Comment on Palantir Started By Spying on a City Now Sells AI for War
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 months agoI'm not very surprised. I think even old-school face recognition does things like measure distance between your eyes, nose etc, and stuff like that (your skull) doesn't change a lot during 10 years of adulthood. The real danger is that they connect all of that information. And as you said, it's everywhere these days, they have a lot of sources and -of course- it's in the wrong hands.
anus@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
You seem well informed, can you help me understand this a bit? Is this basically just ACAB, so any kind of helping the cops is Bad too?
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 weeks ago
Well, I'm not a fan of oversimplifications and ACAB is one. I think the people pushing for a repressive surveillance state are politicians and lobbyists. The police force is merely executing that. Though I bet they like expensive playthings and power and control. Because that's kind of their job.
It depends a bit on where you live. Here in Germany I think we have quite some well-trained cops who do their job well. And do what they're supposed to and help citizens with all kinds of things. Of course we also have bad cops, corrupt ones and people with blood on their hands, but I certainly hope they're far and in between. In America I'm not so sure. I'd surely never help an agency like ICE. That's proper fascist stuff and not ethical. Though I bet there are some cops who do good all day and rescue kittens from trees, idk. I don't think there's an issue with helping those if you like law and order.
I think the issue with surveillance and weird oppressive abuse is bigger than those people. Sure they're involved and that's bad, but they're somewhere at the bottom when they do things like in the article above. Or randomly arrest people in NYC because they have $6 billion to waste on weird tech and some AI tells them to do something. I think the real issue are the people who give them the $6b, the people who decide what dystopian shit to buy with it, the people who passed the laws to instruct them to do it. And last but not least companies like Palantir who make a fortune off of people's misery.
anus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m an American living in London and I’ve been extremely impressed by the quality of policing here compared to America. And part of that quality no doubt has to do with the police dealing with overall less severe crime. So I suppose it’s a bit circular
But nonetheless, crime is essentially unsolved in East London and other parts of the country
So I agree that there’s a better version of policing but I reject that the solution to crime is just better police training
Do you see it as an unsolvable problem?
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 weeks ago
I think policing is a complex issue. And the US for example has almost ten times the homicide rate of the average European country. They have a lot of gang violence, school-schootings and everything is more extreme in the USA, for the better or the worse. I'd say it's likely a comprehensive approach. Police needs equipment and good training. They need to be staffed. They also need good guidelines and strict oversight. And lawmakers and courts need to facilitate an environment in which things go into the right direction. Everything from the local to the national level. Then society has to agree to pull in the same direction. And it's kind of an investment into all kinds of things. That will certainly pay off later, big time. But includes things like invest in healtcare for mentally ill people, invest in integration with immigrants. And invest in the proper solution for online crime. And then there's neoliberalism and our overall concept of a society we want to live in. Of course people are more likely to commit crimes if they're miserable or hungry or don't have anything to loose. So we need a society where everyone has some decent living conditions, also feels alright and is integrated into society in some form. And for me it also includes freedom.
I'd say it's solvable. I mean not a 100% "perfect" world, but we can have a look at different countries and see how they do things and what it does to them. And there will always be crime, and always room for improvement.