Police in England installed an AI camera system along a major road. It caught almost 300 drivers in its first 3 days.::An AI camera system installed along a major road in England caught 300 offenses in its first 3 days.There were 180 seat belt offenses and 117 mobile phone
Why are people saying this is a hypersurveillance dystopian nightmare? Guys, you are still in public! The only difference between this and having police officers sitting there and looking is this is much cheaper and more efficient. The recordings are still being sent to a human being for review.
The UK has never seen a dystopian nightmare they didn’t rush to embrace.
Meanwhile in New Orleans
https://www.fox8live.com/2023/07/26/nopd-use-facial-recognition-leads-zero-arrests-nine-months/
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There is a name for that sort, the safer the item is the more reckless the person becomes.
Yup, and some of these are quite serious. But a cop at the side of the road could stop these people instantly. These people won’t find out that they have broke the law for two weeks. Or they could just kill themselves/someone else/both half a mile up the road.
He’ll yea use machines to strip people of their freedom and privacy in exchange for “safety” and “security”, that could never go wrong
I understand your pov but I feel it’s misplaced. You are in public in a vehicle. You are in public on a side walk. The same laws that have been used to record police are the same being used here. You have no expectation of privacy in public and if you are seen or recorded breaking a law that is on you.
The same laws that have been used to record police are the same being used here.
I don’t think you understand my point. It’s been made clear the First Amendment applies to filming anyone, including police, in public. Any policies that try to bypass that will be destroyed in court. Those same rules apply to all of us as well.
We can absolutely be recorded in public.
Yeah, given the tech today this needs to be revisited at the very least
It won’t.
100% agree. It flags infractions, you have people verify what was being flagged, due course follows.
I think the fact that car deaths are skyrocketing in the US and the UK is even more absurd since modern cars are supposedly “safer” with all of their safety tech.
SUV vs. Bicycle: cyclist dead.
Not for UK, cyclists is the only category which stay the same between 2022/2021.
Then using UK, one of the countries with the lowest deathtoll on the roads in Europe, beside the US, is a bit of a stretch.
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I think deaths jumped a bit post COVID but I don’t think they are skyrocketing. Do you have a source?
I looked it up. They aren’t skyrocketing.
The numbers dropped due to lockdown, then bounced up and are stable.
I hate this cult of negativity - just make up how everything is getting worse in order to hand more power to the government.
The casual and bovine l way it all happen is disgusting.
Fuck ai and cameras and uk.
FUCK CAMERAS. THAT’S WHY I VOTED BREXIT. SO I CAN TEXT AND DRIVE, NOT LIKE THESE BAGUETTE LOVING SISSIES
Monitor my internet and tell me what I can do harder daddy
What?
I hope it’s sarcasm
It is sarcasm. Britsbongs are too indebted to hang on sync and they’d rather sniff nitrous under a bridge
Photos flagged by the AI are then sent to a person for review.
If an offense was correctly identified, the driver is then sent either a notice of warning or intended prosecution, depending on the severity of the offense.
The AI just “identifying” offenses is the easy part. It would be interesting to know whether the AI indeed correctly identified 300 offenses or if the person reviewing the AI’s images acted on 300 offenses. That’s potentially a huge difference and would have been the relevant part of the news.
The system we use in NL is called “monocam”. A few years ago it caught 95% of all offenders.
This means that AI had at most 5% false negatives.
I wonder if they have improved the system in the mean time.
Nobody cares about false negatives. As long as the number isn’t something so massive that the system is completely useless false negatives in an automatic system are not a problem.
What are the false positives? Every single false positive is a gross injustice. If you can’t come up with a number for that, then you haven’t even evaluated your system.
The system works with AI signaling phone usage by driving.
Then a human will verify the photo.
AI is used to respect people’s privacy.
The combination of the AI detection+human review leads to a 5% false negative rate, and most probably 0% false positive.
This means that the AI missed at most 5% positives, but probably less because of the human reviewer not being 100% sure there was an offense.
Look, I’m not saying it’s a bad system. Maybe it’s great. “Most probably 0%” is meaningless though. If all you’ve got is gut feelings about it, then you don’t know anything about it. Humans make mistakes in the best of circumstances, and they get way, way worse when you’re telling them that they’re evaluating something that’s already pretty reliable. You need to know it’s not giving false positive, not have a warm fuzzy feeling about it.
