Bad reporting, but that's par for the course in AI. The cameras don't detect the bad behavior. They beam images to a program that does the job.
Most of what people call AI is really "machine learning" algorithms: "data scientists" pour petabytes of images that are tagged (by some overlord...more in that later) as "bad social behavior" or not, into some canned program that spits out an algorithm that, after cascading data and gaps between success and failure back and forth until "convergence", separates input images into good and bad buckets. The Bad bucketed images trigger the Singapore Stasi into action.
Singapore has a notorious anti-liberty social construct. Many "law and order" folks love it, which is odd since it's antithetical to our Founding, but so be it. (For more on that search for "Singapore caning".) The point is, Singapore in theory doesn't care about false positives as long as they catch the bad guys. False positives in Singapore are the cost of "order."
As such, this machine learning (ML) algorithm is likely overclocked with bias. But that's probably intentional: I bet there is racial bias, apparel bias, and dozens of other bias...they don't care. Further, if anyone is monitoring or back testing this algorithm, they can refine the algorithm for bias if they want...or give that bias a cheery two thumbs up.
Unlike statistical or econometric or biostatistics modeling, ML is not transparent and is fraught with "black box" unintended consequences. Even the most noble of data scientists can build biased models if their data are biased, and the nature of ML optimization and its lack of transparency will codify that bias. A better check on bias, is the character of the model development team. Nobody is perfect, but if you have love for your fellow man regardless if they lean left or right or whatever, or if they listen to Springsteen, more often than not you should be ok.
But nobility is in the eye of the beholder. There was a story yesterday about Facebook apologizing after its AI put ‘primates’ label on video about black men. Is this an accident, or do we see the TRUE bias of woke tech overlords?
Excellent! You articulated my concerns beautifully. I read about the “primate” incident.
Robots in America may just be cleaning up spills right now, but the technology is there to make the robots far more sinister, using various algorithms. A mysterious bulge at a waistline could be a gun, a red hat could mean a White supremecist, etc.
Thank You for explaining my point so eloquently.
“There was a story yesterday about Facebook apologizing after its AI put ‘primates’ label on video about black men.”
There was an incidence like this a few years ago where Google was classifying pictures of black people as gorillas. After that dust up there is no excuse for not having sufficient data in their training set to distinguish between the two, and even less for not testing for that specific case.