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by krisbolton 2 hours ago
Sounds like automation to me rather than 1984. 800 hours of video searched in 3 hours, hardly the destruction of democracy.
1 comments

> 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.

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.

I actually have no problem with an AI system reviewing video evidence for the police.

The point I am making is general: it is not because something seems harmless than it is. It is not because something is legal that it should be.

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.

It's sad because it's a 100% guarantee that's the future we're heading for.

It won't happen within the next few years, but in a couple of decades it'll be there.

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.