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
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.
Heh. Heh heh. You think that you can… file a complaint, and get a fine dismissed just like that. Heh heh heh. God, you’re naive. Or stupid. Or a paid propagandist. Or just plain rich enough for your reaction to a fine to be ‘meh’.
Criminality is predicated on convenience. If it’s easy for an authority to throw out fines and hard for the populace to dismiss those fines, guess what’s going to happen? There’s going to be fines applied that shouldn’t have been, but that the people who are getting fined literally can’t put in the effort to get dismissed. And that’s not justice in the slightest. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’, you troll. Heard that phrase before??
Just wow.
I bet you do not live in The Netherlands. We have a standardized process to complain against a fine.
If the picture doesn’t prove with certainty that you were holding a phone, complain to the address in the letter or just don’t pay the €359 fine and talk to a judge about it.
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.
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 a 100 times with a phone in your hand. 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Expansion of the surveillance state, you go uk.
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.
Can’t believe people still have the audacity to text while driving. I prefer reading a nice relaxing book.
I’ve seen a bus driver do this. No seriously. And it was the safer option. It was on one of those long desert stretches of road in Australia. No turns, interceptions, obstacles, or urbanization, and very little traffic for hundreds of miles.
It was better for the driver to read a book than to zone off bored near death. You could see incoming traffic miles away anyway so a few glances from time to time were enough.
It was funny when I spotted him and asked him “Are you seriously reading a book while driving?”.
inattentive driving should be considered gross negligence
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.
It’s not authoritarian to use technology to improve people’s lives. If you’re in a public place, you’re subject to being photographed by any number of circumstances both human and machine. How to balance it so that it isn’t abused is a valid argument to have, but disregarding tech because it could run amok isn’t a reason to forsake it altogether.
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.
That’s the important part for me. As long as the whole process isn’t automated I’m fine with it.
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.
ITT a bunch of people who have never read an ounce of sci fi (or got entirely the wrong message and think law being enforced by robots is a good thing)
Calling an image recognition system a robot enforcing the law is such a stretch you’re going to pull a muscle.
It’s going to disproportionately target minorities. ML* isn’t some wonderful impartial observer, it’s subject to all the same biases as the people who made it. Whether the people at the end of the process are impartial or not barely matters either imo, they’re going to get the biased results of the ML looking for criminals so it’s still going to be a flawed system even if the human element is OK. Ffs please don’t support this kind of dystopian shit, Idk how it’s not completely obvious how horrifying this stuff is
*what people call AI is not intelligent at all. It uses machine learning, the same process as chatbots and autocorrect. AI is a buzzword used by tech bros who are desperate to “invest in the future”
The image recognition system detects a cell phone being used and snaps a photo, records the plate number, etc. How exactly does that lead to racism?
But the law isn’t enforced by robots the law is enforced by humans. All that’s happening here is that the process of capturing transgressions has been automated. I don’t see how that’s a problem.
As long as humans are still part of the sentencing process, and they are, then functionally there’s no difference, if a mistake is being made it will be rectified at that time. From the process point of view there isn’t really any difference between being caught by an automated AI camera and being caught by a traffic cop.
Although completely reasonable, I fear that your conclusion is inaccessible for most folks.
And as a pedestrian, I’m all for a system that’s capable of reducing distracted driving.
How to disincentivize a motorist public is to make driving a stressful affair- currently, it’s other people. Soon, it’ll be catalogs of minor infractions caught, at the millisecond intervals they occur in, forever and the bill to pay it showing up every single week for the rest of your driving lives. Odds are it’s going to be scrapped, made a Boogeyman for a while, and then come back every time people get testy about gas prices
The trick to get people to not drive as much is to make public transportation easier not driving hard. All you accomplish by making driving hard is punishing the group of people who have the least agency.
Let me guess, you are urban planning.
You have never had to dispute one of those tickets I assume.
Almost a decade ago I got one in the mail for a city that is about 9 hours away from my house. I am going thru the dispute process and being told repeatedly that “I am tired of people claiming that it wasn’t them” with me suggesting that if their system worked they would most likely get fewer calls. Pure luck I noticed that the date is the exact date my daughter was born and thus the only way I could have been in that city is if I had somehow left my wife while she was in labor and managed to move my car 9 hours away. Once I pointed that out and that I could send them the birth certificate they gave up.
The problem with these systems is that they are trusted 100% and it becomes on the regular person to prove their innocence. Which is the exact opposite of what the relationship should be. If I get issued a ticket, it should be on the state to produce the evidence, not on me to get lucky.
If you read the article it makes it clear it wouldn’t get that far.
It goes to human operator who looks at the picture and says whether or not they can actually see a violation on the image. So it wouldn’t get as far as an official sanction so you wouldn’t have to go through that process.
I am sorry am I talking to myself? I just gave you a literal example of this not working.
It’s going to disproportionately target minorities. ML* isn’t some wonderful impartial observer, it’s subject to all the same biases as the people who made it. Whether the people at the end of the process are impartial or not barely matters either imo, they’re going to get the biased results of the ML looking for criminals so it’s still going to be a flawed system even if the human element is OK. Ffs please don’t support this kind of dystopian shit, Idk how it’s not completely obvious how horrifying this stuff is
*what people call AI is not intelligent at all. It uses machine learning, the same process as chatbots and autocorrect. AI is a buzzword used by tech bros who are desperate to “invest in the future”
Sounds like youd support precrime too. Stop licking boots
What the hell is precrime?
