How long before AI gets someone killed? Some allege it’s already happened, but pseudo-sentient tech is still in its infancy, so the body count is probably still only in the single digits at most. Not that the revolutionary technology didn’t give it the ol’ college high school try this week in Maryland.
An artificial intelligence system (AI) apparently mistook a high school student’s bag of Doritos for a firearm and called local police to tell them the pupil was armed.
It seems the kid’s high school had installed a whiz-bang AI-powered security system that scans students and their belongings looking for weapons. Or what it thinks are weapons.
Taki Allen was sitting with friends on Monday night outside Kenwood high school in Baltimore and eating a snack when police officers with guns approached him.
So the school’s HAL 9000 saw the kid’s hand in a bag of cool ranch chips, somehow mistook that for a pistol, and dropped a dime on him.
“At first, I didn’t know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, ‘Get on the ground,’ and I was like, ‘What?’” Allen told the WBAL-TV 11 News television station.
Allen said they made him get on his knees, handcuffed and searched him – finding nothing. They then showed him a copy of the picture that had triggered the alert.
“I was just holding a Doritos bag – it was two hands and one finger out, and they said it looked like a gun,” Allen said.
It seems the security system had the yips.
It’s good that the responding officers weren’t jumpy. Cops responding to a student-with-a-gun call at a school is a good way for someone to get shot. Good on the responding officers — and Taki — for keeping their cool. It seems “smart” gun detection systems are about as smart as “smart” gun technology is. At least so far.
Calling these systems ‘AI powered’ is deceptive. Not the article being deceptive, but the term its self being deceptive.
Overall the so called ‘AI’ everyone is so nuts over is not ‘intelligence’ artificial or other wise. Its simply using what its been fed to arrange into a ‘useful form’ in response to ‘query’. It does not create the ‘information’ it uses from organic thought by reasoning and logic like actual ‘intelligence’ does. So there is no ‘intelligence’ involved but rather simply ‘response’ to any ‘input’ using what its been ‘fed’ from what ever sources that comes from. In effect its basically a fancy ‘calculator’ using ‘input’ to spit out an ‘answer’ that’s already been predetermined by the constraints of and under rules of what it is fed… 1 + 1 is = 2 on a calculator because its been predetermined by the constraints of and under rules of math.
So in reality there is no such thing as ‘AI powered’, but rather its ‘predetermined regurgitation powered’. And herein lies the pit-falls posed by ‘AI’ – it can only use what its been fed, if its been fed that certain ‘combinations’ of shapes and/or materials are firearms its going to say they are firearms – if its been fed that certain ‘demographics’ are dangerous then certain demographics are dangerous – and it does not ‘reason’ or ‘logic’ like actual intelligence does, for example, the material of the Doritos bag is not gun metal and the hand is flesh-n-bone and not gun metal, things we would look at and with our actual intelligence reason and logic that its not a gun.
The excuse is going to be ‘AI said so it must be correct Yea AI!’, so like what happened to this kid, there are a lot of pitfalls with this relying on ‘AI’ stupid and its going to end up getting innocent people injured or killed eventually or like this kid subjected to the threat of use of deadly force that could have gone wrong with the twitch or accidental movement of a finger by a nervous police officer before they even looked physically at what was claimed to be a gun and went only only on the pic AI provided and alerted on as a gun.
.40cal,
Or, as the smart programmers used to say, “GIGO. Garbage in; garbage out.”
Then there are the versions of AI that just means All Indians
So they had a picture of him holding the chips bag and still opted to obey the AI alert?
Just when you think cops can’t get any dumber.
Well, they spent millions on a system known to have an issue with a high false positive rate so ignoring the stupid alert even though they knew would have made it look useless. Look at the letter the school principal sent to the parents about it (the WBAL-TV 11 News television station link), it doesn’t mention this was a false alert or the Doritos, and in a response to WBAL-TV 11 News neither did the police. But both were sure to mention ‘weapon’.
HAL 9000. I wonder how many under the age of 40 even know what the reference is?
Or the Colossus Forbin Project.
Or the Ultimate Computer.
As I recall the smartest people in the classroom said a pop tart chewed by a child resembled a gun.
The only high tech surveillance that works are high resolution cameras.
Before ai, there were, and still are, bogus and/or anonymous calls of false crimes or suspects made to LEAs that had to be investigated. It’s all how we respond to the stimuli. Nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9.