>And if someone were to design a computer capable of suffering, or in other words, a machine that can experience - I don't think its possible and it would need to be so entirely different from the computers we know that we wouldn't call it a "computer" - that person is evil.

I made children that are capable of suffering? Am I evil? (I might be, I dunno!)

If we start with the assumption that no computer can be conscious then we will never notice the computer suffer, even if/when it does.

Better to develop a test for consciousness and apply it to computers regularly, to have a falsifiable result. So that we don't accidentally end up causing suffering!

It also makes the mistake of thinking of criminality as some objective thing and not a social construct. You can make loitering a crime, and then make housing extremely dense and without social spaces so that people in an area congregate in public. Which is exactly what the US did with red lining and segregation. So you have people forced to socialize in public spaces and then you criminalize hanging out in those spaces, or drinking there, etc. And now you have a record of different behavior that you can utilize in a "race blind" way, even though historically you know it's very race conscious.

NYPD's Compstat did exactly that and they tried to use it as evidence that the NYPD wasn't enforcing the law in a race biased method.

>I don't necessarily agree that we need to have what you call 'unexplainable AI'

To be more precise, I'm not saying that we must have unexplainable AI. I'm just saying that limiting our AI to only the explainable increases our ability to reason about it (good) but also decreases the ability of the AI to help us (bad). It's not clear if it's worth the trade-off. Maybe in some fields yes and other no.

Most deep learning is already unexplainable and it's already not useful enough. To increase both the usefulness and the explainability will be hard. Personally, I think that maximizing both will be impossible. I also think that useful quantum computers will be impossible to build. I'm happy to be proven wrong!

In the US the big problem is that b/c of the legacy of redlining and segregation, a lot of these algorithms use zip codes which has turned out to just be a proxy for race. So the pre trial release were basically making the decision based on race and age, but b/c no one in the court system actually knew how they worked, no one challenged it.

Cathy O'Neil's got a bunch of good work on it. She had a book a few years ago called Weapons of Math Destruction.

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So if I am understanding you’re argument, and correct me if I am wrong, the critical difference between a human and a computer is that a computer isn’t capable of sentience and by extension sapience or even more generalized consciousness?

If that is the argument then my take is I’m not sure we can say that yet. We don’t have a great understanding of consciousness yet to be able to say that it is impossible for none organic things to possess. All we know for sure is that it seems that the consciousness can be suppressed or damaged from changing or stopped biological processes within the brain. I am not aware of a reason a machine, in principle, could not simulate those processes to same effect (consciousness).

Anyway, it seems to me that your main problem with using AI for policing is that it would be mechanically precise in its application without understanding the intricacies of why crime may be happening here? For example maybe it will come to the conclusion that African American communities are crime centers without understanding that the reason they are crime centers is because they tend to be poverty stricken which is the real cause. So it’s input may end up being almost a self fulfilling prophecy?

There are two basic kinds of jokes that are almost always good for a laugh:

1. Unexpected stupidity.
2. Unexpected sexual deviance.

Most good jokes fall into one of these categories. Keeping in mind that what makes for stupidity and sexual deviance vary across cultures and tend to change over time.

>why are we inclined to give more weight and validity to that proof, rather than to the primal intuitions?

It depends on what you mean by "proof." The two forms of "proof," deductive and inductive, each address a different issue with "intuition," i.e. internal consistency and observability.

Deductive reasoning (internal consistency) says Socrates cannot be both alive and dead. Inductive reasoning (observation) can test the statement "Socrates is alive" by showing that he is not.

You can't actually prove anything true, for the reasons you state, but you can prove things false. That's what logic does to intuition. If you can't prove your intuition false, that's generally when you feel like you "know" a thing, or have "proven" a thing to be true.

