Something entirely new to worry about: automated, AI-powered police cars

So Ford has apparently filed a patent for an automated police car, giving privacy and civil liberties advocates something entirely new to oppose.

The patent, first spotted by Motor1, describes an autonomous police vehicle that would be able to detect infractions performed by another vehicle, either on its own or in conjunction with surveillance cameras and/or road-side sensors.

The AI-powered police car could then remotely issue citations or pursue the vehicle. Or (and this is where it gets really creepy), “the method may further involve the processor remotely executing one or more actions with respect to the first vehicle,” according to the patent.

In other words, the autonomous police car could wirelessly connect to the original car to communicate with the passenger, verify identity, and issue a citation.

In fact, Ford’s patent filing describes a machine learning algorithm that would be able to determine whether or not a vehicle breaking the law warrants a warning as opposed to a citation, and relay that decision to the driver.”

Image result for robocop ed 209

 

I suppose that with the rise of the driverless car, this situation would be inevitable.  Now the specter of a driverless police car cruising around, analyzing its surroundings by means of a “machine learning algorithm”, and making its own decisions.

At what point in time will Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics need to be rolled out?

01/27/18 Overnight links

Government surveillance drove Hemingway to kill himself

AS an example of the effect that persistent, total government surveillance has on an individual, look to what likely drove Ernest Hemingway to commit suicide: continuous surveillance by government agents. 

The FBI monitored Hemingway continuously from the 1940s until his suicide in 1961, ostensibly based on his ties to Cuba.  There’s a story of a distraught Hemingway sitting in a restaurant with his wife.  When she asked what was wrong, he responded with, “Those two FBI agents at the bar, that’s what’s wrong.”

This happens to journalists all the time.  Low-level harassment, the purpose being nothing more than breaking the spirit of the target.

Barrett Brown is a more recent example of the psychological effect that the harassment of journalists by armed government agents has.

And there’s the strange death of journalist Michael Hastings, whose car inexplicably accelerated before crashing in a ball of fire.

Wikileaks later released CIA documents revealing that smart cars can be remotely hacked, and that doing so would be a wonderful way to off someone they deemed needed it.

“Beware then, that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster, and when you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.” -Nietzche

Tracking the progress of the Surveillance State

In response to a reader email, yes, I read these links.  And as to why I don’t post them Instapundit-style but rather in globs of ten or so, well, it’s because I use the research that I do as well.  It’s easier to scroll back through the blog to find stories when they’re bunched up in one post, as opposed to scattered to the digital winds.  The aim of this site is to be a resource for those who are serious about ending total surveillance, restoring a civilized level of privacy protections for citizens of this country.  When the construction of the Surveillance State here is complete, we will have nowhere to hide from our government.

This has grave implications for our ability to engage in dissent and protest against the crimes of our governments.  What’s more, it will have dire implications for journalism.  Journalists will be tracked and surveiled at a far higher rate than the rest of us.  Passive, pervasive harassment of journalists has the ability to stifle the search for truth, information all of us depend on for an accurate view of what our government is up to.

Governments of the world murdered 252 million unarmed civilians during the twentieth century, not because they suddenly became more cruel, but because they have the means.  Advances in technology and industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century gave humankind the ability to wage war on a global scale. So we did.  It gave governments the means also to mass murder their own citizens.  So they did.

To say it can’t happen again is the height of naivete. The chief lesson of history is that governments murder and enslave.  That is not hyperbole, it is fact.  The Surveillance State will empower governments to do far more.  Do I think that mass murder is on the horizon any time soon?  I don’t.  What I believe this surveillance infrastructure will be used for is incremental enslavement, the boxing in of citizens, who aren’t aware of the prison being built around them until they try to escape.  It will by then be too late.  This is why privacy should be enshrined into law on an equal plane with that of free speech.  Our data is ours, our lives are our own.

I also post fun science-y stories.

01/26/18 Morning links

01/26/18 Overnight links

01/25/18 Overnight links

The specter of automated censorship

Since its inception, the free and open internet has completely devastated the Gatekeepers of information.

Before the development and rapid evolution of the world wide web, the information we received about the state of the world, our leaders and their activities, were taken at face value.  There was no way to verify the facts, weight alternative opinions or that of the rest of the consumers of the news.  Whatever was given, either by radio, television, or newspaper, was taken.  There was no alternative.

Fast forward to the present.  A seemingly endless array of news and opinion sites pepper the web, giving the reader virtually unlimited choices on what to read.  Anyone can start a blog for free.  Freedom of the press has come to mean something revolutionary, a revolution greater than that inaugurated by Gutenberg.  And with the news now comes another glory of the internet era: the comments section.  Here is where the reader can eviscerate Establishment shills, and endlessly debate fellow readers.  No where in the history of civilization has this been possible.  It becomes almost impossible to overstate the revolution that the internet embodies.

The internet finally wrested control of information away from the Establishment and placed it into the hands of the deplorables. Not Trump’s deplorables, but rather what the Elites surely refer to everyone of us as, the taxpayers, those with normal jobs and normal lives, those without political leverage or hidden power, those who make the world that they control, turn.  They have never forgiven us for our use of the internet, and the short work it has made of their designs for our world.  And they’ve worked night and day to find ways of taking the internet away from us.  Of course, just shutting it down would be to overt.  They know that for their plan to be effective, it must be indirect to the point of invisibility.  Whether it be herding us into what Matt Drudge dubbed ‘internet ghettos’, such as Facebook and Twitter, where content can be controlled, the plan must not appear as a plan at all.

And now we have Julian Assange recently warning us of the greatest threat to open discourse online, that of the use of artificial intelligence as a tool of internet censorship. From his Twitter he wrote on January 17th:

A nexus point is being reached, with total surveillance removing our ability to hide from our governments, and artificial intelligence silently reclaiming control over the flow of information online merging, with propaganda immaculately embedded within the flow.

The most perfect prison is one that we don’t realize is there at all.

Oklahoma City and Norman-area have one of nation’s highest chromium-6 levels in public water supplies

Good god. Apparently the ‘Erin Brockovich’ carcinogen is still floating around in the water we drink and clean ourselves with, threatening our health and that of those around us.

Image result for hexavalent chromium

The cancer-causing industrial chemical, hexavalent chromium, is a popular industrial compound, now finding a second life in our groundwater and our bodies.  According to the interactive map, Cleveland and Oklahoma counties have some of the highest concentrations of the chemical in their public water supplies.  Moral of the story: drink Fiji?

h/t Catarina

0/24/18 Overnight links