Great... Maybe now they can use their precognition software to find more adulterous women (rape victims) or hostile employees (slaves from South Asia).
I've wondered before if something like this could be used in a positive way to deter crime rather than harass targets. e.g., if the data suggested youths in a certain area and time were prone to acting up, it could propose some sort of distraction instead - street ball tournament, TV station truck doing an impromptu giveaway, police outreach, etc.
It is best to take the pessimistic view whenever it comes to how policies are applied and how technical solutions are used. Sure, it can be used constructively, but there will always be a few assholes using it to oppress their enemies and exploit it for material gain. Much like you can predict the success of a spam filter by thinking about how it will be exploited by the worst 1%, it is instructive to think about what this tool will do in the hands of ignorant, uncaring and corrupt assholes, because that's probably how it'll turn out.
And that's why we can't have nice things, which is the common thread between telemetry in win10, trigger warnings in colleges and censorship on social media.
It would absolutely possible to train neural nets to use speeches and interviews of politicians and powerful people to suggest likely canditates for sociopathy and other fun things. The trouble is that those people would not submit to actual clinical diagnosis, and even if they did, nothing useful would come of it. Failing to even think in such directions, and instead pondering how to treat small fish even more like lab rats, that can't be the way.
Speeches are written. Interviews are scripted. Personas are cultivated. I'm not sure how it would be able to ascertain whether a politician is a sociopath any more than it would be able to determine whether Brad Pitt is after analyzing one of his films.
Your argument would have been a lot stronger this time last year. Brexit and the Philippines are notable examples of some fairly sociopathic political behaviour that fairly closely followed on-record comments. What happens next year will be the exciting part.
We don't know how neural nets can do stuff like schizophrenia from CCTV footage, merely from how someone walks, but apparently this and other things are already emerging, and with some earnest effort could provide some real results.
Mind you, I was talking about neural suggesting people for clinical diagnosis, not about neural nets diagnosing people. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not even that much interested in the idea (which strikes me as a bit Orwellian), but in the cold feet it would give a lot of people with skeletons in the closet. They don't know that it's not fool proof, they just know they don't want to be found out.
I have actually been wanting to do something very similar to what you propose for a long time. Not as an effective measure or anything, but specifically to show people how such technology CAN be used. My specific idea would be to take news stories and other data around each member of Congress, and train a system to predict how likely each member of Congress is to be cheating on their spouse.
I got this idea when everyone responded to the revelations about the NSA spying on everyone in an extremely specific way 100% of the time. Everyone focused on human analysts reading the text or listening to the audio of conversations. Read literally any article you find where the NSA, Obama, others in the government, absolutely anyone talks about the things the NSA has done and how they practices might be altered. In every single case, they talk solely about human analysts reading things directly. They never once talk about automated systems analyzing communications and inferring behavior profiles, using those inferred profiles to make decisions or target investigations, nothing like that. And that's where essentially all of the actual danger lies as far as I'm concerned.
So perhaps if a website popped up rating each Congressperson on how likely it is they are cheating on their spouse determined by a neural net (or hell even a Bayesian filter, it doesn't actually need to be accurate at all), maybe we could actually get someone to talk about the issue. Because as it is, no one ever has or is willing to as far as I have seen. I don't know if it's because the politicians aren't aware of what such systems can do, or if they've been tricked into thinking they can actually be effective (they can't) so they intentionally try to misdirect people to concentrating on "they'll stop listening in on your phone calls" or what. The only reason I haven't built the site is that I'm unsure if there would be legal implications and if I'd end up charged with slander or something.
There's a good reason for that. The NSA don't consider data to be "collected" until it is presented to an employee or processed into a human readable form[1]. This allows them to gloss over all the data they gather in the normal, dictionary definition of the word "collect", as well as ignoring any automated analysis of that data before it's presented to a human.
As far as I can tell, the NSA don't have a term to properly describe gathering and analysis of data which isn't presented to a human for analysis.
You are correct. I watched a documentary ages ago, years before Snowden, I believe back when the whistleblower had come out and told everyone about the black boxes AT&T put on their networks for the NSA, where it was mentioned that the biggest fear the NSA had was of ever having to appear in court and defend that exact definition of 'collect'. To the best of my knowledge, that definition has still not been challenged in court one way or another.
So that's why the NSA parses their words very carefully, and likely Obama as well... but what about their critics in Congress?
But what use would that information be? I don't care one iota if my president is a sociopath as long as he or she implements the agenda I want them to.
