Police in England installed an AI camera system along a major road. It caught almost 300 drivers in its first 3 days.

Photos flagged by the AI are then sent to a person for review.

If an offense was correctly identified, the driver is then sent either a notice of warning or intended prosecution, depending on the severity of the offense.

The AI just "identifying" offenses is the easy part. It would be interesting to know whether the AI indeed correctly identified 300 offenses or if the person reviewing the AI's images acted on 300 offenses. That's potentially a huge difference and would have been the relevant part of the news.

Expansion of the surveillance state, you go uk.

I love threads like these because it really shows how flexible opinions are, post about ai surveillance state and everyone is against it but post about car drivers getting fined for not wearing a seatbelt and everyone loves it.

The UK has never seen a dystopian nightmare they didn't rush to embrace.

Is the freedom to drive without feeling like you're being watched more important than the prevention of texting while driving?

During my commute, it's common to see people looking at their phones. I don't know what the effect is without statistics, but seeing an accident along the way is a usual occurrence.

ITT a bunch of people who have never read an ounce of sci fi (or got entirely the wrong message and think law being enforced by robots is a good thing)

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I work in an adjacent industry and got a sales pitch from a company offering a similar service. They said that they get the AI to flag the images and then people working from home confirm - and they said it's a lot of people with disabilities/etc getting extra cash that way.

This was about six months ago and I asked them, "there's a lot of bias in AI training datasets - was a diverse dataset used or was it trained mostly on people who look like me (note: I'm white)?" and they completely dodged the question...

(this is definitely a different company as I am not in England)

Fuck ai and cameras and uk.

Meanwhile in New Orleans

https://www.fox8live.com/2023/07/26/nopd-use-facial-recognition-leads-zero-arrests-nine-months/

Why are people saying this is a hypersurveillance dystopian nightmare? Guys, you are still in public! The only difference between this and having police officers sitting there and looking is this is much cheaper and more efficient. The recordings are still being sent to a human being for review.

My main problem with this is, that this becomes like the huge online behemoths like youtube etc. I think most people have seen incidents where youtube cancelled a channel or applied copyright incorrectly, and getting a human to review things is next to impossible. The reason is clear, the sheer amount of content breaching the rules is too big to cost efficiently deal with by humans.

One camera catching 300 people in 72 hours. We don't see how many it triggered, how many were reviewed and found to be false positives.

The problem is going to be if a whole police force takes it up, or it goes national. The amount of hits generated would be far beyond the ability to confirm with humans. I see it going a similar way to youtube. They just let the AI fine people. You report it as wrong, so they send your petition to another AI that pretends to be human and denies you again. The only way to clear things up is to take it to court. But, now the court system is being flooded so they deny people the right to a court case and the fixed penalties will be automatically applied.

This is the dystopia I fear. Actually catching people committing driving crimes? I don't have a problem with that. Aside from maybe the increasing number of driving crimes coupled with the knowledge these cameras exist could lead to less concentration while people make sure they're sitting upright, looking attentive, eyes straight ahead hands at 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock. Did I indicate for that lane change back there? I guess that remains to be seen.

Really great dialogue and discourse going on in this post. Thank you everyone for your opinions and viewpoints. Definitely have a lot to think over on my current stance. Exactly what I was missing lately from the social media I've been consuming (actual discussions with merits both sides hold).

Am I the only one who considers the text on the camera car ("HIGHWAY MAINTENANCE") a bad joke?

This will get shut down the first time some politician gets caught receiving road head and the pictures leak.

I'm surprised car companies haven't already partnered with governments to have the vehicles themselves snitch on the occupants. Why install these camera systems all over the place when the vehicles themselves collect ridiculous amounts of data with greater accuracy? I'm sure the car companies would love the additional revenue stream and the governments would love the greater surveillance capabilities.

@L4s People don't want to get caught breaking the law. Perhaps others wouldn't like fighting false positives.
Solve that with lower fines and a suitably easy way to challenge them.

I know this is gonna be a hot take, but I think there’s a huge opportunity to increase road safety using automation. Where I live the police have largely stopped bothering with minor traffic offenses due to problems with racial profiling, which solves the racial profiling issue but means that it’s very hard to drive so poorly you get pulled over.

It seems like simply ticketing people automatically for driving over the speed limit or running stop signs would be dirt cheap and massively improve driving standards. You wouldn’t even need to do facial recognition or anything, just use the same systems that are already in place for toll by plate to fine the vehicle owner.

Cornwall outsourced mobile speed cameras to a private company a while ago, and realised that they, and the company, we’re making money hand over just, and due to Cornwall’s number of tourists, much of that money was coming from outside Cornwall. This feels like a development of that idea. Ethics and everything aside, if they can find a way to roll this out further and increase the flow of money into the councils coffers, they will

There were 180 seat belt offenses and 117 mobile phone

and 300.000 drivers privacy got violated by a single offender. Someone should gve the AI a fine. Oh wait "privacy" is not a word in the English language anymore, it is just gibberish with no meaning.

Sorry, what did the police do and how many people did they catch in how much time :/

So my car is no longer a private space .

Using AI for this is so stupid. There will be a lot of false negatives and positives.

Oh, this can only end in tears.

And just by chance does anyone know what the damage is done to society by punishing victimless crimes?