Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests we're discussing Artificial Intelligence, so-called AI, and police taking directions from AI and end up arresting the wrong person. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Civil Rights Lawyer that's  is thecivilrightslawyer.com, the article is titled: AI Software Tells Cops to Arrest the Wrong Guy. Quoting directly: "Imagine you go into a business and their AI surveillance camera thinks it recognizes you as a trespasser. So that business handcuffs you and calls the cop. The cops arrive. You show them your real ID. But they don't believe it. Instead they believe the AI. Crazy, right? This happened. On September 17th, 2023, the Peppermill Casino in Reno telephoned the Reno Police Department to report that a man we'll refer to by his initials - M.E., a trespasser, had unlawfully returned to the casino. The casino reported that their AI facial recognition software positively identified the man as M.E., a man they had barred from the casino months earlier for sleeping on the premises. But the Peppermill's AI software was wrong. They had the wrong guy." 

Yeah, this is one of my biggest issues with this whole notion of AI. AI, the whole term has just become ubiquitous and it's almost like a stand-in term for all sorts of other phenomena. One of the big things that Dave Collum, Professor Dave Collum, he is all over YouTube and Twitter and things, he has talked in many podcasts and things of this nature that AI at an economic level seems to be used as a smoke screen for those who, look if they are going to do layoffs anyway, they can say well we laid them off for AI because AI replaced them. That is kind of a narrative within sort of the various markets to basically put a positive spin on layoffs, is one way of looking at that. 

So there are issues with AI from that point of view with like how it's going to change the economy, but how it's going to change the society is what is just killing me. It's the same issues I have got with things like Zoom Court in the aftermath of so-called COVID. Because we don't go to actual Court for most things anymore, which I have a real problem with because especially in the American context when the framers of our Constitution presupposed due process, they weren't thinking about Zoom Courts, and in fact I think they would have a serious problem with Zoom Courts because it's really easy to write somebody a traffic ticket if all you know you have to do is be at your laptop on a given day and basically do a Zoom appearance to a Judge rather than have to actually show up as a Police Officer, have to actually show up in person, bear witness to the ticket if it is challenged, etc., etc. If it can be done on Zoom, you're going to be much more likely to write out that ticket even if it's maybe not warranted or maybe it's a minor infraction and you might not otherwise want to do that because it's not worth your time. Oh well now every infraction gets written up because of Zoom Court. AI is a problem too because Dave Collum also brings this up, it should not be viewed as the answer. When you punch something up in to Grok or Gemini or Chat GPT and it spits back an answer, that is then a place to start from, to start fact checking and to double check it's analysis to see if that is in fact correct. But more to the point, and one thing I kind of worry about is look, at the end of the day, innovation is spontaneous, it's emergent and this allowing AI to think in place of our own brains is not good even if it is used as a jumping off point for further research. There are millions, I don't know how many examples throughout history where one person who thought completely differently from the herd was right and actually had a better way of doing things or found some way to asymmetrically thwart their adversary, whatever. At the end of the day, what AI looks like to me is it is the ability to compute the collective zeitgeist; it's sort of like a machine that spits out conventional wisdom. It is not at the end of the day actual intelligence. It's artificial; it's in the name. It looks kind of like an intelligence; it has certain components that are similar to intelligence, but as with this situation, if you saw somebody that was a doppelganger for somebody else and you say, "hey that looks like so and so. Hey, let me see your ID. Oh that's not so and so, okay". That really should be the end of the analysis, but then now, "oh, well AI told me so; AI told me so." That's the thing that scares me is what happens when law enforcement starts just saying, "well the AI said." That's not good. That's not a good scenario where basically people are just checking out; it's sort of that scene, yeah, I'll do a thumbnail from the movie Idiocracy where the police in Idiocracy arrest this guy and they don't even know what they are arresting him for. They just keep repeating like a script, "you're a particular individual in jail", like they just keep saying "particular individual, we're arresting a "particular individual". They are just sort of their operating at the behest of these computer systems. Idiocracy was an incredibly prescient film, and it predicted a future that I don't think any of us thought was going to be a real thing when we first saw that movie years ago. And I think none of us wanted it to be prophecy, let alone did we think it's seriously could happen, but we have gotten close, and allowing AI to this level in law enforcement, could be very, very problematic. So it's something to think about. 

That being said, we'll certainly be keeping folks updated on this channel as the situation evolves.