And since you have zilch recourse if they don't, making predictions based on their past behaviour and personality is your only bet. Also, marketing budgets in the millions of all sorts of people and corporations engineered to make them seem less banshee-like speak another language -- you may not care, but most people still have the hair on the back of their back stand up when faced with the alien, barren inner landscape of a sociopath. Faking it is, uhm, kind of important to everything they do and are. Without it, they have a meltdown, at best only destroying themselves. If we're talking about the real deal and not just someone who is sometimes a bit of a jerk, that is.
If people mind stuff like baby killers, Stalin and other things, they do mind sociopaths, whether they know what the word implies or not.
One issue is that the AI system has inbuilt racial bias, to the degree that it's tuned with prior data and the algorithms seek to find "more of the same".
It leads to profiling and arrest of teens DRESSED in a certain way or hanging out at a certain location, etc.
There is also a major ethical problem with harrassing people for things they didn't actually DO.
Look, unless you've had run-ins with the business side of law-enforcement you may believe the myth that police are there to "protect and serve"
Law-enforcement has a single task to catch people breaking laws (any kind, the easier and lower risk to catch them, the better) and process them (arrest, run them in the system, write up the particular offenses, etc.)
If anything, the moral/ethical culture in policing in most cities only ENCOURAGES this kind of snap-judgement thinking as well. We need LESS of that and not more.
(of course, if you are Dubai, you consider it a grave public danger if someone is smoking a joint somewhere or engaging in consensual acts between 2 adults who happen to be of the same sex, etc...)
The CULTURE in law-enforcement is already one of impunity, and globally there is a reason that in perhaps 90% of the planets nations there is some derogatory remark for police rooted in their "us vs them thin blue line" nonsense.
Look at America, and it's rash of police killings. Over 1500 last year. There needs to be fundamental reform of most policing in the 21st century before we give them more tools to act like bullies with...
And the vast majority of those were clearly justified (suspect being armed and posing an obvious threat threat.)
Police are far from perfect but they also have to deal with people on a daily basis who are quite literally the dregs of society: where "F--- you pig!" is as common as "Thank you Officer."
As far as inbuilt racial bias -- have you spent time on the streets? You tell me what the percentages are for a crime being committed among different racial and ethnic groups. If you're in Chicago you are far more likely to be shot by a male of a specific racial group than by any other. That's just a fact. Nothing racist about it.
There is some bias in such a system, though. On the whole, for instance, white collar crime kills more people, and does more economic damage to society than street crime ever does by a significant margin. But we'll build and deploy a system to tackle street crime, not one to tackle white collar crime. That's a conscious decision on the part of our society, and part of the reason why crime is normalized in white collar circles. And it certainly does our society no favors. (For the research into the normalization of white collar crime, and its greater harm to society, I listened to the 'Explaining Social Deviance' course by Prof. Paul Root Worpe a few years ago)
White collar crime, like fraud and insider trading, sees as much automated detection software as street crime does. But even if it did not, let's assume we focus our attention on street crime, then your reasoning is a fallacy of relative privation: Y is a worse problem than X, so attempting to solve X is bad/unimportant/makes solving Y less likely.
> And the vast majority of
> those were clearly justified
940?! The British police killed 4 people last year. Assuming a 10x difference in population, are there really 20x as many "justifiable" killings in the US each year?
I don't find that particularly hard to believe. There's easily 20x more firearms per capita in the US than the UK. US police are routinely armed, while UK armed police are only deployed where a firearm is believed to be involved. The abundance of firearms in the US means that police need to be ready for a potential firearms incident in every encounter with the public.
Of course, the number of unjustified deaths will likely be disproportionately higher simply because all US police have the ability to react to a situation with lethal force. Sadly, as long as guns are as abundant as they are in the US, you'll never reduce that to the same level as the UK.
For when - it was c.2009 London started having routine armed patrols I think (it's down to local forces in theory).
Why is harder to answer. As a trend I don't think it's been directly related to terrorism. There have been no calls from the public for it and some typically quiet British grumbling at it.
The cynic in me imagines politics has played a part. Getting hold of extra budget for policing is probably difficult at the moment but guns are probably an exciting enough reason to release funds.
That said, they very much are using the latest incident in Berlin to push armed officers out onto the streets.
If you'd spend enough money on social services, they could certainly use these systems to send out people and help the potential criminals. I guess you'd quickly see that these areas will also have problematic schools where extra money is probably a way better crime prevention method than policing.
The problem with this is that the effect is not easy to measure. If you bring down the crime rate by policing than this can directly be associated with the cost spent. If you improve a school and the crime rate goes down the effect is much harder to measure, and cost/benefit will be in different organizations within the government.
