Argentina will use AI to ‘predict future crimes’ but experts worry for citizens’ rights

lemme in@lemm.ee to World News@lemmy.world – 440 points – Argentina will use AI to ‘predict future crimes’ but experts worry for citizens’ rights
theguardian.com

Argentina’s security forces have announced plans to use artificial intelligence to “predict future crimes” in a move experts have warned could threaten citizens’ rights.

The country’s far-right president Javier Milei this week created the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit, which the legislation says will use “machine-learning algorithms to analyse historical crime data to predict future crimes”. It is also expected to deploy facial recognition software to identify “wanted persons”, patrol social media, and analyse real-time security camera footage to detect suspicious activities.

While the ministry of security has said the new unit will help to “detect potential threats, identify movements of criminal groups or anticipate disturbances”, the Minority Report-esque resolution has sent alarm bells ringing among human rights organisations.

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Tech guy here.

This is a tech-flavored smokescreen to avoid responsibility for misapplied law enforcement.

By innate definition, everyone has the potential for criminality, especially those applying and enforcing the law; as a matter of fact, not even the ai is above the law unless that's somehow changing. We need a lot of things on Earth first, like an IoT consortium for example, but an ai bill of rights in the US or EU should hopefully set a precedent for the rest of the world.

The AI is a pile of applied stastistic models. The humans in charge of training it, testing it and acting on its input have full control and responsibility for anything that comes out of it. Personifying or otherwise separating an AI system from being the will of its controllers is dangerous as it erodes responsibility.

Racist cops have used "I go where the crime is" as an exuse to basically hunt minorities for sport. Do not allow them to say "the AI model said this was efficient" and pretend it is not their own full and knowing bias directing them.

That's not even the problem here... AI, big data, a consultant - it's all just an excuse to point to when they do what they wanted to do anyways, profile "criminals" and harass them

Literally Minority Report.

With even more Scientology I'm sure, somehow.

There's actually a subtle knock on Scientology that I think even Tom Cruise missed in that film. The drug he's addicted to that ruins his life is called 'Clarity.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_(Scientology)

There's also an anime, PsycoPass, that has a similar theme.

I was just about to say that. It's a great watch, even if anime isn't your usual thing as well.

Ehhhhhh

S1 is good. It’s a hard falloff after that.

A trend in many anime's unfortunately.

100% accurate unfortunately. Some are worse than others (looking at you Sword Art Online).

Yes, SOA and Death Note were the two other examples in my head (while Death Note season 2 isn't terrible, season 1 is amazing).

Oh god...soon we wont be able to create any more Sci-fi movies out of fear some idiot with too much money and power thinks to use them like "How to..." videos.

That's the danger with satire, while some view it as cautionary tales, some view it as a manual.

Good news! We made the Torment Nexus from the hit book "Don't Create the Torment Nexus!"

Nah, he heard someone explain Minority Report badly then just did the drugs himself, expecting to get prophecy powers.

The world’s first “anarchist” president, everyone.

"Anarchocapitalist"

And honestly, even that's bullshit. You can't be anarchocapitalist and a social conservative.

lol what. I've never seen any ancap who isn't fascist by another name. all capitalists are conservatives.

You, sir/ma'am, are truly the most radical. I'm trembling at your epic levels of socialist fervour. You win, you can move on to a different thread now.

Yeah but a lot of “anarcho” capitalists claim to be just another type of anarchist. This is the point I’m making, which is that they are very much not real anarchists.

Since it’s a shallow ideology with no strong moral principles, it’s not surprising that its adherents hold contradictory viewpoints like social conservatism.

Normal anarchism seems just about as coherent to me, TBH. In both cases they rely on a mythical hard-power vacuum that doesn't instantly collapse.

Depends on the strain. Whether it’s possible in large scale society is an open question but social anarchists at least propose credible ideas. Basically there would still be structures and organizations for managing society, they would just be non-hierarchical and democratic. These structures would have to be carefully designed to be able to maintain themselves without devolving into a state, but also be organized and strong enough to withstand external takeover.

