How AI-powered tech landed man in jail with scant evidence
YeGoblynQueenne 2021-08-19 16:33:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Regardless of the other aspects of this story (the ones to do with policing, justice, and technology) the fact that we heard nothing from Herring's mother and her conviction about the Williams' guilt reeks of emotional manipulation from this article.
mx-e 2021-08-19 14:07:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]
„Move fast and break things“ shouldn’t be the motto when jailing people. This might be pseudoscience payed with tax money!
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 2021-08-19 16:20:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Let's also remember that judges, lawyers and cops are folks that couldn't hack STEM.
extra88 2021-08-19 16:49:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Your first point was good but spoiled by this ad hominem attack. Being interested in STEM fields doesn't make one any smarter, or otherwise superior, to anyone else.
actually_a_dog 2021-08-19 14:33:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Sorry I don't have anything more profound to share here.
watermelongunn 2021-08-19 13:22:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]
Verdex 2021-08-19 13:54:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]
So some asshole walks into the middle of the court room and butchers a chicken. Then he pulls out the liver and tears the thing apart. Finally, he confidently asserts that the defendant is guilty. He uses all sorts of science words like 'sodium gradients' and 'iron content'.
Meanwhile, we're all professional haruspices over here and we're all like, no. The best we've been able to do is get chicken livers to correctly identify the number '4' and to generate cat photos.
The courts and police (all over the world and deep into history as far as I can tell) have a habit of grabbing pseudo science or even straight up mysticism and using it to assign guilt.
So here we are watching the part of compsci that's currently going through its alchemy stage and people are using it for legal decisions. Yeah, technically people are incarcerating people. However, we should at the very least be telling people, "Hey, have you seen that one James Mickens video where he talks about how machine learning should definitely be kept off the internet of hate (aka the internet) AND definitely not used for important decisions. It's both entertaining and educational."
breckenedge 2021-08-19 15:48:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]
danso 2021-08-19 12:56:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]
The AP story leads with the same wrongly arrested man, Michael Williams, but more broadly covers ShotSpotter's history and evidential failures.
> AP’s investigation found the system can miss live gunfire right under its microphones, or misclassify the sounds of fireworks or cars backfiring as gunshots. Forensic reports prepared by ShotSpotter’s employees have been used in court to improperly claim that a defendant shot at police, or provide questionable counts of the number of shots allegedly fired by defendants. Judges in a number of cases have thrown out the evidence.