Well, the thing here is you just started talking about it being able to tell why there are more arrests in one area than another. That seems like a hell of a lot more complicated than the prior task of just finding the area where they report the most incidents. Time spent alone isn't a sufficient indicator really, is it? Its a factor and something that can skew the data but you can't just directly decide its the cause from the time spent there data being added in

For this example we can train an algorithm to estimate the probability of a crime in an area given the amount of patrolling in that area. So it could be normalized out if the algorithm is designed properly. The amount of care needed in designing these algorithms will need to be high. I do know that there is active research and development in identifying these biases early (even before deployment) but it’ll never be perfect. So it’ll likely be a cycle of negatively hurting people, being called out, fixed, and then back to step 1.

It happened in NYC with fires. It is explored in a fascinating book called "The Fires" by Joe Flood. Basically RAND corporation had used computer models to "more efficiently" provide fire protection in the city and it led to a massive wave of fires and destruction of huge swaths of the city.

Yeah for sure. In the two cases mentioned in the comments the ML-based bullshit isn't the actual cause of the trouble. The root is from the rampant starve-the-beast defunding and privatisation of governmental functions, along with negative neoliberal attitudes to social services. If you have a properly functional social service setup, you won't need any of this shit in the first place.

All the care in the world won't stop the biases inherent in our paradigm. There are built-in mechanisms of discrimination and inequality that the system as we know it optimizes for and are virtually impossible to remove from our current modus vivendi.

These books talk about the problem at length:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28186015-weapons-of-math-destruction

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34762552-algorithms-of-oppression

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34964830-automating-inequality

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The question what makes something funny on the one hand intrigues me and on the other hand always reminds me of this E.B. White quote:

Dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies.

My dude, those are statically miniscule amounts of the arrests. If we counted all of them together over 10 years, they'd be a fraction of a percentage of legitimate stops and arrests.

No, it's common sense. I don't speed Because I don't want to get stopped. I drive a dumb car, in a dumb color with a vanity plate. I already have a target on myself. Why would I give them a legitimate reason to screw with me? If an action is illegal, and you know you're more likely to be punished for commiting it, why would you knowingly take the risk? How is that victim blaming?

Few things have described me better.

No it's not, it's game theory. There may be totally valid reasons for doing that thing which might be critical to understand. It's only victim shaming if you start from the assumption that they are doing that thing because they are stupid, or lack self control, or some other undesirable characteristic.

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Once in a job I worked at we had an AI tool one manager purchased and trusted blindly and he “set it up” to do auto responses to customer inquiries, because it could “learn”. Because there was no other option for this AI to learn from besides it’s own auto responses, it actually ended up dismissing practically every customer inquiry with a bot response and any future responses with the same, related, not response. He “saved the company money” on customer support staff and laid them all off. When we exposed the issue with the bot, by then it was too late- we’d lost more than half of our clientele AND were facing some legal issues regarding regulations for certain types of requests (expensive ones, think GDPR) - of course by then he had already been promoted and talked himself up so high. I saw how badly he’d destroyed the company so I left very quickly, it went under after that. There was no recovering from this misunderstanding and misused “automation and machine learning” application that he had done. The worst part is, had he gotten anyone reasonably intelligent in on his implementation early on we could have prevented all of this by adding in some controls and monitoring what was happening. Now I just tell the story to people looking into automation and harnessing AI as a warning- the system needs to have constant checks to ensure it doesn’t eat itself.

Speaking of truth: it may sound like opportunism, but is it actually?

Sounds like opportunism rather than serious search for truth.

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That way, everybody wins (in theory). Perfect Compassion treats the well being of individuals as the highest good. People who hold other values sacred, may violate Perfect Compassion.

I think cognitive empathy can be cultivated.

> If you're not doing anything illegal, you get let go 99% of the time. If you act uncooperative or aggressively you invite attention.

Sure. No 'walking while brown' type of arrests in this magical neighborhood of yours.

>As B, if you know you're more likely to be punished than A for doing something, why would you do it?

this is straight up victim shaming.