No. 101809Anonymous 10th May 2025 Saturday 8:00 pm101809Dogshit OP, I hate it. I hope a precog sends you to a blacksite.
First of all, that's a Phillip K. Dick novel. Secondly, Tom Cruise jumping about on Oprah's couch happened two decades ago. Are we going to start posting lolcats next year? Maybe asking one another "can i haz cheeseburger?"
Honestly it doesn't sound that bad to me. Data from criminals to predict potential (re?)offenders. Yeah it'd inform police behaviour but people do this shit naturally all the time - you think the police don't know who's acting up or can't read body language?
AI is said to be smart enough to find patterns otherwise unnoticed - if it can accurately predict violent behaviour why not let it?
>>101809 It's just a bit of wordplay, Tom, calm down.
>>101810 But that's it - the fact that it's not THAT bad is what makes it so insidious; there is no conspiracy, it's all for the public good, but that makes it more palatable iss the problem. If you get someone like Trump in office the groundwork has already laid for major fascism by surveillance years ago.
But I digress; read the whole thing and you'll see some more mundane nut still very serious threats to our way of life; it still allows police to be generally racist, AI itself is always going to be subject to the biases of human programming and lead to innocent people getting arrested, it provides a surveillance blackhole for any foreign espionage teams as well as general privacy issues...
Most importantly, there is no proof it can accurately predict criminal behaviour, and if it can, it can be used to predict anything they deem criminal, such as peaceful protests, and shut it down ahead of time.
And most fundamentally, even if this does not increase powers to control you, it doesn't need to. The laws restricting protest and other 'nuisance' behaviour are already extensive after the Tory crackdown and this will be used to enforce them to the nth degree if nothing else.
It's not a cure, prevention, or slippery slope - it's a trapdoor.
>>101811 One, I should add, that leads the police down a rabbit hole of automated mass decision making and a backlog of extra paperwork, away from the light of public scrutiny and the ability to use discretion or even dealing with the public. It takes the humanity out of policing.
Pratchett said real stupidity trumps artificial intelligence every time - we need to stop worrying so much about rogue super-AIs and more about rogue idiots with normal AIs.
>>101810 >Honestly it doesn't sound that bad to me
Think about how it would work in practice, the police decide to patrol an area more because it's apparently where all the criminals are and then they catch even more which reinforces the system while resources are pulled from elsewhere which mysteriously end up with less criminals on the data.
Or to translate that into UK political discourse: If you report a crime then it might impact your properties value.
Less than 1% of people commit more than 90% of crime - the crack addicts who shoplift ten times a day, the headbangers who pick a fight at chucking-out time every Friday night and go home to batter their wives, the career car thieves who steal two cars a night to order. They aren't ordinary people who made an error of judgement, they aren't good kids led astray, they're hardened and habitual criminals who are extremely difficult to rehabilitate. If you're at all serious about preventing crime, then it's almost all a matter of finding those people as quickly as possible, building good cases against them and sending them down for as long as possible.
That crime is also very unevenly distributed geographically. There are neighbourhoods where nobody can remember the last time anyone was burgled. There are streets that serve as open-air markets for drugs or prostitution. There are hotel car parks in London where a tradesman's van is broken into almost every night.
I have no idea if this particular project is good, bad or indifferent, but data-led policing is just obviously the correct approach. Post-austerity, there just aren't enough experienced coppers left who can do the kind of community policing that created a detailed and nuanced picture of a local area. If you want to catch criminals, you need to look in places where lots of crime happens, and the best way we can do that in our current situation is to just throw a shitload of data into ArcGIS and shake it until a heatmap falls out.
>>101815 Accepting our current situation is the problem. Keynes was right: anything we can actually do, we can afford.
Would you accept the NHS throwing up its hands and going "well, obviously fixing your broken arm would be ideal, but in our current situation the best you'll get is some paracetamol - oh and btw you've gotta pay for it yourself?", or would you look a level higher and think: Hang on, why in buggery are we accepting a cost constraint where no real constraint exists? There are people unemployed and - as the government never tires of telling us - millions economically inactive. You can quibble that most of those people would make dire cops, but you only need a tiny fraction of them to make passable supermarket employees to open up room for some supermarket employees to move into policing.
