Drones Club

[ffutures]

Pointed out by numerous friends today - I've delayed posting until I could find the relevant strip:

This is suddenly a lot closer to home.

The spin on the first one that crashes embarrassingly, and how this is improving our safety, ought to be interesting...

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

"Britain is by far and away the world leader in CCTV with 4.2m cameras, which is more than the rest of Europe put together. There is no evidence that CCTV reduces crime, but there is research, including a study commissioned by the government, which reveals that it increases distrust between people and promotes fear of crime."


Couldn't agree more. I can't think of a single time somebody has felt safer because we have cameras on every street corner.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Agree. There are so many cameras that they defeat the alleged object of preventing crime - nobody has time to watch the screens and take action if needed, so about all that they might be good for is investigating after the act.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile private citizens with cameras are treated as suspicious persons by the police…

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

And it seems like 9 times out of 10 when they do investigate something after the fact, the footage from the cameras isn't of sufficiently high quality to identify anybody, because they're all wearing hoodies or whatnot.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is all rather sinister social engineering at work.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

True, but I don't think that problem is caused by too much advanced technology. In the long run, automated pattern recognition systems will look for signs of violence and alert the human (or aint) central station operators.

The real problem in Britain is that you waste a lot of time persecuting honest citizens for self-defense and let off violent professional criminals with light sentences. This is not a technologically-caused problem, and thus won't be cured by any number of cameras or drones.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The real problem is that violent crime is actually on the decline in the UK, but you'd never know it going by the way the police and government behave.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Oh, and you might want to read up on false positives and why even immense advances in facial recognition are unlikely to be useful under real world conditions - even if you get 99% accuracy that's several thousand false positives a year.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I'm aware of the problem with false positives. That's why you use the pattern-recognition software primarily to draw the attention of sapient police and security personnel to specific images -- they can then judge whether or not they are seeing an incipent or actual crime. This cuts the workload of the cops by a considerable degree.

[jinxed-wood.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the drones in Dark Angel!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

There's a cheery thought. NOT looking forward to 2012.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

The use of drones in police and security work is fairly inevitable. I'm suprised there's an issue -- why and how is this different from having manned police patrols?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Hypothetical question; do you normally have police patrols taking photos of you sunbathing nude on the roof? Looking in your 10th-story window? Watching you with image-intensifier cameras at night?

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

No, but the reason why is that police patrols are normally ground-bound and relatively poorly-equipped with sensors beyond their own human ones. Obviously, as humans are increasingly able to fly and electronically-enhance their senses, police will increasingly be able to fly and electronically-enhance their senses, because "police" are a class of "humans."

Police already operate air patrols. What would you do about sunbathing nude on the roof or expecting privacy in 10th-story windows, say, a century from now when aircars -- and thus presumably air police cars -- become common? Or about the presumed anonymity of night when everyone and his cousin can buy ALE binoculars at the five-and-dime?

By this logic, applied a century ago, the police would be limited to riding horses and communicating by semaphore.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'll worry about flying cars when they happen. For now the police have a near monopoly on low-level flights over cities - and our hypothetical sunbather previously knew that a helicopter was around because of the noise it made.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

You think of helicopters as "noisy" because the ones currently in civilian service have relatively unmuffled engines. There are military choppers which are relatively silent, and the technology is very predictably going to filter down to civilian choppers over the next decade or two, because noise in any aircraft which flies over inhabited areas is generally deemed "pollution." Heck, I remember back when jetliners were much noisier than they are today, because some of the baffling technology is already in civilian use on large aircraft.

As for nude sunbathing on one's roof, I would consider it foolish if one cares whether or not one is seen naked, because of the number of low-flying aircraft already present around most cities.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Hypothetically, how would I know? Police copters occasionally fly around this neighbourhood, but I have no idea if the aircrew are sharing around pictures of me nude sun-bathing.

In fact, I understand that the previous tenant of this flat was arrested after thermal IR revealed the signature of his marijuana farm in the loft.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

You can hear a helicopter coming - it isn't the same invasion of privacy as a near-silent drone.

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

The video feed on US military drones is easily interceptable. It won't be long before that happens with the Police ones.

At least when the controls of a Police drone get taken over the haxx0rs won't (hopefully) have access to chainguns and hellfire missiles.