Majority Report
Crime Prediction Software Is Here and It’s A Very Bad Idea
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[T]he Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice will use analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents, putting potential offenders under specific prevention and education programs. Goodbye, human rights!
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Why does the state have to assume that criminal behavior is a given?
Uh, maybe because crime happens with statistic regularity in every large nation, and there’s no remotely sane reason to think that it’s suddenly going to stop happening tomorrow?
The fact is that, even if the software was 99.99% accurate, there will be always an innocent person who will be fucked.
So under the current system, far less than 1 in every 10,000 convicted felons is actually innocent? And under the current system, a sociopath’s initial victims (prior to his being caught) aren’t “fucked?” If they’re not fucked, what are they — noble sacricificial lambs so we can avoid predictive crime prevention at any cost, and stick to the status quo forever? Diaz either isn’t thinking this through, or he just doesn’t give a crap.
And that is exactly why we have something called due process and the presumption of innocence. That’s why those things are not only in the United States Constitution, but in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights too.
Universal what?? OK, you lost me there, big time. You aren’t even attempting to demonstrate the correctness of argument X when you declare some sort of Universal Doctrine of Correctness of Argument X. We have a name for that mode of persuasion. It’s called “dogma.” Ever heard of it?
While everything may seem driven by the desire to achieve better security, one single false positive would make the whole system unfair.
Well, I can’t say you didn’t make your position perfectly clear. (Clearly insane, but clear.)
But one thing is clear: No matter how you look at it, cataloguing people — any kind of people — based on statistical predictive software, and then taking pre-empetive actions against them based on the results, is the wrong way to improve our society. Agreeing with this course of action will inevitably take us into a potentially fatal path.
Hmmm. Maybe I should take back that “perfectly clear.” But I’ll leave the “insane” and “dogma.”
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