That's a great idea -- pre-crime prevention. There might be something to your idea; sort of like a tornado warning but for crime and the mitigation method would be to deploy positive resources to the area. Kind of like a SWAT team for helping diffuse potential crime with love/support rather than a show of force.
In order for such a thing to work, 2 things would have to be true: First, those able to make the decisions to do such things would need to be willing to listen to the AI. Second, the AI would need to be saying things that we do not already know would help. Because if it's just saying things like "reduce economic disparity to lower the crime rate" and "increase autonomy of adolescents" and similar that we have had the research for decades to show are effective, well, why would those able to change things listen? They ignore research, they're not going to listen to an AI if it's saying things that conflict with their worldview that produced the problems in the first place...
I'm not sure the insights into things already well-known are that sophisticated. I'd imagine it's more along the lines of "computer thinks street crime less likely to happen if there's a visible police presence outside bars on Friday night" (or applied to Dubai "if you maintain a visible presence at these hotel bars the men in them will have to book their prostitutes online instead" and "watch the foreign workers closely and your conviction rate will skyrocket")
These sort of predictions "work", for certain values of work...
Organizing for labor rights looks an awful lot like crime to the capitalist. Especially the capitalist holding their employees' passports hostage while they perform a modern form of indentured slavery. [0] Please don't contribute to software that promotes and sustains this practice, resist in any way you can.
Dubai is light years away from understanding, let alone practising, capitalism. And no, unless you are talking about contemporary Comedy Imperialism with Crony Capitalism sauce on top of it, one of Capitalisms core principles is respecting all sorts of capital beyond monetary ones.
Ya'know I'm just saying, things like abolishing slavery and competing for and trying to create quality workforce... stuff nobody cares about when it comes to capitalism for last few decades, which were supposed to lead into socialism if it functioned well.
I probably went too far in commingling the power of the state and the primary benefactors of its economic system. Some citizens then use this state-force to avoid providing foreign workers with even the most basic rights. This commingling of state power and economic power just reminded me of the early days of labor struggle in America. [0]
People in the US on H1B visas don't have their passport taken away and are prevented from leaving. They aren't arrested and imprisoned when they are gang raped. They aren't forced to live in shanty towns with limited facilities like running water. They aren't working 12 hours shifts 6 days a week. They aren't earning $580 a month (the $70k a year the article complains about is at or above the median wage in the bay area). Here in the US we also don't have laws on the books punishing homosexuality with imprisonment and death.
What backups your claim ? The same online articles ? Have you had first hand experience of the same ? I have lived in both countries and have experienced personally what does it take to live as an H1B worker as well as in Dubai on a work permit visa.
Most of the western media articles that you read are very biased and westerners seems kind of jealous of oil rich countries developing at a faster pace than theirs. Western media reports the incidents in an exaggerated manner when it comes to middle east nations.
If women are not allowed to drive a car in Saudi Arabia, Nor are H1B dependents (H4) spouses allowed to work in the US. They are not allowed to have a SSN or a bank account. So what makes US any different ? Isn't just slavery in another form towards the migrant workers no matter in which country they work ?
They differ in their degree of rapaciousness. The formation of a second-tier working permit system disadvantages both citizen labor and the permitted workers themselves. Slavery involves forced bondage and lack of choice. I agree with you that there is a disadvantage, but you can't just slap the label on any system. H1B laborers make median wage and can come and go at their leisure.
>seems kind of jealous of oil rich countries developing at a faster pace than theirs
The first thing I thought of when I saw the title was "Lamborghini". Indeed, the article would have that picture to start with. It's funny that this was my first thought, but it says a lot about perception of Dubai, in general. I can't put a word on it, but the fact that they have Lamborghini police cars makes me say "Pfft. Of course the police would have crime prediction software. Duh." The word is at the intersection somewhere in the Platonic clouds of tech billionaire, startup, ridiculous, no-brainer / obvious, Vertu, excessive, prudent, utility, vanity. I guess 'Dubai' is a sufficient stand-in word.
There is a company from Israel that deployed 10 years ago algoritms to score if people was lying, or angry when people called the police.
And it makes sense.
Anything that helps you triage when you have limited resources it's a good idea.
And any tool that suggest deterrent actions to keep your resources is also a good idea (ie police near a metro station next to a stadium hours before a sports event so pickpocketers don't come nearby).
For me the weakest point is not the technical part (mechanisms), is how you use them (policies).
I mean, you need some policy to trigger reactions to signals. And since policies are made by human people, that has more bias than any algorithm you can ever produce, plus and policy changes will surely affect how the "system" works and how it needs retraining.
So, unless this is used for very simple stuff with simple policies it won't work.
