.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

The Body Hackers.

Neil Harbisson. (Wiki.)






by Louis Shalako



In the future, will all babies have an identifying chip implanted at birth?

“It’s already been done, as long ago as 1998, by what are described as ‘hobbyists.’ The first reported experiment with an RFID implant was carried out in 1998 by the British scientist Kevin Warwick. As a test, his implant was used to open doors, switch on lights, and cause verbal output within a building." 

"The implant has since been held in the Science Museum (London). Since that time, several additional hobbyists have placed RFID microchip implants into their hands or had them placed there by others. Amal Graafstra, author of the book "RFID Toys," asked doctors to place implants in his hands. A cosmetic surgeon used a scalpel to place a microchip in his left hand, and his family doctor injected a chip into his right hand using a veterinary Avid injector kit. Graafstra uses the implants to open his home and car doors and to log on to his computer. Mikey Sklar had a chip implanted into his left hand and filmed the procedure. He has done a number of media and personal interviews about his experience of being microchipped.” (Wiki.)

***

What about Vernor Vinge’s story, Rainbow’s End, where people used contact lenses and glasses to overlay new, augmented realities on the real world around them? And what happens when they are no longer accessories, but installed or built-in to human beings?

“Pre-Google Glass, a Canadian professor had a pair of computerized glasses ‘permanently’ attached to his skull. When another person insisted he remove the glasses and then tried to rip them off his face, trans-humanist enthusiasts called it "the first hate crime against cyborgs."

But now we do have Google Glass. Now we can wire our enhanced spectacles, our satellite navigations systems, our Wikipedia, right into our heads. We could have night-vision, or watch our kids walking home from school from thousands of miles away.

‘Body hackers’ are already among us. They’re making the experiments in the classic Frankenstein sense, right in their own basements. Who knows where all this will lead, but with a chip implanted in your head, projecting text, images and sound directly into the brain, will mean that in the future you will be able to access all of human knowledge via Wifi, anytime you want it.

It seems only a matter of time before aficionados will use the same technology that will cure deafness in some folks, in order to implant ‘headphones’ in their ears. The technology used to cure blindness will be used in other, mass-market products.

Human beings (the more affluent ones) will be, like Steve Austin, ‘bionic people,’ and while the ability to leap a  tall building at a single bound captures the imagination, it is the intellectual and even just the entertainment fields that are probably more relevant in normal daily life.

All of this will come to pass, for when has humanity ever passed up a good thing? Simple eyeglasses change our perception. We have come to accept false teeth, implanted teeth, hair transplants and mechanical heart transplants. We have come not to accept breast implants, which would have been a wonderful thing for women who had gone through a mastectomy, purely on grounds of self-esteem and psychological recovery from traumatic cancer surgery, but to demand them as our right in the case of less than well-endowed and very young women.

It is aspirational in the sense that some think it will help in their careers—actresses, models, porn stars yes, and of course there is that unspoken need to attract suitable mates and the unwritten laws that go along with it.

They have become status symbols in a way that the artificial hip has not.

***

I’m old school, I like typing away on my physical, plastic, electronic keyboard. I don’t mind it, I’ve gotten used to it, and it’s a hell of a lot easier than the old cast-iron framed typewriters.

But we’re already seeing people walking down the street ‘swiping’ at their phones.* The person sitting in a coffee shop, head wired for sound and tapping away on an invisible keyboard while they write their magnum opus, one visible only to them, might not be too far away.

The guy sitting at the back of the room with his own system, trying to hack into their heads for the sheer hellery of it, isn’t too far away either. New gifts bring new dangers.

Business executives might want to have a quick look around inside other business executive’s heads before signing any contracts, just to see what sort of people they are dealing with.

There will be locks, and blocks, and hackers trying to get inside of your head and probably trying to make you do things you might not have done otherwise.

