Revealed: a California city is training AI to spot homeless encampments
Revealed: a California city is training AI to spot homeless encampments
San Jose invited tech companies to mount cameras on a vehicle in what appears to be first-of-its-kind experiment
Last July, San Jose issued an open invitation to technology companies to mount cameras on a municipal vehicle that began periodically driving through the city’s district 10 in December, collecting footage of the streets and public spaces. The images are fed into computer vision software and used to train the companies’ algorithms to detect the unwanted objects, according to interviews and documents the Guardian obtained through public records requests.
So instead of spending X dollars to ensure people have homes, we spend X++ dollars to evict them from their spaces?
Sure, it’s like how NYC spent $150 million to bust people evading $105,000 in subway fees. Absolutely anything to avoid legitimately helping people.
How else would the mega rich be able to buy up the property and rent out the spaces for normal people to finance?
It's literally cheaper to provide the unhoused with healthcare. Not just for them, but for housed people and all taxpayers. But we (as a society) don't. At this point I feel it's literally about cruelty, and punishing them for their "life choices". And you think we'll just give them homes!?
But Sosh uh izm!
Next time you ask yourself that question, remember that these cunts are spending your tax dollars to hurt those who have nothing left to lose. Vote them out
And considering that veterans are over represented in the homeless population, they actively hurt those who have served the country instead of helping them. Shameful!
quite ironically in this context, san jose is named after st. joseph -- he of the legal dad of jesus fame -- who was once famously told there was no room at the inn and had to make do in a stable.
Sounds about right for American-christianity.
Only if you're charging a luxury room price for the stable.
And help them right ? RIGHT ?
If only we didn’t live in a dystopia and that was what this was for.
One can only dream i guess.
San Jose's homeless is a very mixed bag. some wanting to be perpetually homeless, some actual recently loss home and is savable, some on the streets due to drugs (friend had a story where homeless asked for a burger, but refused one from a burger joint nearest by (implied wanted money for drugs)).
Weeding out whose helpable isnt an easy task, because not all homeless share the same reason on how they got to that lifestyle.
This is part of the problem with using terms like "homeless" to describe the occupants of an illegal campsite. There are numerous reasons one may choose to camp in a public space.
- Some are truly struggling to regain their financial footing and either the assistance programs are not helpful or they are unable to utilize them.
- Some are sick which causes them to be unable to participate functionally in society, and they have "fallen through the cracks" of services designed to support them.
- Some reject housing in favor of a lifestyle that demands less effort or accountability -- possibly in service of addiction, which ties into #2 above.
All members of society should have access to shelter (or a safe campsite, if that is our preference) and our basic needs met. As members of society, we shall follow laws which describe, for very good reasons, why we cannot simply erect a camping tent in a city park.
The problem with ignoring campsites is plummeting hygiene and safety. Waste is generated by day to day life and must be collected or eliminated. As campers accumulate and abandon the implements of a semi-permanent hovel: furniture, bedding, tarps, etc., the surrounding area transforms into a dumping site.
The technology described in the article already identifies potholes and illegal parking. It does not identify people or their race. Surely it could evolve into something with more potential for abuse, but in its current capacity, it is quite a neutral tool.
We have collected a lot of data on the "ignore and do nothing" solution -- the outcome is a scientific certainty. Using tools like this to measure progress (for better or worse) seems like something that would help generate support for other solutions, such as extensive expansion of low-cost/no-cost housing services.
Yes and no. San Jose has many many programs to assist the homeless, but some of them are dying in the creeks with flooding. We also have relatively new initiatives for reporting encampment to outreach groups instead of the police.
Not everywhere is a safe place for someone to settle. It's one thing to have a person spend the night somewhere, but services like these may help identify encampments that are establishing in areas at risk of flooding etc before they get too entrenched.
AI policing has begun.
They’ve already been using it to give probably cause and as evidence that all black people are the same and therefore guilty. I’m referring to facial recognition
In terms of legal precedent this may be a good thing in the long run.
The software billed as "AI" these days is half baked. If one or more law enforcement agencies point to the new piece of software the city deployed as their probable cause to make an arrest it won't take long for that to get challenged in court.
