Police in England installed an AI camera system along a major road. It caught almost 300 drivers in its first 3 days.::An AI camera system installed along a major road in England caught 300 offenses in its first 3 days.There were 180 seat belt offenses and 117 mobile phone
In it’s current form it’s good technology. It’s all fine as long as you’re chasing after crimes we all agree are bad* It’s the slippery slope I’m worried about. Just a matter of time untill this is going to be used for something malicious we don’t agree with.
*I don’t care if front seat passengers wear a seatbelt or not as long as they’re adults.
The slippery slope is what makes this not okay. It’s a completely unnecessary invasion of privacy in the guise of “safety”.
I’d love to see some statistics showing that these things are anything other than an additional tax on the drivers. This is bad for everyone and it desensitizes you and opens the door to further surveillance I’m the future.
It isn’t though.
It isn’t unnecessary invasion of privacy. You have no expectation of privacy when driving around on public streets, and to say you’re allowed to break the law and use personal privacy as an excuse is absurd.
“Slippery slope” is a common argument but usually flawed. In this case, driving is an extraordinarily regulated privilege and despite that, it still results in massive deaths and permanent life changing injury every year. In the US, car crashes are the number one cause of death for children. It’s difficult to draw a line between expanding driving enforcement to gross losses in privacy like many here are envisioning.
It also ignores the benefits to civil rights. Again, I don’t know about the UK but in the US, traffic enforcement by police is very unevenly applied. Minorities routinely get their privacy violated on pretexts while cops don’t even pay lip service to the rules.
I am just waiting for the article in the year that shows this system falsely reports darker skin people as breaking the law more often. It sees their hand and decides that the hand looks like a black cellphone or something.
Just like literally every other automated system with a camera that evaluates people.
Ugh I wish that wasn’t plausible…
Just as an aside, gun violence is now the leading cause of death for children in the US; vehicle collisions are now 2nd, due to gun violence increasing and vehicle collisions decreasing.