Why risk your own valuable skin to rob a bank if you can just find some other physically-fit specimen to do it for you? Someone you can trust, because you control what goes on inside of their head and can make their legs move even when they would prefer not to like some cyborg cockroach.

***

Convicted felons out on parole might be implanted with a chip.

If they strayed from home during prohibited hours, law enforcement could track and monitor their movements. If everyone in the world was chipped, there would essentially be no unsolved murders, (that’s the theory) but any crime fiction writer could beat that—a killer simply cuts his hand open and leaves the chip at home on the bedside table while he goes out and does the dirty deed.

A surgeon in some rogue state cuts it out of your head and off you go to do your crime. When you come back, he has already filled in the blank time period with typical touristy stuff and he then re-implants it.

It will soon be illegal not to have a chip, and all sorts of detectors at airports would not just scan for metal, but for the embedded chip. A chip-less person would be suspicious in the extreme.

With chips embedded, employers would always be able to track employees. Such chips are relatively cheap. 
You can hardly buy anything worth more than about twenty bucks at a big-box department store without a chip somewhere in the packaging, and alarms will sound if you attempt to walk off without paying. In an environment where they now have self-serve checkouts, retailers see this as necessary, even desirable for just-in-time production and shipping, stock control, and tracking our buying habits, all of which demand streams and reams of data on a moment by moment basis. It hinders, but does not prevent shop-lifting because thieves learn quickly and know how to remove a chip before leaving the store.

A recurrent theme in the works of science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer involves uploaded consciousness. 

In Mindscan, a man with a fatal condition uploads his consciousness into a newer, healthier version of himself.

If consciousness could be uploaded, presumably it could also be downloaded.

So what about a downloaded consciousness? In the future, as a form of augmented reality, for a small fee, a person might be able to go to iTunes and download somebody else’s conscious experiences.

You could be Lady Gaga for an hour or so. It would only cost $0.99 after all, and you would know exactly how it feels to be onstage as her. You would be Lady Gaga, or Ryan Seacrest, or any celebrity who has such programming available.

In the case of Lady Gaga, you would get to sing a hit song and be somebody else for a while—someone who could actually sing, and a longer program might involve her experiences in longer form.

You might arrive at a concert venue, meet with adoring fans backstage, sit through the makeup session, choose the wardrobe, and then go out on stage and perform the entire show as if that was really you and not her. You would feel all of her physical sensations, and the love of her audience.

The boys might prefer James Bond or even a porn star like Johnny ‘The Wad’ Holmes.

It wouldn’t be long before purely artificial experiences become commonplace. The creator opf the work would own all rights and cut out the celebrity middlemen.

Sports stars, football players, will also be big revenue earners in this scenario.

It’s a lot better than our own boring little lives, isn’t it?

Be anyone you want to be.

The process, once the technology is in place, would be a fairly simple one. Lady Gaga would have her own chip, and it would simply record all of her perceptions during a concert tour. The data would be downloaded out of her mind, and stored on a hard-drive for later.

With some editing for time, and suitable bridges between scenes—the term ‘commercial breaks’ quickly comes to mind—what you end up with is just another entertainment product.

It’s not the most noble endeavour, but it would certainly generate revenues, and for some that will always be enough justification.

It could also become a teaching and learning tool—anything is possible, and so far the limits of the new technology are still obscure.

***

“From locating lost children to keeping financial data and medical records handy, people are about to see a surge in data chip implants. Able to transmit and store data, chips will soon enable people to verify their identities, see if their children have traversed the boundaries (or ‘hopped the geo-fences’) set for them, give paramedics and doctors immediate access to their medical records, allow people to go wallet-free as they pay for groceries via a hand-swipe, or even store educational and employment data for a job interview. But what if the police can use it to track how fast someone is driving or monitor a person’s whereabouts? Can these implants become a mandatory form of ID? How do people protect their privacy from hackers? Can this data be sold to law enforcement or other companies? Does the good outweigh the bad?” (Laboratory Equipment.)