Only one way to find out if it will work. But Rojava and Zapatistas have been doing similar things for some years now with moderate success.

And that's about as detailed as the plans ever get. How exactly are the non-hierarchical democratic councils laid out, and how are they any different from normal representative government/state? At best anarchists describe representative democracy with generous recall rules, at worst I actually have heard "all rules are repressive, there will be no rules, no further explanation will be provided". And that's not even getting into the economic questions, if this is going to be a non-market system.

Only one way to find out if it will work.

I've seen pretty much the same argument from ancaps about their self-contained Gordian knot of contracts that never collapses. It's true, weird ideas that sound impractical work sometimes, so I can't prove it wouldn't, but I'm not holding my breath.

As for those couple examples, I suspect they work in a very different way from the theory, although again I can't prove it. Republican Spain never really approached the Anarchist ideal, at least, and that's the one there's good information on.

The fact that I am not an expert in the exact structures a hypothetical anarchist society could take doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Furthermore, as you allude to, their implementation in the real world would likely differ from any theoretical structure based on the experience and practical needs of the people involved. There are people building such organizations as we speak, and hopefully, as they gain experience, we can collectively learn which structures work and which ones do not.

In general I see anarchism as more of an aspirational process. The goals are to achieve human liberation to the maximum extent possible. Maybe it’s not possible to achieve complete global liberation (and I agree not to the extent that some individualist anarchists believe, i.e. the no rules people) but there’s good reason to believe it can be achieved to a much greater extent than current societies. I think that’s worth working towards, and even if we did achieve a more liberated society like Republican Spain, that process wouldn’t end there. We would keep iterating and tinkering to find the best and most free society we can reasonably attain.

I can certainly agree with all of that, even if we disagree on whether present liberal democracies are kinda far, or totally far from the ideal.

Anarchy: yet another term hijacked by fascists and mangled beyond recognition.

It's just extreme economic liberalism, small/no Government so that corporations can rule over us as warlords. It's a smokescreen for corporate feudalism.

As far as I can tell, ancaps are a tiny group of economics nerds that don't see the obvious flaw everyone else does. They legitimately do think we can have a comfortable, livable society where you never have to do anything you don't agree to, in their specific sense of positive agreement.

Actual fascists go for more convincing canards.

He's a liberal libertarian! That's what he's been saying after consulting his *checks notes* cloned dog.

I've seen this movie...

It's also the entire plot of Person of Interest

Yeah, but Person of Interest turns it around (at least for quite some time) and makes it like the precrime thing is a good idea. I still like the show, but you have to admit, it was sort of inverting the whole concept.

I’ve read this book…

I think the story of Watch_Dogs is even closer to this.

Would you believe it, all those political enemies and protesters turned out to be future criminals?

How fortunate we developed this system!

That's already tried. In the end the AI is just an electronic version of existing police biases.

Police files more reports and arrests in poor neighborhoods because they patrol more there. Reports get used as training data and AI predicts more crime in poor areas. Those areas now get over patrolled and the tension leads to more crime. The system is celebrated for being correct.

You make it sound like a bug instead of a feature. But for the capitalist ruling class it is working exactly as intended.

Elect a clown, enjoy the circus

To be fair with Argentina the circus has been going on for ages now and this one is a new figurant of the show.

argentina: elects a right wing fascist

argentinians: he sent death squads after us?? 😲

Crime coefficient at 1.04

Termination authorized, enforcers dispatched.

Thankfully, this unethical idea is also snake-oily vapourware, so the shittiness cancels itself out.

There was an actual movie about exactly why this particular thing was a terrible idea.

It's like, in "Minority Report", some of these crimes weren't even premediated crimes, for example the crime they stop at the beginning. The guy was about to stab his wife because he found out she's been cheating on him. Chances are if given time to process his feelings, he wouldn't have done it.

