Police in England installed an AI camera system along a major road. It caught almost 300 drivers in its first 3 days.::An AI camera system installed along a major road in England caught 300 offenses in its first 3 days.There were 180 seat belt offenses and 117 mobile phone
Photos flagged by the AI are then sent to a person for review.
If an offense was correctly identified, the driver is then sent either a notice of warning or intended prosecution, depending on the severity of the offense.
The AI just “identifying” offenses is the easy part. It would be interesting to know whether the AI indeed correctly identified 300 offenses or if the person reviewing the AI’s images acted on 300 offenses. That’s potentially a huge difference and would have been the relevant part of the news.
This will get shut down the first time some politician gets caught receiving road head and the pictures leak.
Expansion of the surveillance state, you go uk.
The DEA in the US has surveillance on every highway exit. If you drive on an interstate, you are logged.
Am I the only one who considers the text on the camera car (“HIGHWAY MAINTENANCE”) a bad joke?
@L4s People don’t want to get caught breaking the law. Perhaps others wouldn’t like fighting false positives.
Solve that with lower fines and a suitably easy way to challenge them.I love threads like these because it really shows how flexible opinions are, post about ai surveillance state and everyone is against it but post about car drivers getting fined for not wearing a seatbelt and everyone loves it.
This is a weird phenomenon. Feels a bit like how focusing on “welfare queens” / “dole bludgers” can pave the way for similar privacy erosion (and welfare cuts) even though its a tiny percentage of the people. Seems a short hop away from “if you’ve got nothing to hide…”
Seatbelts I don’t really care about, because with that people mostly just affect themselves (or others in the same car), but for other infractions it makes sense.
The real issue is whether you can trust that the data will only be used for its intended purpose, as right now there are basically no good mechanisms to prevent misuse.
If we had cameras where you could somehow guarantee that - no access for reason other than stated, only when flagged or otherwise by court order, all access to footage logged with the audit log being publicly available, independent system flagging suspicious accesses to any footage, etc. - it wouldn’t be too bad.
Compared to all the private cameras that exist in cars these days…
I just wish they would have one where I live to fine all the people using the HOV lane who aren’t supposed to be
Then we watch the numbers plummet and see there’s only actually 5% of people using the lane and finally see how useless the hiv lane is so we can just make it a regular third lane.
The HOV lane is supposed to look empty. If it was packed full of cars, carpooling wouldn’t have any advantage because you wouldn’t go any faster.
It doesn’t work that well around here, cause there’s inevitably that one car that refuses to go faster than the rest of the traffic that it’s separated from. Or slows down to 10mph when the rest of the highway is stop and go, despite there being a barrier. Then someone gets rear ended because no one was expecting the lane to be going 10mph (and were on their phone), and the accident closes down the lane entirely
Basically, by me, the HOV lane is slower than traffic 90% of the time. Even in stop and go, because that lane is actually the one containing the accident causing the traffic.
Surely the ultimate come away from that is will not ok with people breaking the law and we’re not ok with AI taking people’s jobs. There is no conflict here
So you think most people like the idea of a surveillance state automaticly enforcing it’s every whim with perfect efficiency?
I’m pretty sure that’s something pretty much universally disliked
My main problem with this is, that this becomes like the huge online behemoths like youtube etc. I think most people have seen incidents where youtube cancelled a channel or applied copyright incorrectly, and getting a human to review things is next to impossible. The reason is clear, the sheer amount of content breaching the rules is too big to cost efficiently deal with by humans.
One camera catching 300 people in 72 hours. We don’t see how many it triggered, how many were reviewed and found to be false positives.
The problem is going to be if a whole police force takes it up, or it goes national. The amount of hits generated would be far beyond the ability to confirm with humans. I see it going a similar way to youtube. They just let the AI fine people. You report it as wrong, so they send your petition to another AI that pretends to be human and denies you again. The only way to clear things up is to take it to court. But, now the court system is being flooded so they deny people the right to a court case and the fixed penalties will be automatically applied.
This is the dystopia I fear. Actually catching people committing driving crimes? I don’t have a problem with that. Aside from maybe the increasing number of driving crimes coupled with the knowledge these cameras exist could lead to less concentration while people make sure they’re sitting upright, looking attentive, eyes straight ahead hands at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock. Did I indicate for that lane change back there? I guess that remains to be seen.
Cornwall outsourced mobile speed cameras to a private company a while ago, and realised that they, and the company, we’re making money hand over just, and due to Cornwall’s number of tourists, much of that money was coming from outside Cornwall. This feels like a development of that idea. Ethics and everything aside, if they can find a way to roll this out further and increase the flow of money into the councils coffers, they will
Oh, this can only end in tears.
And just by chance does anyone know what the damage is done to society by punishing victimless crimes?
Not wearing seatbelts and fucking around with a phone are hardly victimless crimes and those laws that punish such offenses were written in blood. Never understood people taking safety regulations lightly. It’s not a fucking suggestion.
Who is the victim of not wearing a seatbelt?
Is it one of those ‘you’re not allowed to do things that only affect you because we’re a society’ type things where we should ban video games and sweet foods too?
Fuck ai and cameras and uk.
I’m not against this. I think the fact that car deaths are skyrocketing in the US and the UK is even more absurd since modern cars are supposedly “safer” with all of their safety tech. Plus how are people still doing this fucking shit when death from dangerous driving has been a thing in the news forever now? It’s like people need even more stricter rules to keep them in line instead of thinking like a reasonable adult.
I think deaths jumped a bit post COVID but I don’t think they are skyrocketing. Do you have a source?
I looked it up. They aren’t skyrocketing.
The numbers dropped due to lockdown, then bounced up and are stable.
I hate this cult of negativity - just make up how everything is getting worse in order to hand more power to the government.
The casual and bovine l way it all happen is disgusting.
For reference, in Switzerland deaths/major injuries from traffic accidents have steadily dropped since the '70s. Thanks to, as you mention, better car safety tech.
But there has also been a great number of speed cameras and lower alcohol tolerance. Oh and new laws with income-relative fines, temporary to permanent loss of driving license, and even jail for the worst driving offenses probably cooling the jets of even the wealthier road maniacs.
Yup, and some of these are quite serious. But a cop at the side of the road could stop these people instantly. These people won’t find out that they have broke the law for two weeks. Or they could just kill themselves/someone else/both half a mile up the road.
It’s about detering behaviours, if people know these cameras are out there, they will be less likely to act like that to begin with as the risk of consequences is now higher.
Why are people saying this is a hypersurveillance dystopian nightmare? Guys, you are still in public! The only difference between this and having police officers sitting there and looking is this is much cheaper and more efficient. The recordings are still being sent to a human being for review.
The only difference between this and having police officers sitting there and looking is this is much cheaper and more efficient.
Sure, but that’s a huge problem, because the legal system wasn’t actually designed for perfectly efficient enforcement. It is important that people be able to get away with breaking the law most of the time. If all of the tens of thousands of laws on the books were always enforced we would all be in prison and bankrupt from fines. Some laws are just bad too, and the way they get repealed is when enough people get away with breaking them for long enough to build political momentum for it.
Also, it isn’t like they are going to stop at using scaled-up AI surveillance just to enforce seatbelt use and texting while driving, there is way too much potential for abuse with this sort of tech. For example if there are these sorts of cameras all over, networked together, anyone with access to them can track just about everything you are doing with no way to opt out. Even if you aren’t doing anything wrong the feeling that you are always being watched is oppressive and has chilling effects.
The problem is the whole “give an inch, they take a mile.” We don’t know what rights this may take away from us in the future. So in the now, always question