***

Now that we have the ability to map the brain, to detect, observe and identify brain-wave patterns, and with the whole world wired up with a chip in their heads, it would eventually be possible to know what every citizen was thinking at a given time. It would all be wireless and monitored by artificial intelligences working in real-time.

From there, it is a short step to the embedded Taser in the chest module and a long list of infractions, real and imaginary in the case of authoritarian or even just overly conservative governments.

Think the wrong thought and zap! You’ve been busted and punished all in one fell swoop in a scene reminiscent of an early Star Trek episode.

Hell is a little bit further down that road, but not too far. Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, there is a very good chance that we will get there eventually.

That’s why the time for debate is now.


END

*Such people will quickly find themselves waking up in the middle of the night and their hands are just swiping away in some subconscious locomotor patterns, which are very strong and become quickly ingrained.

Years ago, I set up a video camera at one end of the room and then went back to working on a book. It was amazing how often I reached for a smoke, a lighter, a handful of potato chips, a drink, or the ashtray, and that hand-to-mouth pattern became really distinct on fast forward. It was quite sobering.

One reason it’s so hard to quit smoking: “What am I supposed to do with my hands?”

It’s also one reason why so many people gain weight when they quit smoking. They keep wanting to stick something in their mouth.

Another good question: what deeply-rooted human need or desire is that major locomotion pattern attempting to feed without my even being conscious of it?

It’s not necessarily just about food or drink, the very real and understandable needs of the body.

The mind and the psyche are involved too.

Retailers will take advantage of all this, I have no doubt of that. Retailers in a consumer society have always known about human insecurities, hence tooth-whitening, breast implants, high-end cars and all the usual cosmetic and prosthetic devices and products we buy on a daily basis.

Okay, now I’m done.

***


Here is my new collection of short stories, Dark Satires. Thanks for having a look.

Friday, December 13, 2013

Superhuman: Building a Better Brain.

Dwayne Reed. (Wiki.)



by Louis Shalako



Neuro-enhancement or ‘building a better brain’ has been around for some time.

Research is ongoing, and like much of high-tech R & D, it’s geared to marketable products, as well as military and more purely medical applications.

Just as the Apollo Program gave us microwave ovens and dehydrated juice crystals, there will be mainstream spin-offs from top-secret military research.

In a soldier, the obvious goal is to give someone a better brain and a better gun, making them more efficient killing machines on the battlefield and more easily managed in times of non-conflict. I use that term because the world has never been, not even for one moment, entirely at peace and probably never will be.*

One of the great ethical dilemmas of neuro-enhancement, is that it will always be first and foremost military, and it will always be a privileged elite who has first access to it.

I would like to break that lock.

If you are willing to spend billions or trillions of dollars to make a smarter soldier, or if every politician with ambition is desperately trying to make himself smarter and his followers more obedient and yet more capable, how come this technology can’t be used to uplift the common man?

If professional athletes, financiers, industrialists can use it simply to make more money, what about poor people?

If the human race was a bit smarter, would we be able to avoid situations of conflict, or would we just be making things worse in that the more exploitive, the more inventive of society will just find new ways to grab for that symbolic brass ring?

Could we even do that impartially, and in an ethical manner, still respecting the right of self-determination, not just for peoples but individuals?

What if representatives of the state came to a clearly impoverished group, and told them, ‘We want to help your children better integrate into society? With important social and economic benefits?”

Isn’t that a little patronizing? And at the same time, it promises much. In a society that only needs or can tolerate so many millionaires, and there are only so many exciting and interesting and high-paying jobs to go around, where is the need? The real need, in the opinion of some, is a docile, unskilled population available to exploit for commercial and political purposes.

How come kids born into extreme poverty can’t be enhanced in some way to help them get a good education? What if it would help them to avoid  unfortunate behaviours that disrupt their education and their early employment years when work and life habits are being formed?

There would be more than one side on that debate, and probably more than two sides.

***

Apparently hooking a nine-volt battery up to your head can enhance performance while playing video games.

