Here's the gist of a post I made a couple of days ago (I removed one sentence that someone considered inflammatory):<p>Having known <i>many</i> victims of sexual violence and trafficking (Seriously. I deal with them, several times a week, and have, for decades), I feel for the folks that honestly want <i>that particular</i> kind of crime to stop. Humans can be complete scum. Most folks in this community may think they know how low we can go, but you are likely being optimistic.<p>That said, law enforcement has a nasty habit of having a rather "binary" worldview. People are either cops, or uncaught criminals.<p>With that worldview, it can be quite easy to "blur the line" between child sex traffickers, and traffic ticket violators. I remember reading a <i>The Register</i> article, about how anti-terrorism tools were being abused by local town councils to do things like find zoning violations (for example, pools with no CO).<p>Misapplied laws can be <i>much</i> worse than letting some criminals go. This could easily become a nightmare, if we cede too much to AI.<p>And that isn't even talking about totalitarian regimes, run by people of the same ilk as child sex traffickers (only wearing Gucci, and living in palaces).<p><i>”Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be.”
-Lyndon B. Johnson</i><p><i>[EDITED TO ADD]:</i> And I 100% agree that, if we <i>really</i> want to help children, and victims of other crimes, then we need to start working on the <i>root causes</i> of the issues.<p>Poverty is, arguably, the #1 human problem on Earth, today. It causes levels of desperation that ignore things like climate change, resource shortages, and pollution. People are so desperate to get out of the living hell that 90% of the world experiences, daily, that they will do <i>anything</i> (like sell children for sex), or are angry enough to cause great harm.<p>If we <i>really</i> want to solve a significant number of world problems, we need to deal with poverty; and that is not simple at all. I have members of my family that have been working on that, for decades. I have heard all the "yeah...but" arguments that expose supposedly simple solutions as...<i>not simple</i>.<p>Of course, the biggest issue, is that the folks in the 0.0001% need to loosen their hands on their stashes, and that ain't happening, anytime soon. I don't know if the demographic represented by the Tech scene is up for that, since the 0.0001% are our heroes.