Heres further proof the justice system is screwed. Yesterday I was stopped while driving for not having current tags. Registration was renewed but I didn't have the sticker yet. Cop looked at my paperwork said all good be back in 5.<p>Come to find out, I haven't had a valid license in 5 years.<p>There was a mistake in court 5 years ago when I paid a fine (speeding ticket). I have a receipt from court saying all settled/money received but court says they never got money.<p>So, after talking to a lawyer yesterday I will be paying another $250 for lawyer fees + court costs to get out of the mistake made by the court in another state 5 years ago.<p>I am lucky. I can pay that. It sucks but some people would be out food money if they suddenly had to pay $500 to drive again.<p>But, I did nothing wrong (except for speeding 6 years ago which I paid the fine and haven't had any issues since) and am stuck paying for the courts mistake.
Add to that a justice system also mostly automated and you are quickly caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare you can't get out if something goes wrong. Imagine the justice system run like google support. Even if something is clearly wrong you can't clear it up if you are not a famous person with a big Twitter following.
> The police said they have upgraded their tech to avoid issues like this in the future.<p><pre><code> if (person_id == "Dong Mingzhu") {
// TODO: generalise this
return false
}</code></pre>
Ironically, the better the AI, the worse this problem is going to get. The error rate will never be zero, but the closer it gets to zero, the more the AI's judgement will be presumed to be correct by the legal system. So if you happen to be one of those unlucky souls who draws the false-positive card in an era where those are rare, you could be totally hosed.
That's absolutely hilarious. But at least it was easily fixed.<p>But to anyone complaining about how this is dystopian: compare it to human police officers who can racially profile and exhibit their prejudices to disproportionately target segments of the population, and which there is absolutely zero easy fix for, especially when we consider how prevalent unconscious bias is.<p>At least an automated system can be analyzed for bias and, when it's found, corrected. There's a lot to be said (in terms of justice) for fair and uniform enforcement of a law, assuming of course there is due process for appeals (and that the law is democratically legitimate in the first place).
Good thing they didn't fine her for speeding at the same time.<p>I find it more than a little bit implausible that facial recognition accuracy is good enough to pluck a face out of a billion people and accurately identify a single individual to the point that a fine would be automatically issued, especially without corroborating evidence that the person fined was even there.
Hilarious, but unfortunately, incidents like these are used to "prove" how incompetent and useless these technologies are, all the while pushing forward their use.
This system seems dumber and simpler than I had imagined it would be. I had guessed the face recognition system would be linked to each citizen's cellphone (i.e. GPS coordinates). How else could it be so certain of any given person's identity, in densely and highly populated areas?
I once read about a proposed 1$ fee for mistakes like that. For individuals, it's just one dollar. For companies and especially the state, it can cost 1000$ and more in processing fees altogether.
I'm seriously confused by what went down.<p>First off, why are the police even reporting this?<p>Secondly, what can the system even do? I'd believe a system could detect a person jaywalking.<p>Identifying them is a huge problem though. running facial recognition against a billion person corpus seems impossible (in fact what even is your match data coming from?). (?). Wouldn't you need to narrow it down somehow, perhaps using phone GPS records?
That this is possible is concerning, it means the system is not smart enough. Might open the possibility of trolling by holding up cardboard cutouts of people and running across the street. Of course that's easier said than done but still...
Funny what happens when you run before you can walk, but with any such technology, there would be false positives even when this gets improved significantly. At such a nascent stage, this is bound to happen.
Maybe calling a machine that has just demonstrated its profound stupidity an “Artificial Intelligence” is part of the problem. This crappy tech is overhyped and overrated.
"debuted crime-fighting facial recognition technology to much fanfare over the past year"<p>People wanted this in China or is this a state run news source?
Every time I see the acronym “AI” I cringe a little bit.<p>It’s literally not AI! It’s very quick statistical work; which works for many circumstances but definitely is not AI. Especially when it doesn’t work.
Yes, but even hidden, it's probably still going to appear quite significant, and I do believe that at some point, the fine size becomes nonsensical.<p>But then again, I do not think that who you are or what you have should change the magnitude of the crime you commit. I don't think it is sensible that I should get greater fines because I chose to bust my ass and suffer from stress to gain more for my family, whereas I could get a much smaller fine if I just lived a more laid back life.<p>Granted, it's supposed to differentiate between the rich and poor, but in doing so it also differentiates between the hardworking and the lazy, punishing productivity and rewarding laziness.
There's been a memo going around from the higher-ups in Central Services that anyone named 'Harry Buttle' should currently take extreme care, due to minor bugs at Information Retrieval.