If you consider people openly planning crimes to be decent evidence for future crimes (and the US legislative and court system certainly does) the US government has been doing this since before Minority Report was released on film. Hell, isn't this essentially what Palantir does? Sure maybe it's not referred to as "AI" but it's certainly a form of partially-automated mass-surveillance with the intent of empowering state agencies to make arrests.
> Hell, isn't this essentially what Palantir does?
Palantir is (was, 10 years ago, when I interviewed for them) a graph database with a UI that allowed easy viewing of large datasets. Then they sold consulting hours to build custom plugins. I like graph databases, but to paint Palantir as a pre-crime system is a bit over the top. It would be a great tool to e.g. find and model relationships between Bitcoin addresses.
Happy to receive an update on that, but I suspect this reputation that they're doing some magic data processing is probably great for sales, so unlikely to happen.
There's a big difference between predicting future crimes and prosecuting future crimes. In terms of predicting, this is something that US intelligence orgs have been doing for a long time.
I think many police departments already use business intelligence systems to determine where units will be deployed based on various inputs such as intelligence reports, previous patterns etc.
One aspect of crime which bothers me a lot can be summarized by a thought experiment:
Imagine a state which does not sufficiently punish criminals who are guilty of certain white-collar crimes. Over time, the amount of white-collar crime causes a significant negative effect on the efficiency of its capitalist system to the point that it becomes impossible to compete in this system and make a living without also resorting to white-collar crime.
Now imagine that the system, by its design, is forcing more and more people into crime, just to survive... And then consider that AI would try to predict and possibly punish crimes before they happen... Surely AI would learn that those who are most harmed by the socio-economic system are the most likely to turn to crime. Systemic discrimination would become the main predictor of crime. It would identity flaws in the socio-economic system in order to punish the people who are most harmed by those flaws, in order to punish those people... As opposed to using those patterns to fix the system itself.
that presupposes many factors to come to that conclusion
That necessity is the the driver of crime.
That systemic discrimination is the driver of necessity.
The part I think this fails is that these factors are not sufficient for crime.
Not everyone who is poor becomes a criminal. In fact, it is an incredibly poor predictor by the numbers. A poor person might be more likely than a rich one to commit grand theft, but this ignores the the fact that 99.99% of poor people don't commit grand theft.
Overall, I think overstating the power of the correlation does a great disservice to all the poor people who are not criminals.
When you say looters, are you talking about those wild videos where 20-50 randos all show up at a store at the same time and clear it out in a whirlwind of chaos?
Outside of just directly talking about crime, there is combining overlapping red flags an individual displays that would paint them as higher risk of committing crime. Some combination of taking part in, and frequency of posting of, various topics present a predictor pattern. The most "obvious" ones are usually called extremist views/behavior; however there exists more subtle views that are fairly innocuous when viewed individually, but together form a higher risk of crime category.
It can in some cases either directly or indirectly cause it: i.e. the Southport riots in the North of the UK were caused by someone on social media incorrectly attributing (at least so far) the blame of the stabbing of three girls and a teacher to "a Muslim", and then English Defence League supporters staged riots based off this.
You'd be surprised. Here's a 6-second clip that manages to squeeze in grand theft auto, driving while intoxicated and driving without a license, complete with clear footage of the perps' faces.
Can't tell about how things are going on in Argentina right now, but here in Colombia they found out several weeks ago some people related to "Tren de Aragua" (an international criminal group with origins in Venezuela) had the guts of posting on TikTok or something live streams of their crimes (and for some time they went away with it).
You can find people deliberately posting video of themselves (with their full, unobscured faces) committing crimes. We're not talking about the smartest bunch of people.
Now the next "dirty war" (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War) style disappearings in Argentina will somehow be *even more* unaccountable. Frankly, that's impressive.
