That reminds me, I gotta check that out. Far out, man. Wonder if it's as cool as the Dude getting his Torino back. What would be really cool are some Big Lebowski bots, you know, like Walter, Donny, The Dude, all chatting to each other, and throw in some Jesus too, you know, for some spice. Jesus is the spice of life, or something like that.

At least the whole cabinet resigned in the Netherlands. In Australia a similar scheme was instituted, then found to be illegal, but the people administering it continued to be in government. The former social services minister even became PM.

Back to the point: I agree that great care needs to be used when trying these kinds of optimised, targeted computational methods.

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They're following instructions to juggle numbers. If you can hand me the human source code, I'll gladly read it, but as far as I'm aware there is no such document in existence.

Oh yeah, this is a whole rabbit hole. There's also algorithms that are being trained by people to identify subjective values, such as "niceness." These are notoriously biased as well, as biased, in fact, as the people who train them. But unlike those people, the opinion of the AI won't be changed by actually getting to know the person it's judging. They give 100% confident, biased, results.

Or the chatbots that interpret written language and earlier conversations to simulate conversation. One of them was unleashed on the internet and was praising Hitler within 3 hours. Another, scientific model designed to skim research papers to give summaries to scientists, answered that vaccines both can and cannot cause autism.

These don't bother me though. They're so obviously broken that no one will think to genuinely rely on them. What bothers me is the idea of this type of tech becoming advanced enough to sound coherent and reliable, because the same issues disrupting the reliability of the AI tech we have today will still be present, it's just the limitation of the technology. Yet even today we have people hailing the computer as our moral savior that's supposed to end untruth and uncertainty. If the tech gets a facelift, I believe many people will falsely place their trust in a machine that just cannot do what is being asked of it, but tries it's damndest to make it look like it can.

Computers are no longer following instructions. That went out about 10 years ago.

They're just juggling numbers. Same as us really but without the ability to self-reflect (yet)

Maybe it will and maybe it won't. Who knows?

Fantastic video. Thank you.

This is the biggest thing happening on an ethical and social level IMO.

I am proficient with the tech. I can write Transformers, download HuggingFace models, and I know what these words mean. But I have no idea about the ramifications of this stuff on society. The people making policy, I am sure, know even less than me, and probably nothing about the the technology.

We need to give control of these changes to the broadest group possible.

The light of the sun has the power to purify.

> I'm not much into metaphysics but complex social constructs with multiple meanings don't do well.

Agree, but pretending this dimension of reality does not exist, or references to it are "woo woo" doesn't seem like a good approach.

> Billiard balls and components that are engineered to replicate exactly to the tested prototype do great.

Physical reality and metaphysical reality run very differently, especially when it comes to causality. Physical reality is extremely simple, and scientism0oriented folks tend to assume the same is true of metaphysical causality, if the notion is even on their radar.

>One last point. You'd be amazed how useful "innocent" incidental data is. Just the expressions on faces or even clothing style and gait may correlate to other data in unexpected ways.

Looking angry on your way home because you got a cancer diagnosis and you're convinced life hates you? The police will now do you the honor of frisking you because you were identified as a possible suspect!

Are you a person of color that recently immigrated? Were you aware immigrants and persons of color are disproportionally responsible for crimes in your area? The police algorithms sure are!

This is an ethical nightmare. People shouldn't be suspect based on innocent information. Even holding them suspect for a future crime because of one they committed in the past is iffy. There's a line between vigilance and paranoia that's being crossed here.

And neither should we monitor everything out of the neurotic obsession someone might do something that's not allowed. Again, crossing the line between vigilance and paranoia. Like, crossing the line so far that the line is now a distant memory that we're not really sure ever existed. Complete safety is not an argument. Life isn't safe and it doesn't have to be. We all suffer, we all die. There is a need to strike a balance, so we can do other things besides suffering and dying. Neither safety nor danger should control our every second.

This was a very poorly structured argument. It basically makes the case that police algorithms are bad because they allow for some of the biases that already exist in our current system to perpetuate, ignoring the fact that the alternative is the system that created those biases in the first place. If police have historically overpoliced some communities, then we have every reason to believe they will continue to do so if we continue with the system of 'police departments make human decisions about how to allocate their resources.' If we switch to the algorithmic model, then continuing that practice is certainly one possible outcome, but it's also entirely possible that we build into that algorithm some coefficient of historical crime that we could let the community have a say in the value of.

Lets say that the 'risk factor' of any given community is based on some collection of metrics like the number of crimes committed in the last 10 years, the number of crimes committed in the last 6 months, the number of 911 calls originating in that community in the last year, and the number of non-criminal emergency calls (fire, ambulance, etc) in that community in the last year:
RF = a1*Crime10y + a2*Crime6m + a3*911Crime + a4*911NonCrime
Now, imagine that through some democratic process the members of that community get to assign values for a1->a4, such that they can place a very low (even zero) value on a1 to completely assuage the concerns of the author in that regard. You simply CANNOT do this if subjective humans are the ones making the decisions.

I simply do not see a non-luddite argument here for why algorithms in policing are a bad thing, as opposed to a neutral thing that have as much propensity to improve policing as they do to make it worse.

Another problem that AI has, which is not mentioned here, is creating proper incentives. I'll give the example of YouTube.