Again, I don’t know if someone else has already done that. Maybe they have. I don’t live in the Netherlands. I don’t trust it until I see the numbers that matter though, and the more numbers that don’t matter I see without the ones that do, the less I trust it.
The fine contains a letter, a picture and payment information. If the person really wasn’t using their phone, they can file a complaint and the fine will be dismissed. Seems pretty simple to me.
However, I have not heard any complaints about it in the news and an embarrassing amount of fines has been given for this offense.
For a post on a site like this that kind of anecdote is plenty to add to a conversation, and it does actually make me feel a tiny bit better about the whole thing, but when you lead with statistics you’re implying a level of research and knowledge that goes beyond just anecdotal. It’s not really fair to you or any of us, but using the numbers that sound good to avoid using the ones that reveal flaws is one of the most popular ways for marketing teams and governments to deceive people. You should always be skeptical of that kind of thing.
How do they know that they caught 95% of all offenders if they didn’t catch the remaining 5%? Wouldn’t that be unknowable?
Welcome to the world of training datasets.
There are many ways to go about it, but for a limited number they’d probably use human analysts.
But in general, they’d put a lot more effort into a chunk of data and use that as the truth. It’s not a perfect method but it’s good enough.
I think 95% were correct reports is what they mean. There could be a massive population of other offenders that continue sexting and driving or worse. One monocam won’t ever be enough we need many monocams. Polymonocams.
The article didn’t really clarify that part, so it’s impossible to tell. My guess is, they tested the system by intentionally driving under it with a phone in your hand a 100 times. If the camera caught 95 of those, that’s how you would get the 95% catch rate. That setup has the a priori information on about the true state of the driver, but testing takes a while.
However, that’s not the only way to test a system like this. They could have tested it with normal drivers instead. To borrow a medical term, you could say that this is an “in vivo” test. If they did that, there was no a priori information about the true state of each driver. They could still report a different 95% value though. What if 95% of the positives were human verified to be true positives and the remaining 5% were false positives. In a setup like that we have no information about true or false negatives, so this kind of test setup has some limitations. I guess you could count the number of cars labeled negative, but we just can’t know how many of them were true negatives unless you get a bunch of humans to review an inordinate amount of footage. Even then you still wouldn’t know for sure, because humans make mistakes too.
In practical terms, it would still be a really good test, because you can easily have thousands of people drive under the camera within a very short period of time. You don’t know anything about the negatives, but do you really need to. This isn’t a diagnostic test where you need to calculate sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value. I mean, it would be really nice if you did, but do you really have to?
You wouldn’t need people to actually drive past the camera, you could just do that in testing when the AI was still in development in software, you wouldn’t need the physical hardware.
You could just get CCTV footage from traffic cameras and feeds that into the AI system. Then you could have humans go through independently of the AI and tag any incident they saw in a infraction on. If the AI system gets 95% of the human spotted infractions then the system is 95% accurate. Of course this ignores the possibility that both the human and the AI miss something but that would be impossible to calculate for.
That’s the sensible way to do it in early stages of development. Once you’re reasonably happy with the trained model, you need to test the entire system to see if each part actually works together. At that point, it could be sensible to run the two types of experiments I outlined. Different tests different stages.
Just to clarify the result: the article states that AI and human review leads to 95%.
Could also be that the human is flagging actual positives, found by the AI, as false positives.
I suspect they sent through a controlled set of cars where they tested all kinds of scenarios.
Other option would be to do a human review after installing it for a day.
but digging out that info would involve journalism and possibly reporting something the cops wouldn’t like! We all know how that goes.
Yeah that’s a shame, would be really interested to know those numbers.
Expansion of the surveillance state, you go uk.
The DEA in the US has surveillance on every highway exit. If you drive on an interstate, you are logged.
Maybe in high population areas, most exits don’t have any infrastructure nearby. Hell a lot barely have signs and just dump you into not much more than a back road.