Yeah!! Now they got them new fangled pooters in cars too!! No thank U Night Rider!!
I for one base ALL my global policy on sci Fi novels 🤦♂️
Since the writers are on strike we can have them just write the entire legal code as the writers of black window are actually taken seriously beyond nerds for once.
The UK has never seen a dystopian nightmare they didn’t rush to embrace.
There is a strong authoritarian undercurrent in England.
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)
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?
“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?”
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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.
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.
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The post I responded to indicated the US and UK. Of course I know that we never invaded and subjugated the English. Clearly I was talking about the US, so ya got me. Pat yourself on the back.
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Just because someone is in public doesn’t mean that they need to be under 24/7 surveillance by big brother. Isn’t England already infested with security cameras? The US is pretty lousy with them in some places and if I knew they were actively watching me I’d make a habit of breaking them, not praise them for helping to overpolice every square inch of the country
Again, if you can be seen in public you already are. Anyone is a witness to your crimes.
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I haven’t committed any. Which is why I’m unconcerned.
Allow me to rephrase that. If an authority figure wants to prosecute you for whatever reason, even if you’ve been perfectly “legal”, they will make up a crime you committed based on something they didn’t like about you. This driving-camera crap just gives them more opportunities.
I got ticketed not too long ago because a police officer thought I was texting when I wasn’t doing anything other than looking at Google Maps. You don’t have to have committed a crime. You just have to have yourself recorded in a way that looks like you might have committed a crime. There is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE between those qualifiers, and it is ripe for abuse. Innocence doesn’t prove innocence, and proving innocence is what matters.
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For reference, in Switzerland deaths/major injuries from traffic accidents have steadily dropped since the '70s. Thanks to, as you mention, better car safety tech.
But there has also been a great number of speed cameras and lower alcohol tolerance. Oh and new laws with income-relative fines, temporary to permanent loss of driving license, and even jail for the worst driving offenses probably cooling the jets of even the wealthier road maniacs.
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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.
100% agree. It flags infractions, you have people verify what was being flagged, due course follows.
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.
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No they wouldn’t. You are telling me you could stop someone on the motorway instantly. You think a stationary cop at ground level would be able to spot a phone held below the window and have the reaction times to intiate a persute?
I never suggested any of this…alls I said was a cop at the side of the road could stop a car. I didnt say we couldnt have a copper parked up on a bridge as lookout or use these cameras.
There is a name for that sort, the safer the item is the more reckless the person becomes.
Meanwhile in New Orleans
https://www.fox8live.com/2023/07/26/nopd-use-facial-recognition-leads-zero-arrests-nine-months/
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 problem is the whole “give an inch, they take a mile.” We don’t know what rights this may take away from us in the future. So in the now, always question
Yeah I understand this argument. In my mind there is no anonymity when driving, (and in my mind there shouldn’t be) and the responsibility you have as a driver have that makes this permissible.
A valid and reasonable point. The problem is that often it spills out of it’s original intent. The “think of children” argument springs to mind
The only difference between this and having police officers sitting there and looking is this is much cheaper and more efficient.
Sure, but that’s a huge problem, because the legal system wasn’t actually designed for perfectly efficient enforcement. It is important that people be able to get away with breaking the law most of the time. If all of the tens of thousands of laws on the books were always enforced we would all be in prison and bankrupt from fines. Some laws are just bad too, and the way they get repealed is when enough people get away with breaking them for long enough to build political momentum for it.
Also, it isn’t like they are going to stop at using scaled-up AI surveillance just to enforce seatbelt use and texting while driving, there is way too much potential for abuse with this sort of tech. For example if there are these sorts of cameras all over, networked together, anyone with access to them can track just about everything you are doing with no way to opt out. Even if you aren’t doing anything wrong the feeling that you are always being watched is oppressive and has chilling effects.
A day in your life must be horrible, friend.
My main problem with this is, that this becomes like the huge online behemoths like youtube etc. I think most people have seen incidents where youtube cancelled a channel or applied copyright incorrectly, and getting a human to review things is next to impossible. The reason is clear, the sheer amount of content breaching the rules is too big to cost efficiently deal with by humans.
One camera catching 300 people in 72 hours. We don’t see how many it triggered, how many were reviewed and found to be false positives.
The problem is going to be if a whole police force takes it up, or it goes national. The amount of hits generated would be far beyond the ability to confirm with humans. I see it going a similar way to youtube. They just let the AI fine people. You report it as wrong, so they send your petition to another AI that pretends to be human and denies you again. The only way to clear things up is to take it to court. But, now the court system is being flooded so they deny people the right to a court case and the fixed penalties will be automatically applied.
This is the dystopia I fear. Actually catching people committing driving crimes? I don’t have a problem with that. Aside from maybe the increasing number of driving crimes coupled with the knowledge these cameras exist could lead to less concentration while people make sure they’re sitting upright, looking attentive, eyes straight ahead hands at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock. Did I indicate for that lane change back there? I guess that remains to be seen.
Haha, that’s a scary thought. But not unreasonable. Fine first and let the recipient proof they are not at fault,fighting through a series of AI entities.
“You’re through to the AI’s AI Manager how may I reject your complaint?”
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).
Am I the only one who considers the text on the camera car (“HIGHWAY MAINTENANCE”) a bad joke?
This will get shut down the first time some politician gets caught receiving road head and the pictures leak.
@L4s People don’t want to get caught breaking the law. Perhaps others wouldn’t like fighting false positives.
Solve that with lower fines and a suitably easy way to challenge them.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.