Otherwise, if you accept the current situation, you may as well give up entirely and save yourself the hassle. You're being set up to fail from the word go. Let's say predictive policing works with current staff levels, it doesn't wind up being racist, and crime drops - great, that means we can cut staff levels and let crime rise back to where it is today while still meeting arbitrary, short-termist, self-imposed financial targets. We can put the savings into meeting the extra costs resulting from the last round of inane cuts to meet short term self imposed financial targets.
Predictive policing is a slippery slope. Maybe you are more likely to reoffend and do much worse things after receiving your punishment for offences like bodily harm. But once a system like that is in place, not only does it suggest that people can't be given the benefit of doubt that they've changed their ways, but who's to stop anybody from pretty soon including every single person in the country in the system, and giving everybody a threat score. And even if your threat score is zero, and really especially if it's zero, the government should have no business keeping any tabs on you at all.
No because policing is about social control and not just an exercise in playing cops and robbers. For example think about what your attitude to the police would be if you go through the humiliation of a stop and search and how difficult regular occurrences of it would then make policing a community without public trust and cooperation. On the other end you have different police tolerances for different areas like anti-social behaviour around student accommodation or keeping the local alkies and homeless bottled up at the edges of society.
It's not a simple process and one that frequently involves the police force having to make complex judgements. The government is right now looking for easy answers for problems like crime that we'll never entirely solve and it has immense pressure to deliver quick results.
>>101815 >Less than 1% of people commit more than 90% of crime
It's about 40-60% on the types of crime and entirely ignores the agency of people to change or to have factors outside of their control that we should look at. This is frankly Clockwork Orange stuff. It's not just that crime in the UK has grown from a lack of policing, the social support that would keep people from falling into crime have also been neglected and the evidence for locking everyone up (good luck with that by the way) is dubious and it can work out cheaper just to send them to Eton.
On a more anecdotal note - I won't say that all police are racist but every encounter with them has drilled home that they're thick as custard and having lived with a copper before I'm well aware that they spend 90% of their lives in a fog from sleep deprivation. These people and the general public at large who report crime are not what I would call reliable sources for data. The problem is that the flesh is weak and should be removed from all decision making but only once we develop the AI powerful enough to have total mastery over humanity.
It's not really about staffing levels, but experience. Austerity-era redundancies targeted the most experienced officers, because they were the most expensive to employ. We've now recruited enough officers to bring back the total force to pre-austerity staffing levels, but the average level of experience is greatly reduced. Those experienced officers who were made redundant in 2010 are approaching retirement age, so we can't easily recruit them back. A lot of those officers have either taken their pension, or they're very happy working normal hours in a low-stress environment in the private security industry and have absolutely no desire to get back in a squad car.
That lack of experience has both individual and collective effects. Less experienced officers are less effective in their job, but they're also less able to share knowledge with each other and with new recruits. If you join the police today, there's a good chance that your trainer won't be a veteran with 20 years on the force, but someone who joined five years ago. That's going to have lasting effects on your own capabilities, which may well propagate to the people that you end up training further down the line.
It doesn't matter how much money you spend, you can't magic up coppers who've been doing it for half their life and know every inch of their patch. Some of that institutional knowledge will just be lost forever, while some will take years or decades to rebuild.
Other aspects of austerity have also greatly degraded the effectiveness of policing, most notably the impact of cuts to mental health services. Many forces are spending a large and increasing amount of time dealing with non-crime mental health incidents. That's obviously bad for the people who need a trained medical professional rather than a big bloke in a stab vest, but it also erodes the ability of the police to do actual police work. If you're spending all night babysitting a schizophrenic in A&E or talking a severely depressed person down from a rooftop, you aren't out chasing villains, you aren't gathering intelligence, you aren't honing your copper's nose.
Again, you can't just magic up mental health professionals. Even if you fix all of the bottlenecks in the training and recruitment pipeline, it still takes six years to train a clinical psychologist or seven to train a psychiatrist. A degraded workforce means worse working conditions for those who remain, creating a vicious cycle of burnout and staff turnover. If you are a qualified psychiatrist, doing ADHD and autism assessments for a private clinic is just much nicer than dealing with incredibly unwell people on the margins of society, regardless of salary.
If you've actually watched Minority Report, then this will all seem familiar to you.
The only real difference being that in the film, those scanners were scanning your iris from a distance. But even that will probably be possible in the near future.