Wait really? Via cameras?
yea, in fact most toll booths are camera operated up north here now, they click a picture of the plate then mail you the toll bill + added expenses for the mail in system. Annoying af but it’s either that or get EZ pass(or not use the turnpike).
it flashes multiple times on the way through so I’m sure it grabs a front picture as well
I work in an adjacent industry and got a sales pitch from a company offering a similar service. They said that they get the AI to flag the images and then people working from home confirm - and they said it’s a lot of people with disabilities/etc getting extra cash that way.
This was about six months ago and I asked them, “there’s a lot of bias in AI training datasets - was a diverse dataset used or was it trained mostly on people who look like me (note: I’m white)?” and they completely dodged the question…
(this is definitely a different company as I am not in England)
“Hookay thanks for the presentation fellas, but lemme ask ya: Was your model trained only on iPhones or was a diverse palette of plastic Android phones from the last 15 years also taken into account?”
Yes does the AI automatically send every taxi through or is it only when they are on the phone. Has the AI ever seen a taxi driver who’s not on the phone in order to check this?
Sorry, what did the police do and how many people did they catch in how much time :/
Is the freedom to drive without feeling like you’re being watched more important than the prevention of texting while driving?
During my commute, it’s common to see people looking at their phones. I don’t know what the effect is without statistics, but seeing an accident along the way is a usual occurrence.
inattentive driving should be considered gross negligence
No. Your freedom to feel feelings is your problem. If you feel like you’re not being observed right now, your feeling is already wrong.
I’m more concerned about error rates and false accusations
Doesn’t it say that each image is sent to a human for review before any charges are laid? Might not be the case forever, but at least for now it’s actually a human who ultimately decides whether or not to prosecute a driver.
This has always been the case for road cameras in the UK from the start from when we first had speed cameras introduced, before they are sent out they are (supposed to be) reviewed by a person first to check for false positives.
That’s the important part for me. As long as the whole process isn’t automated I’m fine with it.
Yes, obviously. Ffs how is this post so full of authoritarian assholes who think more law enforcement (not even done by real people mind you, but by a machine with no sense of nuance or anything) is the solution to anything other than strengthening a fascist government?
Leaving traffic safety to human police, discretion often means racist biases and outcomes.
Can’t believe people still have the audacity to text while driving. I prefer reading a nice relaxing book.
Or painting a nice landscape
I’m surprised car companies haven’t already partnered with governments to have the vehicles themselves snitch on the occupants. Why install these camera systems all over the place when the vehicles themselves collect ridiculous amounts of data with greater accuracy? I’m sure the car companies would love the additional revenue stream and the governments would love the greater surveillance capabilities.
Cause no one would buy a car from a company that does this
Companies will band together to force unpopular changes. They’re already doing it with ridiculous pay-to-unlock-features-already-on-the-vehicle-through-software features.
Yeah, but it doesn’t really benefit the automotive manufacturers to snitch on speeders.
Probably because they wouldn’t see a dime of revenue from this. It would be a new law that just says they have to do it. At best, they would be allowed to pass the costs to customers somehow, likely through our plate registrations at the DMV.
It’s basically a no win for the car companies. Lots of ill will, increased chance of litigation, increased costs for building cars, all for nothing.
In fact, I bet the car companies lobbyists are the reason we don’t have this already.
There were 180 seat belt offenses and 117 mobile phone
and 300.000 drivers privacy got violated by a single offender. Someone should gve the AI a fine. Oh wait “privacy” is not a word in the English language anymore, it is just gibberish with no meaning.
Found the shitty driver
You don’t have an expectation of privacy while driving on a public road and you never did.
I have an expectation of existing and having privacy because not everywhere is a camera. If you don’t have that expectation anymore, then that’s sad.
There is a huge difference between letting an AI check EVERY car ALL THE TIME, or police doing random checks on random roads. One is a privacy violation for some to find some people texting and driving and some people wearing no seatbelt, which then leads to more awareness of everyone about these issues. The other is treating all your citizens as potential “criminals” driving without seatbelt and texting and driving and therefore making it normal to violate everyones privacy.
A government that starts to treat all citizens like potential criminals all the time and put them on camera on every street and in their car and on public transport, in school and at work… is not a government that is on your side and wants to protect you, that’s a prison guard.
