Update this to a world where every corner of your life is controlled by a platform monopoly that doesn't even provide the most bare-bones customer service and yeah, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Imagine when AI will be monitoring all internet traffic and arresting people for thoughtcrime.
What wasn't feasible to do before is now quite in reach and the consequences are dire.
Though of course it won't happen overnight. First they will let AI encroach every available space (backed by enthusiastic techbros). THEN, once it's established, boom. Authoritarian police state dystopia times 1000.
And it's not like they need evidence to bin you. They just need inference. People who share your psychological profile will act and speak and behave in a similar way to you, so you can be put in the same category. When enough people in that category are tagged as criminals, you will be too.
All because you couldn't be arsed to write some boilerplate
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/08/facial_recognition_de...
It can be much scarier.
There was a case in Russia when a scientist was accused in a murder that happened 20 years ago based on 70% face recognition match and fake identification as an accomplice by a criminal. [0] He spent 10 months in jail during "investigation" despite being incredibly lucky to have an alibi -- archival records of the institute where he worked, proving he was in an expedition far away from Moscow at that time. He was eventually freed but I'm afraid that police investigators that used very weak face recognition match as a way to improve their work performance stats are still working in the police.
It's not the only problem with technology -- it's claimed that there has been over hundred cases of false DNA matches not caused by malice or processing errors.[0] In theory, DNA match must not be considered by courts as 100% accurate, but in fact it is.
On the other hand, there were cases when human rights advocates or journalists were claiming that innocent people were jailed but that turned out to be false, like people getting caught on camera doing the same kind of crime again after they served their sentence.
Your false equivalency is to compare prosecution of criminal acts within western democracies with how criminal justice works in russia, which is a dictatorial, genocidal, imperialistic mafia state. You're using this subtle form of propaganda in order to make russia more relatable to audiences from democratic countries, while forgetting the fact that people go to prison in russia for just holding up an empty piece of paper.
Based on your other comments you seem like a tech person from the russian sphere of influence, I assume a russian who moved abroad. I cannot find more evidence of you using propaganda tactics, so I don't want to be too harsh on you.
However, please be aware that you cannot compare apples to oranges. In dictatorships like russia you can and will get killed if you position yourself against the tzar.
Maybe you'll recognize your cognitive dissonance and stop rationalizing that russia is in any way comparable to a democratic country. With this understanding, I think you'll notice that your whole comment is off-topic: Yes, dictatorships are more scary than democracies. Nobody needs to click on a link to lenta.ru and expose themselves to russian spyware to understand this point.
The case described by the parent is that of someone who was wrongly imprisoned for 10 months on the basis of bogus application of faulty technology, even though they had a solid alibi. Therefore, the comment does not reflect well on Russia, the Russian state or the Russian government, like.. at all.
If there is a propaganda dimension to this (which I doubt), it is certainly not an attempt to say something nice about the Russian justice system.
The comment I criticized falsely implies that there is due process in russia, and that technical faults lead to unfair results for the people who are accused of something.
It is a cherry-picked example, and the big majority of russian court cases are decided without due process, because it is a dictatorship. If you try to get justice because you were harmed by corrupt officials or the tzar you're out of luck. Lawyers are getting shot on the street as a birthday present for putin. There are lots of examples. And once you're in prison they'll send you to the frontlines to murder Ukrainians.
You wrote those comments in a very repetitive and mission-driven way. Which does not inspire confidence in the absence of ulterior motives.
The notion that this kind of thing couldn't happen in the west is laughable
[0] https://coloradosun.com/2024/03/08/yvonne-missy-woods-cbi-in...
In the article you linked, there is a criminal investigation, an audit and a re-test of evidence in order “to ensure the accuracy and completeness of its entire catalog of records because someone manipulated DNA evidence.
In russia, there is no investigation, because they make up evidence against their political enemies all the time. It feels like you have some incentive to miss the elephant in the room.
In democratic countries such errors with regards to forensic evidence spark news because it is so unusual. In dictatorships like russia, nobody expects forensic methods to be valid because the court verdict does not depend on evidence, it depends on your connections to the dictator.
Having indefinite moratorium on the death penalty is a big plus though.
You can find it in the following link in the third page of the PDF (labelled as page 84): https://nob.cs.ucdavis.edu/classes/ecs153-2021-02/handouts/c...
It's amazing how 60 years ago somebody anticipated these exact scenarios, yet we didn't take their cautionary tale seriously in the slightest.
Something I've started to see happen but never mentioned is the effect automated detection has on systems: As detection becomes more automated (previously authored algorithms, now with large AI models), there's less cash available for individual case workers, and more trust at the managerial level on automatic detection. This leads to false positives turning into major frustrations since it's hard to get in touch with a person to resolve the issue. When dealing with businesses it's frustrating, but as these get more used in law enforcement, this could be life ruining.
For instance - I got flagged as illegal reviews on Amazon years ago and spent months trying to make my case to a human. Every year or so I try to raise the issue again to leave reviews, but it gets nowhere. Imagine this happening for a serious criminal issue, with the years long back log on some courts, this could ruin someones life.
More automatic detection can work (and honestly, it's inevitable) but it's got to acknowledge that false positives will happen and allocate enough people to resolve those issues. As it stands right now, these detection systems get built and immediately human case workers get laid off, there's this assumption that detection systems REPLACE humans, but it should be that they augment and focus human case workers so you can do more with less - the human aspect needs to be included in the budgeting.
But the incentives aren't there, and the people making the decisions aren't the ones working the actual cases so they aren't confronted with the problem. For them, the question is why save $1m when you could save $2m? With large AI models making it easier and more effective to build automated detection I expect this problem to get significantly worse over the next years.