With Ford’s patent filed on autonomous, AI-powered police cruisers, some apparently believe the future looks brighter for bias-free policing. The logic goes that, since it’s a robot doing the police work, race and class won’t factor into who gets punished. But it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to see the inevitable future of autonomous cop cars cruising around neighborhoods. For one, the vehicle would most certainly be equipped with advanced facial recognition tech, and instantaneous access to a biometric database that it would also feed information into. Second, these drone vehicles wouldn’t replace cops at all, but merely be used as another weapon by them against us. In essence, each community would be given it’s own personal Surveillance State avatar, an automated, AI-powered snitch snooping around neighborhoods, gulping up images of people, their activities, etc.
Like I’ve said before, not just the protection of our liberty, but our continued existence as a species depends on the preservation of a sphere of privacy from our own government. The unrelenting push towards total surveillance is a push toward a point when we no longer have that ability.
