> 800 hours of video searched in 3 hours, hardly the destruction of democracy
You are completely wrong.
Laws in their current state are a completely broken system, because they don't account for future technology, and do not include a mandatory regular review.
When the 2nd ammendment was included in the constitution, guns were innacurate and unreliable weapons shooting a few bullets per minute. If the guns then had been the assault rifles shooting at 900RPM you can buy nowadays in Walmart, you better believe the 2nd ammendment would not exist.
Similarly, you do not know what was the intent when video surveillance was first deemed acceptable evidence in court. But you know for sure that they weren't processing 800 hours of video in 3 hours, and you also know that they intent for this review to be done by actual human beings.
Imagine security cameras everywhere. Oh wait, we already have that.
Imagine llm’s analyzing every frame of every security camera everywhere (including shared ones like stores, flock, ring etc). Then an agentic judge issues warrants.
Not to get into an internet argument, but the entire premise of what you say is false -- and I'm not just saying that to argue.
1. The intent was and is categorically not for the review of CCTV or any evidence to be specifically carried out by humans.
2. Law can't - and isn't suppose to - account for specific future technology, that's future prediction which is impossible.
What you mean is you disagree. What you mean is you believe a human should be involved in video evidence review. I'm not sure why, because it's clearly an area of waste. Maybe you have reservations about accuracy. Then what you mean is you want the technology to be at a certain level of accuracy before it is used in practice.
I suspect you do believe the accuracy isn't good enough, but you've forgotten the layered controls in English law. People are tried by other people. An AI tool that speeds up triage isn't the judge or jury.
Thankfully, we do have laws that change with the times over here in the UK. Just a couple months ago we had a constitutional change (abolishment of hereditary peers) and that was just another Thursday. It's fine, we don't need to rely on deliberately inefficient police force.
Substituting political process and laws changing with the times with political nihilism and fetishisation of old norms (indeed, see 2A; also see a paramilitary executing political opponents and how 2A influenced that) is how one ends up with a broken state.
There are tens of thousands of laws in the UK. How many are reviewed how often? The extreme majority never is, by design. Technology enables an expansion of the power of the law without actual changes to those laws.
Laws are "reviewed" by courts, and in the UK newer laws automatically supersede older laws if there are any contradictions (with minor nuances as per Thoburn v Sunderland City Council). There's no need for the mechanism that you seem to have in mind (never mind that it doesn't work like that), we can and do change laws.
Police forces across the world and in particular in the USA are already using it.
I would much, much rather see this experiment contained to one really boring, competent British AI project than allow the kind of bullshit we are seeing, and maybe this will be a key plank in the process of actually pushing Palantir out.
Any technology that may be responsibly used today has no guarantee of being used responsibly and ethically in the future.
If the polls are to be believed, the UK is likely to be ruled by a far-right party after the next general election.
Between this, digital ID, police facial recognition technology, and 'age verification', well... its like the current incumbent party are actively trying to give the new one all of the tools needed to oppress before they're even in office.
> If the polls are to be believed, the UK is likely to be ruled by a far-right party after the next general election.
If the most recent actual election of a candidate is to be believed, Reform cannot even take a high stakes scalp in the easiest possible context — a totally unnecessary, frankly engineered election designed to solve the Labour leadership crisis.
Even in that absolutely fucking farcical, facially offensive, wasteful context, voters still managed to organise themselves to conclusively keep out the one candidate who they could have used to give the government a kicking.
So I am less worried than I was. Reform have always had the biggest hill to climb in political history to get enough candidates to form a majority; it will be desperately hard work.
And now I think they have much less of a chance of doing it. Makerfield was a test they failed unambiguously, and partly this is because they have already split on the right. They really, really wanted it, and they failed.
I don't think you can base your prediction of the next general election on a single local election for a constituency that has been a labour stronghold since its inception in 1983.
Like it or not, the polls are scary, and they're predicting something that is possible. The incumbent government should be bearing that in mind when making decisions.
I don't think "a Labour stronghold since its inception in 1983" has anything to do with that outcome. It simply wasn't an ordinary by-election.
(And I don't think you can use council election numbers as a way to predict a parliamentary majority; it doesn't really work that way.)
Labour strongholds in that area have fallen to Reform, and Reform and Restore both put a lot into that race.
Winning it is the most important thing Reform could have done, and they had the biggest possible chance to see the electorate use a vote for them as a kick in the face to the Labour party.
(A kick in the face I believe they richly deserved for trying the whole idea in the first place; it is staggeringly obtuse to force a constituency election to solve an internal party problem.)
Literally a once-in-a-generation chance to deliver a blow to the unity of the governing party. Nothing like it in 30 years. They put a lot into it and they didn't win it.
Now see how they will have to do better in 320-odd constituencies with different local issues. Can they find 320 candidates that the locals won't loathe or organise against?
A Reform outright majority is only barely possible on a technical level; it's just an enormous challenge (and if they do achieve it, to be clear, I think the country will be in a kind of existential terror for generations).
They will be the official opposition; that much is in no doubt. But it's a personality cult party and I think there's pretty strong evidence (from Restore's share) that the personality cult is wearing off.
And the country that was beginning to despair has just been shown, unambiguously, that tactical voting can keep them out. Which is something many constituencies knew in 2024, mine among them.
So as angry as I am that Makerfield happened at all (it's a bit of an outrageous farce, really), I am a little more optimistic.
That is true. Police will have to use AI (criminals will!) but we need protect socieity from any bias, miscarriage of justice, police harrassment etc. There needs to be strict governance over the tool use.
A cop in the UK was recently suspended (I think suspended) for allegedly using AI unofficially to fabricate evidence.
Why would you think that? This is never going to work. It's going to get handed to SSS/NEC/Capita/whatever the fuck they're called this week, they'll get billions of pounds of government money, they won't be able to launch, and it'll quietly get buried.
What this is for is much simpler - it's for funnelling billions of pounds of the public purse into wealthy Conservatives. We've had nearly 50 years of Tory misrule and fraud. This is just Businesss As Usual for them.