This sets the stage for the legality of the software to be challenged now (in half baked form) and to set a legal standard demanding high accuracy and/or human assessment when making an arrest.
this brave new future which we live in fucking sucks
Every year California is becoming more like Night City. Cyperpunk is supposed to be a dystopia, not an aspiration.
When housing becomes a for profit business, this is the result. It's happening in my city in Canada as well.
I have a homeless community sprouting up behind our cul de sac and it gets bigger each spring. It likely disappears in the winter, I've no desire to walk through the uncleared snow to find out. And a few blocks away people are camping out on sidewalks everywhere, it's becoming an epidemic, in a city that was once very affordable.
Tulsa Oklahoma is full of homeless encampments and this is supposed to be one of the cheaper states to live in. Yet landlords want to price their places like the bigger cities. It is scary to see what cost to rent in this town compared to the pay being offer for jobs. Its wonder there isn't more homeless.
Being homeless is like the software piracy equivalent of housing. You're not paying but rich people are "losing money" since homeless people aren't paying them $4000+/month therefore it's a crime.
Do you really think the concerns about encampments are all from rent seeking landlords?
Here in Minneapolis it's the number of murders, gang violence (territory), rape, and human trafficking.
Second tier issues are overdoses, fires, sanitation (which doesn't sound like much until you see the people with fingers and toes rotting off), and crime rates increasing as they try to make enough money to feed their drug habits.
It's a very complex issue. Much more complex than "the landlords are upset people aren't paying rent".
We're all shocked that New Technology X is used to target and oppress people
Is it done to give them home quicker? Is it?
*sigh*
"unwanted objects"
The rates of suicide are going to skyrocket
the accuracy for lived-in cars is still far lower: between 10 and 15%
Sounds like the tech isn’t terribly useful
That surely won’t stop governments from throwing millions at it or private companies from taking the money.
It doesn’t have to be accurate to be useful
Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
Basically a dowsing rod, totally incapable of detecting bombs, drugs, etc. But possibly still useful as a probable cause generator.
Maybe it's to help them.
Don't tell me, I like the illusion.
This sounds like a real opportunity for false positives as opposed to, I dunno, engaging with the community?
From the screen grabs, Since when is a legally street parked RV a homeless encampment? Looks like picking low hanging fruit for campaign talking points.
They start out identifying the various "races" probably. I'm a brown person and would like to keep reminding everyone that different races do not exist in the sense that it is not a scientific term with any meaning. A term with proper meaning is "species" and there is only one "homosapiens".... it's not just Juantastic who lives under the bridge, it's all of us. We are all a single family. Anyway, would you let your brother or sister or parents or relatives go live under a bridge and hungry? Nah right? What if they were thousands of miles away and didn't have a place to sleep in? Still nah! You would do whatever to try to help! So why are there homeless people in every city and why do we not help Gaza and Ukraine people? Right? We need to do a better job!
This might actually get struck down on constitutionality. How does one confront their accuser in court if the accuser is a trained neural net?
And that’s without even touching on the fact that ML is stochastic in nature, and should absolutely not be considered accurate enough to be an unsupervised and unmoderated single-point-of-failure decision engine in contexts like legal, medical, or other critical decision-making process. The fact that ML regularly and demonstrably hallucinates (or otherwise yields garbage output) is just not acceptable in a regulatory sense.
Source: software engineer in biotech; we are specifically disallowed from using ML at any level in our work for the above reasons, as well as potential HIPAA-related data mining issues.
I don’t know much about jurisprudence, but wouldn’t the neural net be a tool of the person that brought the lawsuit.
Like if you get brought in due to DNA, you don’t have to face the centrifuge that helped extract your DNA from the sample?
You’re ignoring the fact that using such a failure-prone system to initiate legal proceedings against a citizen is ABSOLUTELY going to overload an already overloaded system. And that’s not even going into the fact that it puts an unjust burden on those falsely accused, or the fact that it’s targeting a segment of the population that’s a lot more likely to go “fuck it, I don’t care, how could things possibly get worse” (read: serious depression, PTSD, other neurodivergences that often correlate with being unhoused). This is by-design.