>What happens if a woman is raped and becomes pregnant?
Probably made an example of just the same, like the rest of the slave class there.
It really miffs me that UAE receives all this Western patronage. In a just world they'd be embargoed into the ground until they adopted decent human rights practices.
The west doesn't give a fuck. They say they do but it is not true. Most of us are just a bunch of hypocrites. Some people do have principles but a big portion does not. Just look at who all the evangelicals voted for in the U.S. presidential election. They voted for [1]You Know Who even after he admitted that he liked to grab em by the billy bush. Now every-time I hear them talk about Jesus I remember who they voted for and smile. They are not fooling me twice.
[1] Last time I mentioned his name I got down-voted to oblivion. Lets see what happens this time. :)
You can't simplify an election vote to that degree. A vote for a candidate is not an endorsement of all of their behavior.
Obama won his first election on a platform of change. It's pretty clear that the citizenship wants something different, and Trump offered that much more strongly than Clinton.
Two of the most important issues for me are surveillance and imperialism. And as bad as Trump is for both, my understanding is that Clinton would have been worse. And I'd rather vote for someone uncouth than someone who is going to be using my tax money to spy on me and to bomb other countries.
You are free to have different priorities, you are free to care more about other issues, but please acknowledge that the election is more complex than "they voted for a guy who likes to 'grab em by the billy bush'"
I'm sorry, but if you don't think the "political strongman" that is Donald Trump isn't going to take the overarching (and illegal) domestic spying program (that was created by Bush and expanded under Obama) and abuse it to its full potential, then you clearly have not listened to the man you apparently voted for.
I won't even address the world's history with egomaniacs and military power.
He also has requested lists of employees at state agencies who have worked on climate change and gender equality. I really don't know where you're getting this image of him from.
By 'rape' do you mean she had sex outside a legitimate marriage? If so, she is guilty of prostitution or adultery or illicit sex. There is of course no such thing as marital rape. For rape to be proven there must be multiple adult male witnesses who will testify. The penalty for 'lying' about being raped is a year in jail.
And the penalty for abortion is death.
Wow. This is sick. Rape has nothing to do with sex or marriage, and everything to do with consent.
"Rape" occurs whenever there is no consent. Yes, you can have marital rape. Obviously. If there was no consent, then it is rape and it is illegal ( at least in civilized countries ).
Whether the raped person is married or not has NOTHING TO DO WITH IT whatsoever. No consent, then it is rape, and the perpetrator, if caught, will be punished. NOT the raped person, obviously. The rapist.
You realize parent is simply describing the rape laws prevalent in parts of the Middle East and North Africa, including Dubai? Not literally endorsing them?
Well... parent's post starts as a question, and then proceeds with some seemingly authoritative descriptions. It has no quotation marks and, as written, can not really be interpreted in the way you mention.
Given the actual text in the post, your interpretation of the parent's true intentions could be as biased as mine... :)
(Can't go any deeper on the thread, so responding here instead):
I would respectfully suggest that you are being misled by your outrage into a deeply uncharitable interpretation of parent's language.
> By 'rape' do you mean she had sex outside a legitimate marriage [which in much MENA law are equivalent acts]? If so, [by the laws of Dubai] she is guilty [in a purely legalistic sense] of prostitution or adultery or illicit sex. There is of course no such thing as marital rape [in the law books of Dubai]. For rape to be proven there must be multiple adult male witnesses who will testify [...I'm not sure how this sentence could be made any clearer]. The penalty for 'lying' [scare quotes emphasize that this is a perspective parent does not personally hold] about being raped is a year in jail. And the penalty for abortion is death [this is also not a matter of opinion, but is actually what happens to women in many MENA countries].
You are trolling right? Perhaps not as it turns out there are actually people who have somehow come to control material resources that actually believe this.
It's clear from your other comments that this is simply describing something you find appalling, as do we all.
As the number of readers gets large, though, the long tail of interpretation guarantees that a few will, for whatever random reason, miss the subtext. The cost of such misreadings (pointless off-topic indignation) is high. So when commenting on appalling or other divisive things, please be explicit rather than implicit.
This is one case of the general phenomenon—noticeable on HN—that effective communication to large, weakly cohesive groups works differently than to small, close ones. The available range is narrower if one wants not to put the needle in the red. That's a pity, because it gives less latitude for expressing yourself, but putting the needle in the red is much worse.
Agreed about the dangers of less than explicit communication.
But I'm not appalled by Dubai. If anything, I'm appalled by the childish arrogance and "moral superiority" on display in this thread. There is nothing "hackerish" or clever about getting inflamed against a far-away country you probably know nothing about.