“Expectation of privacy” is a legal term with an agreed-upon definition that isn’t subject to your intuition or what you consider to be “sad”.
I know it is a legal term. It was meant to help protect peoples privacy, but got perverted to now mean that privacy only exists at home. That is sad and not understanding that it is sad, is even more sad.
Really great dialogue and discourse going on in this post. Thank you everyone for your opinions and viewpoints. Definitely have a lot to think over on my current stance. Exactly what I was missing lately from the social media I’ve been consuming (actual discussions with merits both sides hold).
Using AI for this is so stupid. There will be a lot of false negatives and positives.
I think it’s a pretty good idea, the AI does a first pass, flags potential violations and sends them to a human for review. It’s not like they are just sending people fines directly based on the AI output.
I’m definitely a fan of better enforcement of traffic rules to improve safety, but using ML* systems here is fraught with issues. ML systems tend to learn the human biases that were present in their training data and continue to perpetuate them. I wouldn’t be shocked if these traffic systems, for example, disproportionately impact some racial groups. And if the ML system identifies those groups more frequently, even if the human review were unbiased (unlikely), the outcome would still be biased.
It’s important to see good data showing these systems are fair, before they are used in the wild. I wouldn’t support a system doing this until I was confident it was unbiased.
- it’s all machine learning - NOT artificial intelligence. No intelligence involved, just mathematical parameters “learned” by an algorithm and applied to new data.
Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence. As is a pathfinding algorithm in a game.
Neural networks were some of the original AI systems dating back decades. Machine learning is a relatively new term for it.
AI is an umbrella term for anything that mimics intelligence.
There’s nothing intelligent about it. It’s no smarter than a chatbot or a phone’s autocorrect. It’s a buzzword applied to it by tech bros that want to make a bunch of money off it
Indeed. That’s why it’s called artificial intelligence.
Anything that attempts to mimic intelligence is AI.
The field was established in the 50s.
Your definition of it is wrong I’m afraid.
The only people that call it that are people who don’t get what AI actually is or don’t want to know because they think it’s the future. There is exactly nothing intelligent about it. Stop spreading tech bro bullshit, call it machine learning bc that’s what it actually is. Or are you really drinking the ML kool-aid hard enough that this is your hill to die on? It’s not even as intelligent as a parrot that’s learned to recognize colors and materials, it’s literally just a souped up cleverbot
Literally the definition my friend. You just don’t know what the term is refering to.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines or software, as opposed to the intelligence of human beings or animals. AI applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Waymo), generative or creative tools (ChatGPT and AI art), and competing at the highest level in strategic games (such as chess and Go).[1]
Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956.[2] The field went through multiple cycles of optimism[3][4] followed by disappointment and loss of funding,[5][6] but after 2012, when deep learning surpassed all previous AI techniques,[7] there was a vast increase in funding and interest.
The various sub-fields of AI research are centered around particular goals and the use of particular tools. The traditional goals of AI research include reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception, and support for robotics.[a] General intelligence (the ability to solve an arbitrary problem) is among the field’s long-term goals.[8] To solve these problems, AI researchers have adapted and integrated a wide range of problem-solving techniques, including search and mathematical optimization, formal logic, artificial neural networks, and methods based on statistics, probability, and economics.[b] AI also draws upon psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience and many other fields.[9]
This is a really important concern, thanks for bringing it up. I’d really like to know more about what they are doing in this case to try and combat that. Law enforcement in particular feels like an application where managing bias is extremely important.
I would imagine the risk of bias here is much lower than, for example, the predictive policing systems that are already in use in US police departments. Or the bias involved in ML models for making credit decisions. 🙃
I think the lack of transparency about data, both the one used for training, and the actual statistics of the model itself is pretty worrying.
There needs to be regulations around that, because you can’t expect companies to automatically be transparent and forthcoming if they have something to gain by not being so.
They will tho. In the future. And because its a camera (black and white) there will be many false positives. And this is what the normal driver should fear. That the police just say yeah everything fineeeee and let the ai loose, this is just the first step into. I really doubt it would RELIABLY detect seat belt offenses.