YouTube has the incentive for more ads to be viewed, which roughly coincidences with people staying on YouTube longer which means the YouTube needs to select the correct next video for you to watch so that you won't tune out.

An AI algorithm might work hard to be a better predictor of your preferences. But it might also work hard to change you to be easier to predict. We find that if you watch enough YouTube videos, eventually you will enter a loop of extremist views on politics. Extremists are easier to predict. YouTube will modify your mind to make you more predictable.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-of-youtube-comments-shows-how-its-turning-people-onto-the-alt-right/

Back to policing. Imagine that the algorithm discovers a way to increasing the crime rate in one part of town. It could do that while also deploying more police there. This would make the algorithm appear more effective in stopping crime though the algorithm was actually also the cause of the crime.

It seems like we wouldn't make an algorithm that could increase crime but we could imagine the AI plugged into other ones that could, like maybe an AI determining which neighborhoods get better roads and schools. And anyway, probably no one at YouTube imagined that their AI would intentionally radicalize people but here we are. So we probably should be worried that an AI controlling policing might try to increase crime.

This is an interesting read. At the same time, it does itself a disservice by looking at the issue through an equity or moral lens.

Let's examine.

Neighborhood A. Neighborhood B.

A has minimal police patrols, minimal police calls, minimal interactions with law enforcement.

B has regular patrols, regular calls and frequent interactions with law enforcement.

It doesn't matter that the area is impoverished, it doesn't matter than the area is primarily minorities. What matters is that's where the crime is so that's where the police go. Why would you allocate resources to an area they wouldn't be used? B gets more calls, so B gets more patrols, so B has more interactions. If A starts seeing an increase, the AI would naturally divert resources accordingly.

This isn't so much an issue of biased data, as much as it's an issue of people not liking what the data shows. And that's something that needs to be admitted. All the AI can do is look at the areas and suggest based on the inputs which area is more likely to have crime.

The site's sources for data also don't regard the actions of the arrested towards the officer at all. If you're not doing anything illegal, you get let go 99% of the time. If you act uncooperative or aggressively you invite attention. Which causes your likelihood of being arrested to skyrocket.

Should we work to solve the root issues? Absolutely. But a LOT of that work needs to come from those areas themselves. You can pump all the funding in the world through them but if the people inside don't want to change, you won't change the statistics. There's some statistics in the article that are closed to banned on reddit. I won't copy them. I think a question we should be asking is: As B, if you know you're more likely to be punished than A for doing something, why would you do it? If I was predisposed to brain bleeds, I wouldn't join boxing. Some of this is personal choice. If I knew I was more likely to get arrested for smoking pot, I wouldn't touch the shit.

It reminds of the algorithm that handed longer sentences to minorities. If I am not mistaken, it took factors like income and spit out a value that determines whether the defendant will recidivate or not. The result was that minorities were disproportionately affected by it…

We, the watched, need to seize the power to choose.

I'm looking for really practical suggestions about how to get this going.

It might have the opposite effect. Being denied privacy could make people revolt violently. Why would they respect society and it's people when they are so disrespected they can't have even any privacy?

>wort

:laughing:

(I keep hoping that somebody is reading reddit with a proper markdown viewer. Emoticons don't work for me here.)

>but only in the limited domain within which it practices

I agree. I'm not much into metaphysics but complex social constructs with multiple meanings don't do well. Billiard balls and components that are engineered to replicate exactly to the tested prototype do great. However, the power of these replicants is getting ever larger.

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have u watched this

These algorithms are very vulnerable to bias. If a neighbourhood is heavily patrolled, the chance is much higher any infractions are added to the learning set, increasing the "crime-value" of that area. Meanwhile, areas that are rarely patrolled at all, have a much lower chance of ending up in the database. This creates blind spots.

A real life example of where policing by AI went horribly wrong is the Dutch childcare benefit scandal. The algorithm "learned" that types of people (single mothers, immigrants) were more likely to have something wrong with their taxes, checked them more often, and then identified them as fraudsters for minor infractions like receipts being handed in incorrectly, or being a few days late with payment. Because computers are *magic truth machines* that *don't make mistakes* these people were given no legal recourse, no chance to defend themselves. They did not even know what they were accused of.

If we are going to use machine learning as a tool to help legal administration, we need to take extreme caution, and everyone working with these machines must fully understand their limitations. The computer has no idea what it's actually doing, it's just a fancy calculator following instructions, and while it follows these instructions flawlessly, it's still extremely error prone, and does not have the capability for self-reflection a human does, even if "learning" is built into the algorithm. AI fundamentally does not understand what its doing, and that means it will never understand if its doing wrong. We cannot use AI to replace our own judgment.

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So as we have agreed I think, the prescription is hypothetical.

I think the prescription you offer uses both 1 and 2. 1. You may think you only have value X, but you also have unspoken values Y and Z. 2. The best way for both you and I to achieve Y and Z is to cultivate empathy and sympathetic joy

> (1) Do we want to continue increasing the data collection levels (you could argue that it will correlate to safety for some)

Yes, because we wish to extinguish privacy.

> (2) Do we want to keep this data collection in the hands of opaque institutions?

Yes, because we crave post-orwellian authoritarianism so nightmarish it makes North Korea look like anarchy.

I'm not being sarcastic, I'm making observations.

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