The headline wording makes it sound like Flock AI is incorrectly flagging this grandmother, but the issue is so much worse than that. The cameras and AI are reading the license plate correctly, and notifying police, as they were designed to do, but someone typed the offending license plate incorrectly.
The reason this is worse than a misbehaving set of hardware and software is that it shows how a company is blanketing a massive number of citizens in a product that is easily weaponized, but they haven’t defined processes to roll back any sort of errors. Then they put this product in the hands of a bunch of over-empowered thugs who are more interested in tickets and arrests than they are with serving their community. And then when
It’s like that old phrase about giving a handgun to a monkey, but we’ve instead made an electronic monkey that makes bullets, then handed out guns to a bunch of organic monkeys who are automatically delivered these bullets. Then, when the monkeys start shooting up people and places at unprecedented rates, the monkeys have no accountability because they’re monkeys, and the owners keep asking if people didn’t want monkeys to have handguns, then why do all of my monkeys keep getting my handguns and my bullets?
And when we ask how to correct this system (not even dismantle it), the employees at every level simply quote that the work is mysterious and important. This is just another dystopian grinding machine in the pile of dystopian grinding machines waiting to be fed.
Apologies: I mixed a lot of metaphors and kinda jumped all over the place. I could probably edit this to something more sensible, but then I’d have to wait longer to tap that shiny submit button.
The headline wording makes it sound like Flock AI is incorrectly flagging this grandmother, but the issue is so much worse than that. The cameras and AI are reading the license plate correctly, and notifying police, as they were designed to do, but someone typed the offending license plate incorrectly.
The reason this is worse than a misbehaving set of hardware and software is that it shows how a company is blanketing a massive number of citizens in a product that is easily weaponized, but they haven’t defined processes to roll back any sort of errors. Then they put this product in the hands of a bunch of over-empowered thugs who are more interested in tickets and arrests than they are with serving their community. And then when
It’s like that old phrase about giving a handgun to a monkey, but we’ve instead made an electronic monkey that makes bullets, then handed out guns to a bunch of organic monkeys who are automatically delivered these bullets. Then, when the monkeys start shooting up people and places at unprecedented rates, the monkeys have no accountability because they’re monkeys, and the owners keep asking if people didn’t want monkeys to have handguns, then why do all of my monkeys keep getting my handguns and my bullets?
And when we ask how to correct this system (not even dismantle it), the employees at every level simply quote that the work is mysterious and important. This is just another dystopian grinding machine in the pile of dystopian grinding machines waiting to be fed.
Apologies: I mixed a lot of metaphors and kinda jumped all over the place. I could probably edit this to something more sensible, but then I’d have to wait longer to tap that shiny submit button.