Pardon my little joke, but that one seems like a no-brainer.

Your brain runs on electrical impulses, and a little more juice in the system just helps to overcome the natural resistance of the circuit, in simple electronic terms. Our bodies have electrolytes. Sports drinks can often help to balance electrolytes. It’s in their advertising.. Sport at the higher levels involves certain types of brain activity as well as physical prowess.

One might think that upping the electrolytic values at the same time as the current might enhance brain activity even more, especially if it’s high-paced activity demanding a lot of quick decisions and mental flexibility. A person in the same experiment being asked to sit on a hard chair and stare at a blank wall might have more trouble ‘focusing’ whereas the person playing war games might find they need all the help they can get—even if they’re ‘just sitting in a chair’ as well.

Going back to the electrolytes, athletes and professional sportsmen can benefit from neuro-enhancement. 

Neuro-enhancement can help in precision locomotor training. It can help an athlete throw a javelin more precisely. It can help a boxer have better control over his punches. It can help a quarterback quickly and accurately read a field and then make the perfectly-controlled throw and put it just where it needs to be, because his throwing arm is hooked up in a constant feedback loop between muscle and brain, eyes and ears.

There is a famous story of a pilot, Major James Nesmeth, who spent seven years in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Much of that was in solitary confinement, surely one of the least stimulating environments a person can experience.  (That’s why it is an ‘enhanced form of punishment,’ over and above simple incarceration.)

He kept his sanity by playing golf in his head. He played a course he remembered well. He played eighteen holes twice a day, and after a time, he was even varying the wind and the weather, trying out different clubs on different shots…the whole schlemiel.

It was a process of visualization, and when he was released, they say he was a pretty good golfer. He was much-improved by all that practice play in his head.

He was better than he was before. It also helped him to survive seven years in a prison camp.

With a little neuro-enhancement, it’s possible the results might have been even greater. At the time he was under great stress and suffered from poor nourishment and minimal health care, with minimal recreation facilities.

Security forces might become ‘smarter,’ but then some of those security forces belong to rogue nations and groups with agendas of their own. Won’t the terrorists just get smarter too?

“When the smart pills start to look like dead flies, you’re halfway to a cure.” – old joke.

‘Smart pills’ – stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall - are now old tech. Non-invasive brain stimulation techniques, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) that uses the principles of electromagnetic induction to focus currents in the brain, are now commercially available for non-medical improvement (such as memory and cognition boosting). Brain stimulation devices are most commonly used in treatment for various neurological and behavioral conditions, but the same technology can be used to enhance the human brain beyond its natural abilities. So far, research shows these techniques to be low-risk. A company called Foc.us is currently selling a trans-cranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) headset designed “to increase the plasticity of your brain,” making “synapses fire faster” so customers can improve their gaming skills.Neuro-stimulation can be used to boost motor function, improve memory, and even modify behavior. But should it? And at what point do we cross the line? Do we have a responsibility to be the best humans we can be? – Reilly Center, Notre Dame University.

***

How would you feel if one school in your district announced that there was an experimental program of neuro-enhancement and yet that was only one out of twenty elementary schools in the district.

What if that was a school in the more affluent part of town and you weren’t all that well-off?

Wouldn’t you resent it? What about your kids? You’ve struggled along with a high-school education, earning in the lower end of the spectrum and your biggest dream is for your kids to escape the cycle of poverty and get a really good education and get out? Just get out?

It wouldn’t seem very fair, would it?

Yet at the same time, if the program was in your school, those other parents would scream, and some of it would be pretty ugly—in their eyes, poverty breeds crime and your kids are just destined to go to jail anyways, so why waste the money on them? It’s better spent elsewhere in their opinion.

A program like that is still some ways off. There are other, non-invasive, non-chemical, non-electrical or magnetic brain enhancement techniques.

One involves shutting off the TV and reading a book! Another no-brainer, ladies and gentlemen.

