Post #4377185

John Oliver just did a great piece on police surveillance. You know, I love machine learning as a technology. It's a really fascinating, useful tool. But I hate how so many people treat it as magically reliable. That's just foolish. Modern computer vision often achieves 90+% accuracy in ideal conditions, and... that's pretty mediocre, actually! It's good as a first pass filter, or a "good enough" solution to something low stakes, but it's absolutely insane to me that this shit is sometimes used to send in a swat team. AI isn't magic and it isn't reliable. But it's a great excuse to stop thinking, and to double down on the bias and injustice that went into the training data. See also The AI Con, which is a fantastic book on the subject. #ai #surveillance