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

[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.