Comment on Palantir Started By Spying on a City Now Sells AI for War
anus@lemmy.world 2 days agoI 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.