Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fsndz 649 days ago
even without tech, justice system is already ruining people's lives unjustly. so maybe we have to discuss failure rate, processes in place to correctly use the tech, instead of just saying it has to be bad ? the question is will the tech help ruin more people lives that was already the case or not or improve the odds in some cases even
2 comments

> even without tech, justice system is already ruining people's lives unjustly

Sure, but as with a lot of this stuff, this allows that to be done _at scale_. "[bad thing] happens anyway" isn't a great argument against "we should ban this thing where [bad thing] is likely to happen at massive frequency".

meanwhile police departments are already using that around the world, and they seem conscious about the limitations, and not using it as a 100% accuracy tool.

"Assistant Chief of Police of Miami, Armando Aguilar, said in 2023 that Clearview's AI tool had contributed to the resolution of several murder cases, and that his team had used the technology around 450 times a year. Aguilar emphasized that they do not make arrests based on Clearview's matches alone, and instead use the data as a lead and then proceed via conventional methods of case investigation"

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65057011

That depends on every user of this massive data set to be responsible with it, do you trust that?

If there was a way to read every person's thoughts in public spaces to deal with crime, so that you could know exactly who is guilty of a crime, or preparing to commit a crime beforehand, would that be a technology you'd support?

Data privacy is important, our collective rights are more important than helping the police to increase their rate of solving crimes.

>> even without tech, justice system is already ruining people's lives unjustly

>Sure, but as with a lot of this stuff, this allows that to be done _at scale_.

EXACTLY. The US wastes over 8 billion dollars a year inefficiently ruining peoples' lives and burning tax dollars. With the advent of facial recognition AI software, we can ruin lives 90% more efficiently at three times the scale!

then you should not ask "what is a possible misuse of this [facial recognition to catch criminals] technology?" but some more nuanced question

As for the rest of your argument, even if we take as a given that there is cases where facial recognition could be helpful, I'd say that if a company can't be trusted not to illegally develop their products it can hardly be trusted to respect strict standards when their products are in use