Daily Archives: 5 April 2018

AI Surveillance

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Police forces around the nation are on the verge of getting Artificial Intelligence assistance in identifying folks of interest to them in real time on our cities’ streets.  The image below and its caption illustrate the thing.

I’m all for assisting the police, especially regarding the subject of that cynically tear-jerking caption.  But this sort of thing needs to be looked at with a very jaundiced eye.  It isn’t too far away from what the People’s Republic of China already is doing in terms of routine surveillance and tracking of everyone.

It’s not that everything the PRC does is bad, but some things are inherently dangerous, no matter who developed them or uses them extensively.  This sort of technology can very easily become a direct assault on our ability to be anonymous in public spaces.

TaeWoo Kim, chief scientist at One Smart Labs, a New York-based startup that is working on such software, said the technology is “creepy and a bit Big Brother-y,” but said it is “purely intended to fight crime, terrorism and track wanted subjects.”

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Governments can’t be trusted with such capabilities, and we don’t even need to invoke nefarious intent or “Big Brother-y” conspiracies to see that. Governments will end up misusing, even abusing, this sort of thing just in the ordinary outcome of normal bureaucratic imperatives to justify the bureaucrat’s and his bureaucracy’s existence, to grow, to expand the bureaucracy’s power and budget.

William Bratton, the former commissioner of the NYPD, says that the public was similarly worried about DNA testing when the technology first emerged. The technology has been credited in freeing wrongfully convicted people from prison.

This is a false analogy, though.  DNA testing isn’t used for routine, real-time surveillance of the population or even of small groups or of individuals, and current technology doesn’t allow such use.  AI-based image surveillance technology lends itself to exactly that real-time watching.

Standards and Markets

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The EPA has decided to revisit, revise, and lower fuel efficiency standards for cars sold in the US for the model years 2022-2025.  The Obama administration EPA had mandated that overall fleet fuel efficiency—averaged across all models of cars built by a manufacturer—be raised to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 from 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016.  This would have represented a greater than 50% increase in fuel efficiency in just 10 short years.

Environmentalists are up in arms over the move.  Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund President:

Designing and building cleaner, more cost-efficient cars is what helped automakers bounce back from the depths of the recession and will be key to America’s global competitiveness in the years ahead.

And Jon Foley, California Academy of Sciences Executive Director, tweeted

This move wastes energy, and makes more dependent on foreign oil.

Both misunderstand.  Krupp is right that building better cars helped automakers recover from the Panic of 2008, but he missed two Critical Items.  One is that American automakers, pre-Panic, were churning out junk and losing market share to better manufacturers.  When they stopped building junk, they got competitive again.

That brings me to the second Critical Item.  It was free market competitive forces—and the Panic to drive that home—that enabled the American automakers, building better cars, to get back into the game.  It was free market competition, in response to changing consumer demands, that pushed automakers to build more reliable, more fuel efficient cars (and trucks), with competition moving to hold prices down.

Neither of those had, or have, anything to do with government mandates.

Foley just seems to have not been paying attention over the last few years.  New technologies for locating oil and gas and for extracting those have lowered the cost of oil and gas for a whole host of uses, including car and truck fuel, and those technologies have led the US to be a larger producer of oil and gas than any other nation, save Russia—and we expect to surpass Russia in a couple of years.  There’s not much dependence on foreign oil here.

Oh, and one last thing.  The cost of buying a car won’t be so great now that manufacturers don’t have to waste capital on crash courses in engine development and can instead move at the pace of market competition.

Now, if only we could get rid of the ethanol mandate, too, so car maintenance and food costs could be reduced.