See this is why I only drive when I am drinking a 20oz coffee and eating a footlong sub. That way when AI acuses me of being distracted from being on the phone, the human it gets sent off to for review will be like “oh no, he was simply balancing a sandwich on his lap while he took the lid off to blow on his coffee so it wasn’t to hot, the AI must have thought the lid was a phone.”
Besides, it also ensures I use a handfree device for my phone because face it… I don’t have any free hands, I’m busy trying to find where that marinara sauce fell on my shirt when I was eating the last bite of meatball sub. (Add pepperoni and buffalo sauce) Have to stay legal after all.
We have a couple of these cameras in The Netherlands.
We found it quite intrusive to look into people’s cars. Therefore the computer will flag photos, of possible offenses, and a person verifies them.
Unfortunately the movable camera has a huge lens and it’s reported to a waze-like app before they are even finished setting it up.
Oh, this can only end in tears.
And just by chance does anyone know what the damage is done to society by punishing victimless crimes?
You must be a troll.
I swear to you this is a real opinion as someone who had to drive a lot for work, I humbly think this is a bad idea.
Not wearing seatbelts and fucking around with a phone are hardly victimless crimes and those laws that punish such offenses were written in blood.
It is a suggestion when the people enforcing it do not follow the suggestion. At least where I am the definition is so lose that driving falls under distracted driving. And it is a victimless crime up until someone crashes into another, but hey, we have laws that say that is a crime (reckless endangerment). Putting extra layers on this and expecting people to fight every wrongful ticket is not a good idea.
You realise you’re applying what I’m assuming are US laws to a study based on English and Welsh laws, yes?
Distracted driving is not an offence, the use (or causing or permitting the use of) a mobile phone is an offence. For more broad issues, then charges of Careless (or even Dangerous) Driving would apply.
Plus your logic is so full of holes, it sinks faster than an Oceangate sub. You could use that angle to argue that throwing axes in a primary school is a victimless crime until someone gets hurt.
I am not from the US. And I have witnessed the full stupidity of her majesty’s (I will be cold in the ground before I recognise king sausage hands) courts work with distracted driving (I was on the receiving end).
Who is the victim of not wearing a seatbelt?
Is it one of those ‘you’re not allowed to do things that only affect you because we’re a society’ type things where we should ban video games and sweet foods too?
Other passengers in the car, for one. The driver losing consciousness due to hitting their head on the steering wheel or dashboard from an initial impact because of not wearing the seat belt now becomes an out-of-control vehicle that can involve anybody in the vicinity of the impact. There are plenty of victims if you just think for a sec.
What exactly happens with the car after the initial hit?
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Ah yes, the famously victimless crime of using your phone while driving. Honestly screw anybody who does that, they deserve to be ticketed each time, cause each time they might kill somebody.
I literally watched cops driving while on their phone everyday after it was made illegal. Nothing was done, Nothing changed, they hand out tickets while breaking the same rules. Might kill someone is a precrime, a issue with these tickets in this case is that without the AI camera nothing would have been seen (literally victimless). If someone crashes into anything while on their phone the chances it will be used in prosecution is low.
I don’t think texting while driving is a good idea, like not wearing a seatbelt. However this is offloading a lot to AI, distracted driving is not well defined and considering the nuances I don’t want to leave any part to AI. Here is an example: eating a bowl of soup while operating a vehicle would be distracted right? What if the soup was in a cup? What if the soup was made of coffee beans?
However this is offloading a lot to AIIt’s offloading nothing because all it does is flag potential cases of violation of the law that are then reviewed by a human, the alternative is to take a picture of all cars and have humans review all of them.
Yes, as they currently scrutinize speed/stop cameras so well now…
Careful not to hurt your back carrying that goalpost!
Hey I want a person to write the ticket and not a camera/AI. Sorry for the old fashion idea.
A person is writing the ticket though…
I literally watched cops driving while on their phone everyday after it was made illegal. Nothing was done, Nothing changed, they hand out tickets while breaking the same rules.
I mean yeah, fuck the police :) Seems like we’re in agreement here.
Might kill someone is a precrime, a issue with these tickets in this case is that without the AI camera nothing would have been seen (literally victimless). If someone crashes into anything while on their phone the chances it will be used in prosecution is low.