Nietzsche has a good quote about this pestilential habit of moral condemnation, which I can't find right now. It's a bad habit, an addiction we should recognize and discard.
(Now a thread about the unique ways of the Emirates and how to navigate there would be worthwhile.)
People don't talk in this ridiculous, irresponsible way when they have skin in the game. I wouldn't expect loose, childish talk from you, Dan G about moderating forums, because you moderate a forum and know what's involved.
Okay people have been very literally minded in reading my comment and did not read the thread context. I probably should assume that is going to happen.
Also, lest someone take this as an anti-islam attack, let me be clear that this is about the authoritarian/theocratic oligopoly system over there. The normal people are lovely.
If a women is raped, a woman needs 4 (someone can correct me on exact number) witnesses to verify that she was raped. Otherwise woman just gets charged with adultery when she goes to complain that she was raped.
That is a tragic miscarriage of justice; thank you for sharing it. You will note however, that the victim was not jailed for the "crime" of having been sexually assaulted. (Funnily enough, I am a Guardian Member https://membership.theguardian.com and have never visited the sites you mention.)
The point was simply to demonstrate your immediate pounce to associate the topic with a completely irrelevant matter, as was pointed out in the parent.
So, instead of pointing fingers, I was curious about your thoughts on Dubai's potential Crime Prediction Software.
"A 30-year-old Ethiopian woman was arrested in Al Qasimi Hospital on Thursday after she confessed that her newborn baby is illegitimate and she is an illegal maid, an official at Sharjah Police told Gulf News on Saturday
The police said the hospital should have informed them immediately. “They should not accept such cases of unmarried pregnant women,” police said."
> The idea isn't just to go there and arrest suspicious-looking people, but to use a larger police presence in an area to deter crime from happening in the first place.
But then if the crime does not happen, what is this software predicting ?
Wise decision. Don't even visit the gulf states if you've ever worked for someone there and something went wrong, even if you weren't at fault and the work was done elsewhere. You have no rights in their system.
We imagine this with USA police and see where things could go wrong, but our police and Dubai's police have unique sets of problems to deal with.
Dubai has a very very high incentive to keep their crime rates as low as possible, and being a much more young growing nation with the capital to do so, this certainly keeps their appeal as a place to do business and vacation viable despite the region they're in.
I'd imagine that this simply displaces the crime to other areas. It could see short-term impact but I'm less clear on the long term reduction in crime vs. simply shifting it in a game of wack-a-mole -- I'd be curious on research.
However, this sort of information would be useful if you could figure out where support structures could be put in place vs simply deploying police... ie, planting community gardens, providing housing to the homeless, providing fresh food and child care, teaching parenting skills, etc.
Of course, you don't really need software to tell you that providing for people's basic needs drastically reduces crime.
This is just automating capacity planning. Now done by hand, but better done with computers.
As to the degree this is "encoding racial bias", I feel this is passing the buck to the computer. The computer is merely calculating a probability distribution on historical data the best it possibly can (and likely, more accurate, effective, and with more objectivity than humans ever can). Impartiality or partiality does not start or end with a computer program, it starts with human policies.
One does not solve police racism by creating a model that adheres to your view of an ideal world. This argumentation is naive. It does not change anything, but perhaps makes you feel good. You either solve it at its core, or you don't solve it at all.
One should also distinguish between heavy-crime areas and police bias. Some areas, where a certain race may be overrepresented, are just more prone to street crimes. This is not bias, but fact. Don't cripple your model, just because you don't agree with the facts.
As for white collar crime vs. street crime; automated systems to detect fraud, insider trading, scams, and theft, are also in place. These just don't benefit from capacity planning / more police presence on the streets.
The Minority Report angle is journalistic nonsense / click-bait, akin to invoking Terminator when talking about Google's AI efforts. This is about areas of crime, not pre-crime for individuals.
These systems can adapt. If an area sees a drop in crime rate, then that area requires less police presence. It is not just trained on a single snapshot.
Finally, such Crime Prediction software can be used by human police officers to make better decisions. It is far off from self-driving police cars without any human input.
Note, I am not saying algorithmic bias does not exist, or that this is not an important issue to solve, as we start automating more processes in society. But then, let's discuss it on fair and equal ground, and leave human bias against "human-biased" systems out. We can talk about this mathematically now, or at least, in a non-emotional rational manner.
Aside: Other comments here are very America-centric, and detract from the topic at hand. It's like posting news articles on manual SWAT-raids gone wrong in NY, when discussing predictive policing software in California.
84 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadAnd that's why we can't have nice things, which is the common thread between telemetry in win10, trigger warnings in colleges and censorship on social media.
