Revealed: a California city is training AI to spot homeless encampments

www.theguardian.com

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Five bucks says this involves one or more Israeli tech companies. Not that we don’t have plenty of our own domestically.
“We’re not detecting folks,” Tawfik said. “We’re detecting encampments. So the interest is not identifying people because that will be a violation of privacy.”
BUT WHO LIVES IN THE ENCAMPMENTS?! DO 'FOLKS' LIVE IN THE ENCAMPMENTS?!
Now this is the proper dystopian use of AI I was promised.
Time to set up tarps at random locations around the city to stretch police resources
What a waste of resources. They just proved sweeps don't change crime rates.
- Oh was this about crime prevention? I thought it was simply about giving cops more money and pumping dollerydoos into Silicon Valley's pockets.
  
  Well they also love bullying the homeless; gets the cops something to do that isn’t murdering people over petty crimes and racism. Doesn’t get the public as riled up either, since most are already well practiced in ignoring the unhoused.
This could be used for good to help speed up outreach efforts, but I think we all know how this is going to be used.
One day they will accidentaly firebomb a boyscout camp and somebody will ask a question "what about 100 homeless encampments we bombed earlier, are we the baddies?" And the answer will be of course 🦗 🦗 🦗
Putting the opinions about homeless and sweeps aside for a sec..I feel like this still doesn't make sense from the cop perspective. It sounds like this would be mounted to a car that a person is driving. Why not just have the person mark the location, it's not like they're hard to recognize.

10 comments