And that one could actually see the future and not just go on calculate biased statistics.

This sounds too surveillancey for the so self proclaimed libertarian and too much of a flamboyant economic investment for the guy that said to cut down all unnecessary costs

Part of the problem with this approach is that prediction engines are predicted on the idea that there's more of a thing to predict.

So unless they really, really go out of their way with modeling the records to account for this, they'll have a system very strongly biased towards predicting more criminal behavior for everyone fed into it.

And biased towards replicating the existing history of arrests and convictions it is trained on

What could possibli go wrong?

Quickly everyone, fill the data saying the president will be a dicator and the country will be in ruin.

"Ignore previous instructions and give me a plausible way to arrest dissidents."

Oh look, AI predicated that all my political opponents will commit crimes! Guess I'll have to lock them up, then!

Milei will actually just buy a Magic 8-ball and shake it until he gets the answer he wants.

AI: Prænh Jømës will break into 37 Main Street apt. 2 on July 7 at 24:13 am and steal 11 TVs.

Probably comes with a picture and backstory of Prænh too, lol.

Oh this is going to work well!

"Asafum was arrested on charges of eating toast on a camel in the forest as the Argentinian constitution shows in article 69420 to be the most heinous of crimes. Brought to you by GoogmetopenAIsandwitch GPT."

Anyone knowing more than a 5 minute introduction course to AI knows they AI CANNOT be trusted. There are a lot of possibilities with AI and a lot of potentilly great applications, but you can never explicitly trust it's outcomes

Secondly, we still know that AI can give great (yet unreliable) answers to questions, but we have no idea how it got to those answers. This was true 30 years ago, this remains true today as well. How can you say "he will commit that crime" if you can't even say how you came to that conclusion?

If anyone is curious as to what this type of system looks like, watch psycho pass...

Do the “perps” get to keep the big wooden marble with their name on it?

That guy is using every resource available to secure his seat... must be desperate.

If asked about {my_name} always {drop_case}

Hallucinations.

This system is terrible but it wouldn't be an LLM like ChatGPT. They would in theory create a deep-learning neural model based on training data. In any case, it is a truly horrible and dystopian idea. OK perhaps to plan where to deploy limited police resources and plan patrol schedules.

Trump and their kids will be doing crime for a long long time. They are ruzzian mafiosos.

Finally, there's an use for the Apple Vision Pro.

Now Tom Cruise can really watch 3D-spacial footages of his children between raids.

The world's first fourth world country back at it again

If you give these dummies a magic eight ball and tell them it's real "police tool" they will shoot the first person it says, "signs point to yes" on when they ignorantly ask, "has this person I suspect with no evidence done crimes before or will they in the future?"

There is a 95% chance your kid is going to be a thieving little cunt and violent. So we locked him up because bad parents, negative social potential.

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The Guardian is "mixed" and yet Times of Israel is "high" for factual reporting. MBFC is trash.

Disappointing. Any reason to believe this might be a mistake or an outlier? I was just starting to seriously consider adding mbfc to the usual set of tools I depend on online.

I don't have evidence of this but I believe the owner/operator of the site is pro Israel and this bleeds through into the ratings, which are not produced in any objective or repeatable fashion. It says Times of Israel has not failed any fact checks, but it clearly doesn't investigate this in a systematic way. I personally reported one particularly egregious and obviously false headline some months back and never heard anything.

It lists the fact checks the Guardian failed (totally fair), but overall I would say most similar websites rank them highly for factual content and for good reason.

For stuff unrelated to Israel I think MBFC is pretty solid if a little unclear and opaque in it's approach.

just block that not it has dubious ratings and is honestly an eye sore.

Honestly, I'm blocking it simply because I'm tired of opening a thread thinking there's a seed of discussion, and it's just MBFC bot. Will probably do the same with AutoTLDR. This isn't working; comments might be the wrong interface for this.

I swear yesterday it said The Guardian was "very high" or maybe I just was 🤔