this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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I mean yeah, fuck the police :) Seems like we're in agreement here.
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.
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.
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.
BOOT LICKER
Fuck them and their law.
Then are you a criminal boot licker since you seem to hate nuance so much? Do you cheer for murderers and rapists everytime the police try to enforce the law?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.