Thread

1. freddealmeida · 1790398947 · focus · HN ↗

   Flock did not put the woman in jail. The police and DA put her in Jail. This is not a failure of the technology (do they have confidence levels?). This is a failure of how police are outsourcing their reasoning and decision making to an AI camera service that seems to fail at the tail.

   1. CrendKing · 1790401755 · focus · HN ↗

      But Flock gives police overconfidence to commit actions instead of having due diligence. It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.

      This is also comparable to self-driving car: Waymo's system has achieve the level of "less error than human on average" long time ago, but they are still only doing slow expansion. Why? Because when AI is involved, human naturally expect them to be almost 100% correct, not just barely better than human, otherwise why bother use AI (and all the troubles to legalize for AI) in the first place? So in this case, I guess the police just blindly trust the AI being 99.99% correct.

      1. nrmitchi · 1790403041 · focus · HN ↗

         Flock isn’t an “AI” though? It doesn’t put together a case and say “yes, this is the criminal”. It’s not a crime-solving AI.

         It’s a camera system, and data can be queried by police. They have to search for something. So the cops searched for a vehicle matching the description in the general area, seemed to take the first one, and called it a day.

         That’s not an AI-uncanny-valley. That’s the equivalent of (pre-flock/cameras) looking at vehicle registration list and assuming the one at the top of the list must be it.

         The automation-trust is a legitimate concern but it’s not applicable here.

         1. baranul · 1790423355 · focus · HN ↗

            Correct, but what's more, there is a lack of accountability issue that's part of it. When people are not held accountable for the screw ups, then processes don't or are very slow to change. That's how you can just call it a day, regardless of the harm done to innocent citizens.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.