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

So instead of spending X dollars to ensure people have homes, we spend X++ dollars to evict them from their spaces?

quite ironically in this context, san jose is named after st. joseph -- he of the legal dad of jesus fame -- who was once famously told there was no room at the inn and had to make do in a stable.

And help them right ? RIGHT ?

AI policing has begun.

this brave new future which we live in fucking sucks

Every year California is becoming more like Night City. Cyperpunk is supposed to be a dystopia, not an aspiration.

When housing becomes a for profit business, this is the result. It's happening in my city in Canada as well.

I have a homeless community sprouting up behind our cul de sac and it gets bigger each spring. It likely disappears in the winter, I've no desire to walk through the uncleared snow to find out. And a few blocks away people are camping out on sidewalks everywhere, it's becoming an epidemic, in a city that was once very affordable.

Is it done to give them home quicker? Is it?

*sigh*

"unwanted objects"

We're all shocked that New Technology X is used to target and oppress people

The rates of suicide are going to skyrocket

the accuracy for lived-in cars is still far lower: between 10 and 15%

Sounds like the tech isn’t terribly useful

Maybe it's to help them.

Don't tell me, I like the illusion.

This sounds like a real opportunity for false positives as opposed to, I dunno, engaging with the community?

From the screen grabs, Since when is a legally street parked RV a homeless encampment? Looks like picking low hanging fruit for campaign talking points.

Yes, actual human beings are unwanted objects. This is hella dystopian.

They start out identifying the various "races" probably. I'm a brown person and would like to keep reminding everyone that different races do not exist in the sense that it is not a scientific term with any meaning. A term with proper meaning is "species" and there is only one "homosapiens".... it's not just Juantastic who lives under the bridge, it's all of us. We are all a single family. Anyway, would you let your brother or sister or parents or relatives go live under a bridge and hungry? Nah right? What if they were thousands of miles away and didn't have a place to sleep in? Still nah! You would do whatever to try to help! So why are there homeless people in every city and why do we not help Gaza and Ukraine people? Right? We need to do a better job!

This might actually get struck down on constitutionality. How does one confront their accuser in court if the accuser is a trained neural net?

And that’s without even touching on the fact that ML is stochastic in nature, and should absolutely not be considered accurate enough to be an unsupervised and unmoderated single-point-of-failure decision engine in contexts like legal, medical, or other critical decision-making process. The fact that ML regularly and demonstrably hallucinates (or otherwise yields garbage output) is just not acceptable in a regulatory sense.

Source: software engineer in biotech; we are specifically disallowed from using ML at any level in our work for the above reasons, as well as potential HIPAA-related data mining issues.

Holy Mackerel! Could this be any more of an extremely boring dumb and awful cyberpunk dystopia? Good God!

it'd be a shame if a .22 round found it's way through the casing of that camera. A real damn shame for sure.

disgraceful. If I ever meet somebody involved in this....

I'm going to choose to believe that the goal is to know how to more efficiently deliver aid to those that need it

What a great new use for Ai 😂 I can drive, identify vehicles that people are living in with 70% accuracy and pick out fresh new tracks on iTunes with 25% accuracy. How many companies did they have working on this so they can later make millions not actually fixing anything :-(

This is the best summary I could come up with:

For the last several months, a city at the heart of Silicon Valley has been training artificial intelligence to recognize tents and cars with people living inside in what experts believe is the first experiment of its kind in the United States.

Last July, San Jose issued an open invitation to technology companies to mount cameras on a municipal vehicle that began periodically driving through the city’s district 10 in December, collecting footage of the streets and public spaces.

There’s no set end date for the pilot phase of the project, Tawfik said in an interview, and as the models improve he believes the target objects could expand to include lost cats and dogs, parking violations and overgrown trees.

City documents state that, in addition to accuracy, one of the main metrics the AI systems will be assessed on is their ability to preserve the privacy of people captured on camera – for example, by blurring faces and license plates.

The group, made up of dozens of current and formerly unhoused people, has recently been fighting a policy proposed last August by the San Jose mayor, Matt Mahan, that would allow police to tow and impound lived-in vehicles near schools.

In addition to providing a training ground for new algorithms, San Jose’s position as a national leader on government procurement of technology means that its experiment with surveilling encampments could influence whether and how other cities adopt similar detection systems.

The original article contains 1,487 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Hate my state.

Maybe you cope with the noxium of urine created amonia, the feces, the needles, the petty crime, and getting hassled and called a "fa**ot" for not having a $1 bill in San Jose, Oakland, SF, or LA but I cannot. All the well wishes are nice, and I would love love if the homeless could be put into unused office space or whatever pipedream is trendy at the time (and there have been a lot of pipedreams in my shortish life). But I want them gone, I want the worse-than-a-favela shantytowns, and I want the smell gone. I don't really give a shit how it's done so long as it isn't cruel or illegal.

So sick to death of all the magical thinking from other liberals in this state. We have the run the of the place and homeless is worse by 5 fold. And the Republicans are just practically begging for mass execution and deportation, as is their way.

I don't care anymore. Just go away.

Hey look its the bay area. Can it burn down again please. Sincerely some redneck from the IE

These 'homeless' are no better than Gypsies. They reject society and take advantage of the good nature in people. They are scumbags and do not deserve sympathy.

If they can stand on the same corner every day at the same time they are more than capable of getting a job.