This is an all-around grade-A shit policy. It’s also a policy designed to treat the symptom instead of the cause. It will make the streets around San Jose look a bit nicer, and in doing so it will harm a lot of people.
The service described in the article has nothing to do with courts, regulation, enforcement, or the legal system. It is used by city maintenance to identify elements of public property in need of attention, such as abandoned vehicles and potholes in the asphalt. It is being adapted to identify accumulations of trash and other indicators of illegal camping which are important to maintainers of public spaces.
Holy Mackerel! Could this be any more of an extremely boring dumb and awful cyberpunk dystopia? Good God!
I'm going to choose to believe that the goal is to know how to more efficiently deliver aid to those that need it
disgraceful. If I ever meet somebody involved in this....
What a great new use for Ai 😂 I can drive, identify vehicles that people are living in with 70% accuracy and pick out fresh new tracks on iTunes with 25% accuracy. How many companies did they have working on this so they can later make millions not actually fixing anything :-(
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For the last several months, a city at the heart of Silicon Valley has been training artificial intelligence to recognize tents and cars with people living inside in what experts believe is the first experiment of its kind in the United States.
Last July, San Jose issued an open invitation to technology companies to mount cameras on a municipal vehicle that began periodically driving through the city’s district 10 in December, collecting footage of the streets and public spaces.
There’s no set end date for the pilot phase of the project, Tawfik said in an interview, and as the models improve he believes the target objects could expand to include lost cats and dogs, parking violations and overgrown trees.
City documents state that, in addition to accuracy, one of the main metrics the AI systems will be assessed on is their ability to preserve the privacy of people captured on camera – for example, by blurring faces and license plates.
The group, made up of dozens of current and formerly unhoused people, has recently been fighting a policy proposed last August by the San Jose mayor, Matt Mahan, that would allow police to tow and impound lived-in vehicles near schools.
In addition to providing a training ground for new algorithms, San Jose’s position as a national leader on government procurement of technology means that its experiment with surveilling encampments could influence whether and how other cities adopt similar detection systems.
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Hate my state.
Vote better.
Doesn't the Democratic party have complete majority control of most cities and the state legislature?
That's a party which usually claims to be about taking care of poor people or 'housing is a human right', but I keep seeing evidence that part of California's issue is residents eliminating any/all zoning that isn't classic single family homes in places where there's tons of good jobs, but super expensive housing.
It's hard to wade through political party propaganda, but I thought this was well documented.
I don't live in CA, so I don't really know more than articles publish, but it just seems like they voted for the more American liberal/progressive party and still aren't getting those values?
Maybe you cope with the noxium of urine created amonia, the feces, the needles, the petty crime, and getting hassled and called a "fa**ot" for not having a $1 bill in San Jose, Oakland, SF, or LA but I cannot. All the well wishes are nice, and I would love love if the homeless could be put into unused office space or whatever pipedream is trendy at the time (and there have been a lot of pipedreams in my shortish life). But I want them gone, I want the worse-than-a-favela shantytowns, and I want the smell gone. I don't really give a shit how it's done so long as it isn't cruel or illegal.
So sick to death of all the magical thinking from other liberals in this state. We have the run the of the place and homeless is worse by 5 fold. And the Republicans are just practically begging for mass execution and deportation, as is their way.
I don't care anymore. Just go away.
You just want them gone, how uhh, how are you going to do that?
Hey look its the bay area. Can it burn down again please. Sincerely some redneck from the IE
Right, why can’t it be a wonderful place to live like Riverside or San Bernardino?
Yeah we're shitholes but we are damned well aware of it. Only the rich fuckers think otherwise.
These 'homeless' are no better than Gypsies. They reject society and take advantage of the good nature in people. They are scumbags and do not deserve sympathy.
If they can stand on the same corner every day at the same time they are more than capable of getting a job.
This comment is so ridiculous it has to be some sort of bait.
Yeah it's a bit racist about the Gypsies on top of the rest of the shit-take
Not my fault you have your head up your ass. Open your eyes. Think for yourself.
Too scary huh? Never mind just go back to sleep, be a good little NPC.