Apr 20, 2020
Britain Is Developing an AI-Powered Predictive Policing System
Posted by Omuterema Akhahenda in categories: ethics, health, robotics/AI
What police would do with the information has yet to be determined. The head of WMP told New Scientist they won’t be preemptively arresting anyone; instead, the idea would be to use the information to provide early intervention from social or health workers to help keep potential offenders on the straight and narrow or protect potential victims.
But data ethics experts have voiced concerns that the police are stepping into an ethical minefield they may not be fully prepared for. Last year, WMP asked researchers at the Alan Turing Institute’s Data Ethics Group to assess a redacted version of the proposal, and last week they released an ethics advisory in conjunction with the Independent Digital Ethics Panel for Policing.
While the authors applaud the force for attempting to develop an ethically sound and legally compliant approach to predictive policing, they warn that the ethical principles in the proposal are not developed enough to deal with the broad challenges this kind of technology could throw up, and that “frequently the details are insufficiently fleshed out and important issues are not fully recognized.”
This article reviews the history of digital computation, and investigates just how far the concept of computation can be taken. In particular, I address the question of whether the universe itself is in fact a giant computer, and if so, just what kind of computer it is. I will show that the universe can be regarded as a giant quantum computer. The quantum computational model of the universe explains a variety of observed phenomena not encompassed by the ordinary laws of physics. In particular, the model shows that the quantum computational universe automatically gives rise to a mix of randomness and order, and to both simple and complex systems.
