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. CrendKing · 1790403904 · focus · HN ↗

            I don't know the details on how Flock is internally designed, but I suppose AI is at least involved in the image recognition and correlation, at least to this scale. I also don't know exactly why Flock misidentifies Issacs' car in this case, because I don't find it in the article or the interview, but I assume it is due to a mislabeling of the plate number or the car damage imagery, which is related to AI. Correct me if I'm wrong.

            1. SpicyLemonZest · 1790435986 · focus · HN ↗

               Flock didn't misidentify Isaacs' car in this case. It correctly identified that her car was vaguely near the accident, and the police incorrectly concluded that it was the one involved in the accident.

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