Mind you, I was talking about neural suggesting people for clinical diagnosis, not about neural nets diagnosing people. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not even that much interested in the idea (which strikes me as a bit Orwellian), but in the cold feet it would give a lot of people with skeletons in the closet. They don't know that it's not fool proof, they just know they don't want to be found out.
I got this idea when everyone responded to the revelations about the NSA spying on everyone in an extremely specific way 100% of the time. Everyone focused on human analysts reading the text or listening to the audio of conversations. Read literally any article you find where the NSA, Obama, others in the government, absolutely anyone talks about the things the NSA has done and how they practices might be altered. In every single case, they talk solely about human analysts reading things directly. They never once talk about automated systems analyzing communications and inferring behavior profiles, using those inferred profiles to make decisions or target investigations, nothing like that. And that's where essentially all of the actual danger lies as far as I'm concerned.
So perhaps if a website popped up rating each Congressperson on how likely it is they are cheating on their spouse determined by a neural net (or hell even a Bayesian filter, it doesn't actually need to be accurate at all), maybe we could actually get someone to talk about the issue. Because as it is, no one ever has or is willing to as far as I have seen. I don't know if it's because the politicians aren't aware of what such systems can do, or if they've been tricked into thinking they can actually be effective (they can't) so they intentionally try to misdirect people to concentrating on "they'll stop listening in on your phone calls" or what. The only reason I haven't built the site is that I'm unsure if there would be legal implications and if I'd end up charged with slander or something.
As far as I can tell, the NSA don't have a term to properly describe gathering and analysis of data which isn't presented to a human for analysis.
[1]: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf (Page 15, 2.2.1)
If there's no name for it, you can't accidentally name it.
So that's why the NSA parses their words very carefully, and likely Obama as well... but what about their critics in Congress?
If people mind stuff like baby killers, Stalin and other things, they do mind sociopaths, whether they know what the word implies or not.
It leads to profiling and arrest of teens DRESSED in a certain way or hanging out at a certain location, etc.
There is also a major ethical problem with harrassing people for things they didn't actually DO.
Look, unless you've had run-ins with the business side of law-enforcement you may believe the myth that police are there to "protect and serve"
Law-enforcement has a single task to catch people breaking laws (any kind, the easier and lower risk to catch them, the better) and process them (arrest, run them in the system, write up the particular offenses, etc.)
If anything, the moral/ethical culture in policing in most cities only ENCOURAGES this kind of snap-judgement thinking as well. We need LESS of that and not more.
(of course, if you are Dubai, you consider it a grave public danger if someone is smoking a joint somewhere or engaging in consensual acts between 2 adults who happen to be of the same sex, etc...)
The CULTURE in law-enforcement is already one of impunity, and globally there is a reason that in perhaps 90% of the planets nations there is some derogatory remark for police rooted in their "us vs them thin blue line" nonsense.
Look at America, and it's rash of police killings. Over 1500 last year. There needs to be fundamental reform of most policing in the 21st century before we give them more tools to act like bullies with...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
And the vast majority of those were clearly justified (suspect being armed and posing an obvious threat threat.)
Police are far from perfect but they also have to deal with people on a daily basis who are quite literally the dregs of society: where "F--- you pig!" is as common as "Thank you Officer."
As far as inbuilt racial bias -- have you spent time on the streets? You tell me what the percentages are for a crime being committed among different racial and ethnic groups. If you're in Chicago you are far more likely to be shot by a male of a specific racial group than by any other. That's just a fact. Nothing racist about it.
White collar crime, like fraud and insider trading, sees as much automated detection software as street crime does. But even if it did not, let's assume we focus our attention on street crime, then your reasoning is a fallacy of relative privation: Y is a worse problem than X, so attempting to solve X is bad/unimportant/makes solving Y less likely.
Of course, the number of unjustified deaths will likely be disproportionately higher simply because all US police have the ability to react to a situation with lethal force. Sadly, as long as guns are as abundant as they are in the US, you'll never reduce that to the same level as the UK.
That used to be true, with a few exceptions (e.g. airports). It's not the case today and increasingly firearms officers are armed on patrol routinely.
Why is harder to answer. As a trend I don't think it's been directly related to terrorism. There have been no calls from the public for it and some typically quiet British grumbling at it.
The cynic in me imagines politics has played a part. Getting hold of extra budget for policing is probably difficult at the moment but guns are probably an exciting enough reason to release funds.
That said, they very much are using the latest incident in Berlin to push armed officers out onto the streets.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2440342/eleven-police-forces-t...