But the books you choose for your kids make a difference as well. While fiction can expand the imagination, a rather intangible thing and hard to define, non-fiction such as history or even good-old how-to books, say ‘Personal Finance for Dummies’ could make a big difference in their lives a few years down the road.

I think we’ve all seen advertisements for memory enhancing games, drugs, apothecary substances.

Another thing that’s good for your brain: oxygen. Sounds simple, but it’s true.

Bearing in mind the electro-chemical nature of the brain, everything in there is a chemical reaction—that reaction runs on oxygen.

It’s a kind of internal combustion.

***

Change your Brain. Dr. Gregory Amen. If you’ve seen him on PBS, then you know all about his work.

A really interesting guy, and well worth a listen.

Working Memory Training. (Wiki.) Check out people’s claims, talk to someone else who has been through a program. You don’t have to sign yourself or your kid up to the first one that comes along.

Think and Grow Rich. Napoleon Hill. The obvious thought when we see a rich guy is that he must be smarter than us, and in some ways he is. His knowledge, an important part of brain power, is specialized to a given task, such as making money.

Analytical thinking. Understand cause-and-effect relationships. This holds true in our personal lives just as much as it does in math, or physics, or chemistry.

For a writer, cause and effect is the basis of plotting a story. If Party A does this, how does it affect Party B? 

What does Party B do in consequence, and how does this affect what Party A does next, or how does this advance the goals of Party A?


END

* There are several wars going on right now in the world, and there are always tensions.
Presently China and South Korea are mutually bristling over a ‘strategic reef’ in international waters—or what would be international waters if one can get their ‘rightful claim’ recognized by all parties.

Any rock sticking up from the ocean floor, if it can be successfully claimed by a state or power, immediately confers sovereignty, and it commands a 200-mile economic zone, in a radius around aforesaid rock or reef.

The benefits to a successful claimant are obvious in an increasingly resource-starved world. This includes minerals, oil and gas under the surface, fishing rights, and the right to enforce all the laws and strictures of the sovereign nation.

Simply put, there is money, power and prestige involved. The average person in the street in either country probably doesn’t give a tinker’s damn for some rock in the ocean, but they do care about their own family, their job, and their economic status. The media can be used to whip up public opinion, and no doubt this is a contentious issue for both parties.

***

Reading both requires and enhances analytical thinking, and writing even more so. In a few short years my own thinking has become much more lucid, much clearer, and yet first thing in the morning--when the old electrolytes are low--it's like I can't even remember my password. 

Even my vision is blurry in the morning.

It seems to clear up after a while and I really get going.

(If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich? -- ed.)

That, is a very good question!

***

Thursday, December 12, 2013

The Thought Police.


Courtesy C.I.A.
















by Louis Shalako





Thought police may not be too far off into the future, and oddly, time-cops as well. Read the following passage very carefully and you’ll see they use the term ‘future crime.’

(Cops are already solving crimes long in the past. They do it in the present moment, not by time-travel.)

“The National Institute of Justice defines predictive policing as ‘taking data from disparate sources, analyzing them and then using the results to anticipate, prevent and respond more effectively to future crime.’ Some of these disparate sources include crime maps, traffic camera data, other surveillance footage and social media network analysis. But at what point does the possibility of a crime require intervention? Should someone be punished for a crime they are likely to commit, based on these sources? Are police required to inform potential victims?* How far in advance can crimes be forecasted?”

They also mention ‘social media network analysis.’ (See: intelligence-gathering network.)

Preventive policing sort of ignores any presumption of privacy on the part of the individual.

There are those who will say, “Well, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.”

Let’s extend that.

“If you aren’t thinking anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about…”

This is the door the thought police come in, isn’t it? They might even kick it in.

The right to privacy of our own thoughts is now open to question.

The future is already here, for we have had instances of crime prevention when cops get a tip that someone is threatening someone through the use of social media. If an arrest is made, a future crime may well have been prevented.

