Comment on Palantir Started By Spying on a City Now Sells AI for War
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 week agoWell, 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 2 days 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 2 days 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.
anus@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I agree with you
I would just say that the incentives aligned in America for law enforcement to choose “predictive policing”, whether they call it that or something else
Personally, I think the black mirror conversation is a false dichotomy and the argument that it only gets worse is a slippery slope fallacy
Predictive Policing is here if we like it or not, it’s not new, the feds have been studying how to profile people since before the web was even a thing
I do think the Patriot act was an abuse of power and it continues to be abused but I’m not convinced that we’re necessarily worse off (tactically speaking), I just think the law should be just and upheld appropriately
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 days ago
Yes. Though I think predictive policing is directly ethically wrong. I mean first of all there is no such thing as a thought crime. So I think you can't make people suffer consequences before they did anything. And it comes with consequences. If you're living in a poor neighborhood or you're black or have some records in their databases, for whatever reason... Life will become difficult. And you might not be able to live up to your potential any more. Possibly lots of people won't. Also mistakes will happen and we have to find a way to minimize the amount of innocent people in jail.
And I'm not sure if it's a slippery slope either. I mean we have China with a social score system. And several other countries with prevalent surveillance. And we know since Snowden that the US also keeps large databases about all of us. It's already there.
I think it's more a salami swindle. In the early days, the internet was relatively free, then we had a corporate takeover. And more recently governments are actually cracking down and we don't have Pornhub in Texas anymore. The UK is also very eager to restrict freedom, porn and unwanted things. Several smaller forums hosted in the UK died last year. I had occasionally used sone of them. Then they want your Social media accounts at the borders these days and people are send back home. Also small things increased like someone wanting to pat me down and look inside my bag before I visit an evening show. Private companies do the same. I can barely use a messenger these days without revealing my phone number and letting them track me forever. Google gets embedded deeper in all our devices and lifes each day and of course they don't necessarily want a dystopia... But they definitely want to manipulate you. That's kind of the core of advertising.
I definitely feel some of the consequences. And I don't think "Predictive policing is here whether we like it or not"... It's a choice. Just because technology exists, doesn't mean it's a good idea to use it. That's a fallacy as well.