The problem with this is that the effect is not easy to measure. If you bring down the crime rate by policing than this can directly be associated with the cost spent. If you improve a school and the crime rate goes down the effect is much harder to measure, and cost/benefit will be in different organizations within the government.
These sort of predictions "work", for certain values of work...
The "blah blah" MACHINE LEARNING strikes again....
0. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-slaves-of-dubai
Ya'know I'm just saying, things like abolishing slavery and competing for and trying to create quality workforce... stuff nobody cares about when it comes to capitalism for last few decades, which were supposed to lead into socialism if it functioned well.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike
https://medium.com/@seeminglyquiet/modern-day-slavery-in-ame...
People in the US on H1B visas don't have their passport taken away and are prevented from leaving. They aren't arrested and imprisoned when they are gang raped. They aren't forced to live in shanty towns with limited facilities like running water. They aren't working 12 hours shifts 6 days a week. They aren't earning $580 a month (the $70k a year the article complains about is at or above the median wage in the bay area). Here in the US we also don't have laws on the books punishing homosexuality with imprisonment and death.
Most of the western media articles that you read are very biased and westerners seems kind of jealous of oil rich countries developing at a faster pace than theirs. Western media reports the incidents in an exaggerated manner when it comes to middle east nations.
If women are not allowed to drive a car in Saudi Arabia, Nor are H1B dependents (H4) spouses allowed to work in the US. They are not allowed to have a SSN or a bank account. So what makes US any different ? Isn't just slavery in another form towards the migrant workers no matter in which country they work ?
>seems kind of jealous of oil rich countries developing at a faster pace than theirs
Fascism can sure look pretty from the outside.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/30/italian-police...
There is a company from Israel that deployed 10 years ago algoritms to score if people was lying, or angry when people called the police.
And it makes sense.
Anything that helps you triage when you have limited resources it's a good idea.
And any tool that suggest deterrent actions to keep your resources is also a good idea (ie police near a metro station next to a stadium hours before a sports event so pickpocketers don't come nearby).
For me the weakest point is not the technical part (mechanisms), is how you use them (policies).
I mean, you need some policy to trigger reactions to signals. And since policies are made by human people, that has more bias than any algorithm you can ever produce, plus and policy changes will surely affect how the "system" works and how it needs retraining.
So, unless this is used for very simple stuff with simple policies it won't work.
Probably made an example of just the same, like the rest of the slave class there.
It really miffs me that UAE receives all this Western patronage. In a just world they'd be embargoed into the ground until they adopted decent human rights practices.
[1] Last time I mentioned his name I got down-voted to oblivion. Lets see what happens this time. :)
Obama won his first election on a platform of change. It's pretty clear that the citizenship wants something different, and Trump offered that much more strongly than Clinton.
Two of the most important issues for me are surveillance and imperialism. And as bad as Trump is for both, my understanding is that Clinton would have been worse. And I'd rather vote for someone uncouth than someone who is going to be using my tax money to spy on me and to bomb other countries.
You are free to have different priorities, you are free to care more about other issues, but please acknowledge that the election is more complex than "they voted for a guy who likes to 'grab em by the billy bush'"
I won't even address the world's history with egomaniacs and military power.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aWejiXvd-P8
He also has requested lists of employees at state agencies who have worked on climate change and gender equality. I really don't know where you're getting this image of him from.
"Rape" occurs whenever there is no consent. Yes, you can have marital rape. Obviously. If there was no consent, then it is rape and it is illegal ( at least in civilized countries ).
Whether the raped person is married or not has NOTHING TO DO WITH IT whatsoever. No consent, then it is rape, and the perpetrator, if caught, will be punished. NOT the raped person, obviously. The rapist.
Sick world.
Given the actual text in the post, your interpretation of the parent's true intentions could be as biased as mine... :)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13244642
> By 'rape' do you mean she had sex outside a legitimate marriage [which in much MENA law are equivalent acts]? If so, [by the laws of Dubai] she is guilty [in a purely legalistic sense] of prostitution or adultery or illicit sex. There is of course no such thing as marital rape [in the law books of Dubai]. For rape to be proven there must be multiple adult male witnesses who will testify [...I'm not sure how this sentence could be made any clearer]. The penalty for 'lying' [scare quotes emphasize that this is a perspective parent does not personally hold] about being raped is a year in jail. And the penalty for abortion is death [this is also not a matter of opinion, but is actually what happens to women in many MENA countries].
As the number of readers gets large, though, the long tail of interpretation guarantees that a few will, for whatever random reason, miss the subtext. The cost of such misreadings (pointless off-topic indignation) is high. So when commenting on appalling or other divisive things, please be explicit rather than implicit.