But in the broader sense of the article preventive policing takes a lot of numbers from a lot of places.

It assigns weights or values to each factor that goes into any person’s make-up at any given time.

Over the course of our life, our circumstances change, and so would our ‘personal algorithm.’

The risk factors change, and at some point in our life we may have reached a low point. This can be measured against a previous high point, a threshold of danger or risk may be reached, and a little bell goes off down at police headquarters.

If our subject, a guy called Edwin, living in Lincoln, Nebraska, has a personal algorithm, one based on all the data that can be gathered from monitoring his social interactions, using biometric recognitions and mood analyses from gas station security cameras, from his shopping habits, from recognizing his license plate at stop-light intersections, from semantic analyses of his postings on Facebook, by key-word recognition, the thought police might very easily determine that Edwin is ‘at risk’ to offend against the municipal, state, or federal laws.

Every little thing Edwin says is being taken down so that it can be used against him, but the cops are just doing their jobs, right?

They may determine on an intervention. They may wish to prevent him from assaulting his ex-girlfriend, or from committing suicide, or robbing a bank or starting up a meth lab or violating any other recognizable statute.

What if Edwin has a history of alcoholism and the cops are notified that he just bought and insured a vehicle? 

Maybe he’s been seen at a gas station, not too far from the liquor store?

Maybe they should put a car nearby and take a look at Edwin?

A lot of nice, well-meaning, thoughtful people would even applaud that. They might stop Edwin from going head-on into a minivan with a mother and four children in it later that night.

Sounds like a good idea, right?

Unfortunately, he hasn’t actually done anything yet. He’s merely ‘at risk’ and arguably others are at risk from Edwin—in the future. Maybe. Maybe even most likely.

The legislation which enables preventive policing has carefully written clauses regarding how an offender poses a ‘public or private menace,’ or whatever.

What are you going to do with Edwin?

Are you going to sentence him to thirty days in the county bucket?

Are you going to stick him in with other offenders of a more serious nature? Is his cell-mate a member of a drug-running bike gang? Is he a thief, a con-artist, does he grow dope, does he run illegal aliens over the border?

Edwin will be exposed to more criminality. Jail has been called a university of crime.

Will you take Edwin to the hospital for a period of observation?

Will a court order him to attend to a psychiatric or other program, one designed to help at-risk future offenders to work through their issues and move on with their lives in a more positive direction?

How are you going to pay for all of that?

And how is Edwin going to like being grabbed, losing his job, consequently losing his home, and ending up on the street because someone decided that he was a risk? Even though he never actually did anything? 

Except be an alcoholic, buy a car and get some gas, bearing in mind that he’s upset with his ex-girlfriend?

If he gets desperate enough, out there on the street, he might just remember that he had a cell-mate that promised to set him onto something good, some easy money kind of operation and Edwin might not have much going for him to begin with, and so he might just look his new friend up.

What’s really terrifying is the combination of privatized prisons, shrinking state budgets, the need to keep all those beds filled in a private jail to keep profits flowing to shareholders, and there have already been abuses.

Throw mandatory-sentencing legislation into the mix and some robot guards, and you have a potent brew.

That’s because we have different levels of crime, and therefore we must have different levels of future crime. 

The corollary of this would be different levels of punishment.

The lowest level is simple larceny—and stealing someone’s lawn mower is somehow seen as less serious when compared to sticking up a gas station attendant with a shot-gun in his face and running off with the proceeds.

Higher levels of crime (and punishment) involve assault, murder, and there is the whole range of crime from prostitution, domestic abuse, kidnapping, extortion, counterfeiting. The whole list.

Here’s where Edwin’s personal algorithm comes into play again.

If Edwin’s prior history includes assault, and maybe he got picked up with a weapon when he was prohibited from owning one, maybe he’s been convicted once or twice for little things, then the charge of the possible future crime he is being accused of being potentially able of maybe committing someday becomes more serious.

