Comment by DrewADesign | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrewADesign | Hacker News Reader

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Engineer: hey I made this cool thing that can help people in public safety roles process information and make decisions more efficiently! It gives false positives but you save more time than it takes less time to weed through them.

Someone nearby: well what if they use it to replace human thinking instead of augment it?

Engineer: well they would be ridiculous. Nobody would ever think that’s a good idea.

Marketing Team: it seems like this lands best when positioning it as a decision-making tool. Let’s get some metrics on how much faster it is at making decisions than people are.

Sales Rep: ok, Captain, let’s dive into our flagship product, DecisionMaker Pro, the totally automated security monitoring agent…

::6 months later—some kid is being held at gunpoint over snacks.::

Nice fantasy, but the reality is that the "people in public safety roles" love using flimsy pretenses to harass and abuse vulnerable populations. I wish it was just overeager sales and marketing, but you're view of humanity is way too naive especially as masked thugs are disappearing people in the street as we type.

What? A) The naïveté of the engineer’s perspective was literally the whole point of the story. B) Saying I’m somehow absolving law enforcement by acknowledging other factors is absurd. My childhood best friend was shot and killed by police during a mental health crisis. C) If you think that police malevolence somehow absolves the tech world’s role in making tools for them, that’s as naive as it gets.

Refer to the post office scandal in Britain and the robodebt debacle in Australia.

The authorities are just itching to have their brains replaced with by dumb computer logic, without regard for community safety and wellbeing.

Lack of Accountability as-a-Service! Very attractive proposition to negligent and self-serving organizations. The people in charge don't even have to pay for it themselves, can just funnel the organization money to the vendor. Encouraging widespread adoption helps normalizes the practice. If anyone objects, shut them down as not thinking-of-the-children and something-must-be-done (and every other option is surely too complicated/expensive).

And the black box sentencing recommendation systems some US states bought into like a decade ago.

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