This is one case of the general phenomenon—noticeable on HN—that effective communication to large, weakly cohesive groups works differently than to small, close ones. The available range is narrower if one wants not to put the needle in the red. That's a pity, because it gives less latitude for expressing yourself, but putting the needle in the red is much worse.
But I'm not appalled by Dubai. If anything, I'm appalled by the childish arrogance and "moral superiority" on display in this thread. There is nothing "hackerish" or clever about getting inflamed against a far-away country you probably know nothing about.
Nietzsche has a good quote about this pestilential habit of moral condemnation, which I can't find right now. It's a bad habit, an addiction we should recognize and discard.
(Now a thread about the unique ways of the Emirates and how to navigate there would be worthwhile.)
People don't talk in this ridiculous, irresponsible way when they have skin in the game. I wouldn't expect loose, childish talk from you, Dan G about moderating forums, because you moderate a forum and know what's involved.
To be clear: this is not my opinion of how things should be, but it is the view of gulf states governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_system_of_the_United_Ara...
Also, lest someone take this as an anti-islam attack, let me be clear that this is about the authoritarian/theocratic oligopoly system over there. The normal people are lovely.
Wrong.
We need to progress in all parts of the world.
So, instead of pointing fingers, I was curious about your thoughts on Dubai's potential Crime Prediction Software.
The rest of the world needs to be aware of just how bad the situation is in UAE:
Rape Victims Are Being Jailed Under Extramarital Sex Laws in the UAE https://news.vice.com/article/rape-victims-are-being-jailed-...
UAE imprisoning rape victims under extramarital sex laws – investigation https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/26/hundreds-of-wo...
'They Destroyed Me': French Teen's Rape Case Exposes Dubai's Dark Side http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3932740
The vanished: the Filipino domestic workers who disappear behind closed doors https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/oct/24/t...
(Links via TorgnyLagman's reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5jr48x/unmarried... )
There's a lot you won't find on Breitbart or the Daily Stormer.
So, instead of pointing fingers, I was curious about your thoughts on Dubai's potential Crime Prediction Software.
The police said the hospital should have informed them immediately. “They should not accept such cases of unmarried pregnant women,” police said."
barbarians. the Irish pull the same shit: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ireland/967...
But then if the crime does not happen, what is this software predicting ?
We imagine this with USA police and see where things could go wrong, but our police and Dubai's police have unique sets of problems to deal with.
Dubai has a very very high incentive to keep their crime rates as low as possible, and being a much more young growing nation with the capital to do so, this certainly keeps their appeal as a place to do business and vacation viable despite the region they're in.
However, this sort of information would be useful if you could figure out where support structures could be put in place vs simply deploying police... ie, planting community gardens, providing housing to the homeless, providing fresh food and child care, teaching parenting skills, etc.
Of course, you don't really need software to tell you that providing for people's basic needs drastically reduces crime.
Psycho-pass and Minority Report becoming reality?
As to the degree this is "encoding racial bias", I feel this is passing the buck to the computer. The computer is merely calculating a probability distribution on historical data the best it possibly can (and likely, more accurate, effective, and with more objectivity than humans ever can). Impartiality or partiality does not start or end with a computer program, it starts with human policies.
One does not solve police racism by creating a model that adheres to your view of an ideal world. This argumentation is naive. It does not change anything, but perhaps makes you feel good. You either solve it at its core, or you don't solve it at all.
One should also distinguish between heavy-crime areas and police bias. Some areas, where a certain race may be overrepresented, are just more prone to street crimes. This is not bias, but fact. Don't cripple your model, just because you don't agree with the facts.
As for white collar crime vs. street crime; automated systems to detect fraud, insider trading, scams, and theft, are also in place. These just don't benefit from capacity planning / more police presence on the streets.
The Minority Report angle is journalistic nonsense / click-bait, akin to invoking Terminator when talking about Google's AI efforts. This is about areas of crime, not pre-crime for individuals.
These systems can adapt. If an area sees a drop in crime rate, then that area requires less police presence. It is not just trained on a single snapshot.
Finally, such Crime Prediction software can be used by human police officers to make better decisions. It is far off from self-driving police cars without any human input.
Note, I am not saying algorithmic bias does not exist, or that this is not an important issue to solve, as we start automating more processes in society. But then, let's discuss it on fair and equal ground, and leave human bias against "human-biased" systems out. We can talk about this mathematically now, or at least, in a non-emotional rational manner.
Aside: Other comments here are very America-centric, and detract from the topic at hand. It's like posting news articles on manual SWAT-raids gone wrong in NY, when discussing predictive policing software in California.