A conviction, would lead to a more serious sentence, wouldn’t it, or at least shouldn’t it? By any rational measure…?

And a simple psychiatric intervention would involve a longer period of observation, wouldn’t it, if the signs were serious enough, and if the risk to some other person was considered great enough, and if Edwin under further examination did not prove amenable to suggestion or did not sort of give all the right answers.

Who is going to pay for all the extra beds in local hospitals? Or special wards in local jails?

The goal of predictive policing is of course to prevent Columbine-style massacres and terrorist attacks, but it involves monitoring and profiling an entire population of individuals at all times.

Where do you set the filter? In other words, when do you cut it off as not serious enough and just ignore it?

And wouldn’t that cut-off itself be abused, in a particularly bigoted jurisdiction, to take all the wrong sort of people off the street, so nice people could ‘feel safe’ in their own neighbourhoods, or maybe to take one racial group off the streets so they would no longer compete for unskilled jobs with poor folks of the dominant race?

That’s already being done now, isn’t it, in some jurisdictions?

In my opinion the best cops have no hate in them, no bigotry, no prejudice. But there’s nothing to stop a bigot from joining the force and working his way up in it.

There's nothing to stop a bigot from running for sheriff or being elected governor, or even president.

No one has ever successfully managed to legislate for enlightenment, but then, no one has ever successfully legislated against prejudice and bigotry.

***

Preventive policing might even work, in that you would get arrests, and in the case of would-be terrorists, you might even find a truckload of explosive all ready to go, and a group or individual all set to carry out some plan.

In that sense, it would have been a success. That success would get high praise in the media.

Google has launched semantic search,** and I just read Facebook*** is doing heavy research into artificial intelligence, using the vast quantities of data they have gathered from us, quite frankly.

Semantics is the analysis of meaning. Artificial intelligence would use semantics to determine meaning, and with all the world now wired through a number of networks, using our phones, our devices, computers, automobile navigation systems, surveillance cameras, and a whole host of other sources of information, artificial intelligence will be used in preventive policing because it would require an almost infinite amount of manpower just to crunch the numbers and interpret data.

Preventive policing requires software and computer time, lots of it.

While a light might come on or a buzzer might sound on some police dispatcher’s board somewhere when Edwin tripped the threshold on his own personal algorithm, it is not quite clear whether the local police would consider it a high priority.

As long as people still had rights, they could always get a lawyer after some period of incarceration, or ‘observation,’ or even ‘treatment,’ and come back with a successful suit in a court of law.

My personal opinion is that the enabling legislation would have thought of that too—and done whatever was necessary to insulate the authorities from excessive responsibility for any mistakes that are made, or the inevitable civil and human rights violations that will surely occur.

But when you realize that most at-risk people really don’t have the resources to defend themselves in the first place, nor the resources to come back later, nor even to appeal ‘a wrongful conviction’ while they sit in a jail and rot—how in the hell that would ever be proven is also a good question—then a vast prison population composed of ‘at-risk’ individuals like Edwin doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.

It is almost a law of technology that all really revolutionary technologies bring disruption, they cause great and often unforeseen changes in the social context.

The infrastructure is already in place. It’s just a matter of time before this happens to some extent.


END

*Are police required to notify future victims?

What about potential future perps? Would a record of warnings or tickets be kept, and of course wouldn’t that also bear on the future outcome of a charge of ‘being at risk of committing a future breach of statute law?’

We got us a real can of worms here, ladies and gentlemen.

**Semantic search tries to predict the subject’s intentions, which of course has wider applications.

***Artificial intelligence would be used to draw conclusions based upon semantics, which may be defined as meaning, and multiple layers of deeper meaning. In the psychological sense, social theory would be used to define ‘at-risk’ indicative factors in any one person’s algorithm based upon past statistical analyses of individuals within social groups.

When these theories are based both on statistics and bigotry, ‘poverty breeds crime,’ for example, the possibility of abuse arises.