A wanted poster might have some people watching faces more closely, but they aren't compiling a history of every face they saw and when and where they saw it, and sending that in to law enforcement where it can be combined with other histories and used to generate suspect lists based on coincidences.

Right, that's just saying "we prefer built-in random inefficiencies" with extra steps. The heart of investigation is pulling coincidences into an actionable pattern (which is different from trial and conviction, which relies on far more than coincidences).

Given how much crime currently goes uninvestigated because the backlog is so high, is automating some of the coincidence-sniffing a bad thing?

See my other comment in this thread, but I’d venture to say yes. Changing the efficiency of enforcement naturally will throw something else in the economy out of balance, particularly if the money spent to increase confidence-sniffing is not being well dispersed into the local economy.

If in the past you’d have to hire more local policemen, they’d need more police vans made, they’d need more uniforms made, more wear on police vans means more work for the mechanics, etc etc etc, now you just pay Protector Co. once for your new surveillance software. Now you haven’t dissuaded people from crime with good plentiful local jobs (as a gross oversimplification, but hopefully you can see this would still apply to a more realistically complex economy)

I think it really depends on the reason why you were going around putting up wanted posters and asking people if they’d seen somebody. If it was a dangerous criminal, sure. An ex? Creepy. In general, I’d have some probing questions before being forthcoming, I like to think. Picture of my friend? Sure Mr. Private investigator, tell me what you want and give me your number, and I’ll let him know somebody wants to talk to him…

If there was, like, a club devoted to organizing the sort of informal observations of who was where and trying to track everybody the old fashioned way, I’d think everyone involved was a real creep there, too. Although, of course, this would be a bit impractical.

And the paparazzi weren’t some beloved people, and they mostly targeted public figures!

There’s something to be said for the inefficiency I guess. But, I think it is also to a large extent a proxy for the idea that normal people only went on the hunt for somebody for a good reason.

Differences:

1. Wanted posters were only hung up based on human witness reports and for a very limited number of suspects. With face recognition, you can hunt automatically for hundreds who happened to be around a specific place at the wrong time.

2. Reach, and therefore likelihood of false-positive face matches.

3. Investigators wouldn’t blindly believe a random community member reporting a match, they would check if the reported suspect really matches the description and the circumstances. With face recognition and AI, people tend to just assume that the computer is correct.

I think it’s notable that your first point is directly in line with GP’s idea about built inefficiencies.

I think you’re absolutely correct, inefficiency is a strong counterweight, and it’s one that’s (consciously or subconsciously) built into the laws and punishments.

When you look at a punishment which is set up as a “deterrent” or you hear about someone “throwing the book at you” it’s because of all the perceived inefficiency. They caught “you” this time, and they’re accounting for all the times “you got away with it” (statistically).

If you go from 10% efficiency to 100% efficiency without changing the punishment, observant people will, I believe correctly, take issue with the fact the punishment has now become “10x more drastic” when taken as a whole society.

There is also something about this inefficiency that makes us more free. Everyone bends the rules to some extent in an area they feel is worth the risk. Maybe you changed an outlet without consulting a licensed electrician / inspector.

To that end, the inefficiencies are built into our economies. Would people be safer with every electrical change being measured? Surely. Could the economy support every electrical change being measured? As in, can the average American even afford to pay an electrician every time they want to change a fixture? I think the answer is realistically no. If everyone has enough free cash they don’t mind spending it on an electrician, 100% efficiency and compliance might be reasonable and good.

You’ll see this phenomenon while traveling, there are things like traffic violations, sketchy wiring, eyesores, etc that you’d say “that would never fly in $HOME_COUNTRY” and it’s commonplace there. They may even still be illegal there. But the standards of enforcement change to meet what are in principle the ideals of the people, but in practice what’s possible for the economies to support. You might go back in 10 years and find their economy is stronger, the enforcement has increased, but people are not unhappy with the change and life goes on. The people who did the sketchy wiring have probably had time and an influx of cash from the stronger economy to pursue better training, and are now the ones doing good to-code work.

The way technology throws this out of balance is to give enforcement the ability to expand without incurring the traditional economic penalties for doing so. Those economic penalties would’ve grown the economy in other areas. If you follow the line of thinking, it leads to a significant increase in the wealth gap. Of course, there’s enough evidence to support that this is exactly what’s been unfolding. My thought is, if this natural economic balancer is reduced, we should seek to add another.