Using your fucking phone while driving is the crime. This isn’t some “thought police” situation. Put the phone away, and you won’t get the ticket. It’s that simple. We don’t need to wait for a person to mow down a pedestrian in order to punish them for driving irresponsibly.
In the same spirit, if a person gets drunk and drives home, and they don’t kill somebody – well that’s a crime and they should be punished for it.
And if you can’t handle driving responsibly, then the privilege of driving on public roads should be revoked.
I don’t think texting while driving is a good idea, like not wearing a seatbelt. However this is offloading a lot to AI, distracted driving is not well defined and considering the nuances I don’t want to leave any part to AI. Here is an example: eating a bowl of soup while operating a vehicle would be distracted right? What if the soup was in a cup? What if the soup was made of coffee beans?
This is such a weird ad absurdum argument. Nobody is telling some ML system “make a judgment call on whether the coffee bean soup is a distraction.” The system is identifying people violating a cut-and-dried law: using their phone while driving, or not wearing a seatbelt. Assuming it can do it in an unbiased way (which is a huge if, to be fair), then there’s no slippery slope here.
For what it’s worth, I do worry about ML system bias, and I do think the seatbelt enforcement is a bit silly: I personally don’t mind if a person makes a decision that will only impact their own safety. I care about the irresponsible decisions that people make affecting my safety, and I’d be glad for some unbiased enforcement of the traffic rules that protect us all.
The issue is this has no way to judge context, someone playing music on their phone though the car audio (super common now) tapping the phone to ignore a call is just as much a crime as texting a novel to an ex. And you are kidding yourself if you think almost every person driving for a living is not at some level forced to use their phone by their company (I was). This is just more AI solutions looking for a problem, I would much rather have someone pulled over when driving erratically then the person getting an automated ticket 3 weeks after mowing down a pedestrian.
I do a LOT of driving. I consider phone use a bain. The law over here is you can only interact with 1 finger. This works quite well. If you need to hold your phone, you’re over focused on it. I can tap a few buttons, if required, and use voice control for most functions.
Anyone interacting with their phone enough to be caught by this is a danger to other road users. The solutions are so trivial that anyone not using them is being actively reckless, of the same level as drink driving.
someone playing music on their phone though the car audio (super common now) tapping the phone to ignore a call is just as much a crime as texting a novel to an ex.
They are all crimes. Set up your music before you go, or use voice command. Ignore the call with voice command or just let it go to voicemail. Lol. It’s not hard.
And you are kidding yourself if you think almost every person driving for a living is not at some level forced to use their phone by their company (I was)
This is a great of the strength of this system: this company will find its drivers and vehicles getting ticketed a lot, and they’ll have to come up with a way to allow drivers to do their jobs without interacting with their phones will moving at high speeds.
I would much rather have someone pulled over when driving erratically then the person getting an automated ticket 3 weeks after mowing down a pedestrian.
The camera doesn’t magically remove traffic enforcement humans from the road. They can still pull over the obviously drunk/erratic driver.
I am saying there is a difference between say looking at your phone and using your phone, both are crimes but both are not the same.
The companies just say “don’t break the law” then give you shit if you don’t update a ticket in 10 min (only can be done on a phone and the job requires driving 3 hours to the next place). They don’t care if you get a ticket, it does not come off their bottom line.
They don’t pull over people that are hard tickets, I see it way to often. They don’t pull people over when someone calls saying they are drunk.
This is just another excuse for the police to do even less but still make quota, and on top of that you are trusting a system that can not figure out how many fingers a human has on average.
There isn’t really a difference. Both are incredibly distracting and dangerous. It’s why both are illegal.
I mean yeah, fuck the police
But love police cameras and the police enforcing them?
Police cameras are not police. And the laws being enforced is also not police. Supporting them while not supporting the police force misuse of power is not a contradiction like you are implying.
I have no idea what your example is trying to highlight, but it matters not - if it was a fringe case, then clearly you would either appeal the fixed penalty notice, or reject the FPN and put your argument to a court.
I am just pointing out that this is an issue that is very much a wedge shape. Not sure what you mean by fringe, and most never fight these tickets/can not afford the time in court to try.
