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

Nobody cares about false negatives. As long as the number isn't something so massive that the system is completely useless false negatives in an automatic system are not a problem.

What are the false positives? Every single false positive is a gross injustice. If you can't come up with a number for that, then you haven't even evaluated your system.

How do they know that they caught 95% of all offenders if they didn't catch the remaining 5%? Wouldn't that be unknowable?

Maybe in high population areas, most exits don't have any infrastructure nearby. Hell a lot barely have signs and just dump you into not much more than a back road.

Wait really? Via cameras?

So you think most people like the idea of a surveillance state automaticly enforcing it's every whim with perfect efficiency?

I'm pretty sure that's something pretty much universally disliked

The slippery slope is what makes this not okay. It's a completely unnecessary invasion of privacy in the guise of "safety".

I'd love to see some statistics showing that these things are anything other than an additional tax on the drivers. This is bad for everyone and it desensitizes you and opens the door to further surveillance I'm the future.

I am not okay with this. Seatbelt wearing is a private matter. Yes, I wear mine.

The HOV lane is supposed to look empty. If it was packed full of cars, carpooling wouldn't have any advantage because you wouldn't go any faster.

Not wearing a seatbelt reduces the security of others. If you want to throw it away, that's a different matter and should not be handled through seat belt laws.

Leaving traffic safety to human police, discretion often means racist biases and outcomes.

Doesn't it say that each image is sent to a human for review before any charges are laid? Might not be the case forever, but at least for now it's actually a human who ultimately decides whether or not to prosecute a driver.

Although completely reasonable, I fear that your conclusion is inaccessible for most folks.

And as a pedestrian, I'm all for a system that's capable of reducing distracted driving.

You have never had to dispute one of those tickets I assume.

Almost a decade ago I got one in the mail for a city that is about 9 hours away from my house. I am going thru the dispute process and being told repeatedly that "I am tired of people claiming that it wasn't them" with me suggesting that if their system worked they would most likely get fewer calls. Pure luck I noticed that the date is the exact date my daughter was born and thus the only way I could have been in that city is if I had somehow left my wife while she was in labor and managed to move my car 9 hours away. Once I pointed that out and that I could send them the birth certificate they gave up.

The problem with these systems is that they are trusted 100% and it becomes on the regular person to prove their innocence. Which is the exact opposite of what the relationship should be. If I get issued a ticket, it should be on the state to produce the evidence, not on me to get lucky.

Sounds like youd support precrime too. Stop licking boots

It's going to disproportionately target minorities. ML* isn't some wonderful impartial observer, it's subject to all the same biases as the people who made it. Whether the people at the end of the process are impartial or not barely matters either imo, they're going to get the biased results of the ML looking for criminals so it's still going to be a flawed system even if the human element is OK. Ffs please don't support this kind of dystopian shit, Idk how it's not completely obvious how horrifying this stuff is

*what people call AI is not intelligent at all. It uses machine learning, the same process as chatbots and autocorrect. AI is a buzzword used by tech bros who are desperate to "invest in the future"

I understand your pov but I feel it's misplaced. You are in public in a vehicle. You are in public on a side walk. The same laws that have been used to record police are the same being used here. You have no expectation of privacy in public and if you are seen or recorded breaking a law that is on you.

No they wouldn't. You are telling me you could stop someone on the motorway instantly. You think a stationary cop at ground level would be able to spot a phone held below the window and have the reaction times to intiate a persute?

What?

Yeah I understand this argument. In my mind there is no anonymity when driving, (and in my mind there shouldn't be) and the responsibility you have as a driver have that makes this permissible.

Companies will band together to force unpopular changes. They're already doing it with ridiculous pay-to-unlock-features-already-on-the-vehicle-through-software features.

I have an expectation of existing and having privacy because not everywhere is a camera. If you don't have that expectation anymore, then that's sad.

There is a huge difference between letting an AI check EVERY car ALL THE TIME, or police doing random checks on random roads. One is a privacy violation for some to find some people texting and driving and some people wearing no seatbelt, which then leads to more awareness of everyone about these issues. The other is treating all your citizens as potential "criminals" driving without seatbelt and texting and driving and therefore making it normal to violate everyones privacy.

A government that starts to treat all citizens like potential criminals all the time and put them on camera on every street and in their car and on public transport, in school and at work... is not a government that is on your side and wants to protect you, that's a prison guard.

Are parents letting kids play on motorways these days?

Would be nice if my privacy and road safety were related issues, but they are not.

It’s absolutely trivial to make a car that physically couldn’t exceed the speed limit, or would not start until the driver is secure, or the phone is stowed, or threat did not had multi level menus in touch screen nave.

instead they build infrastructure to have AI take and analyse photographs of us.

You need to give it a bit more thought.

I'm definitely a fan of better enforcement of traffic rules to improve safety, but using ML* systems here is fraught with issues. ML systems tend to learn the human biases that were present in their training data and continue to perpetuate them. I wouldn't be shocked if these traffic systems, for example, disproportionately impact some racial groups. And if the ML system identifies those groups more frequently, even if the human review were unbiased (unlikely), the outcome would still be biased.

It's important to see good data showing these systems are fair, before they are used in the wild. I wouldn't support a system doing this until I was confident it was unbiased.

• it's all machine learning - NOT artificial intelligence. No intelligence involved, just mathematical parameters "learned" by an algorithm and applied to new data.

They will tho. In the future. And because its a camera (black and white) there will be many false positives. And this is what the normal driver should fear. That the police just say yeah everything fineeeee and let the ai loose, this is just the first step into. I really doubt it would RELIABLY detect seat belt offenses.

I literally watched cops driving while on their phone everyday after it was made illegal. Nothing was done, Nothing changed, they hand out tickets while breaking the same rules. Might kill someone is a precrime, a issue with these tickets in this case is that without the AI camera nothing would have been seen. If someone crashes into anything while on their phone the chances it will be used in prosecution is low.

I don't think texting while driving is a good idea, like not wearing a seatbelt. However this is offloading a lot to AI, distracted driving is not well defined and considering the nuances I don't want to leave any part to AI. Here is an example: eating a bowl of soup while operating a vehicle would be distracted right? What if the soup was in a cup? What if the soup was made of coffee beans?

Who is the victim of not wearing a seatbelt?

Is it one of those 'you're not allowed to do things that only affect you because we're a society' type things where we should ban video games and sweet foods too?

It is a suggestion when the people enforcing it do not follow the suggestion. At least where I am the definition is so lose that driving falls under distracted driving. And it is a victimless crime up until someone crashes into another, but hey, we have laws that say that is a crime (reckless endangerment). Putting extra layers on this and expecting people to fight every wrongful ticket is not a good idea.