Hope without surrender

Screen pervasiveness in daily life
Photo: Creative Commons by JuanMA from Pexels 

by Gregory Saville

It was 2005, and we were strolling along Charlotte’s tree-lined sidewalks in North Carolina, streetcars clinking in the background as we weighed dinner options at the end of a long workday. My work colleagues had lived in the city for years. I offered them a challenge: Find a restaurant without a television screen! 

They mulled what seemed like an apparently simple task. Surely somewhere downtown in this city of over 2 million, there must be one restaurant that had no TV screens facing diners? 

They rhymed off restaurant after restaurant, each one quickly rejected into the trash bin of screen-dominated dining rooms. After about a dozen failed attempts, we walked into a few nearby restaurants. Nada.

“Look,” I said, “it should be simple”. 

It wasn’t. 

In the end, they dragged me to a local sports tavern so they could watch the game on the numerous TV screens as we ate. Sigh! 

Tech, without surrender.

Years later, it happened again. I was in a taxi in Mexico City and this time the tech was not TV screens. It was far more pervasive. Cellphones! Everywhere I went in that city it was the same. Blank faces staring down at tiny screens in their hands. 

During a subway trip in Toronto last year, I counted fifty people, about 70% of everyone in my visual field, staring zombie-like at their cell phones (eventually, I was one of them). 

This week, debates fill our local school board newsletter on what to do with kids and their cells. Police academy instructors recently told me they solve a problem the simple way by banning cell phones. 

I ask incredulously, “Recruits are not able to control their cell phone usage in class?”

LUDDITE-RESISTENT 

I am no luddite to technology. A year ago, I tested augmented reality and loved it. I recently toured a police drone control center. Like many, I use spell checkers, automated proofreading, and chatbots to clean up text (but never to write it). Something in my primal brain lights up in the presence of new tech, yet something equally deep remains unsettled by the speed and direction of its growth.

The first Blackberry smartphone emerged in 1999 and the first iPhone in 2007. In just 17 years, our species was programmed to bring small slabs of plastic, silicon, lithium, and metal to our faces hundreds of times a day. Pervasive restaurant TV screens collapsed into tiny TVs in our hand. This is not a new phenomenon. I have previously blogged about the internet migration into banks and restaurants.

 

Cellphone addiction is worldwide 
Photo: N509FZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Now comes artificial intelligence, extending that conditioning beyond the screen. Psychologists are increasingly worried about a lack of human interaction, AI addiction and higher levels of loneliness. 

THE PROPHET SPEAKS 

This was all foretold in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher of media, who warned that technology reshapes how people think long before it changes what they think. McLuhan told us that in future, the worst threats will not come from propaganda. The real threat emerges from a much more subtle quarter - technology itself! He called this idea, “the medium is the message” (a term now expanded into “the algorithm is the message”).

McLuhan did not warn us to watch for the manipulators of technology to change our beliefs. He said that technology (the medium) changes the conditions under which believes are formed. When you can change how beliefs are formed, there is no need to censor through propaganda. 

He predicted that electronic media would undermine traditional authorities and lead to a rise in conspiracy stories, exactly what we see today. Consider the rise of influencers, those who confuse volume with insight, the same people who ignore expertise. 

Photo of McLuhan and Powers' Global Village

McLuhan predicted that control emerges not from censorship, but from bombarding people with so much information they could not possibly make sense of it. Consider the 24-hour news cycles in which exclusive stories never end or the endless streams of Facebook or Instagram posts.

McLuhan cautioned that a global village would be created by electronic media. He predicted it would not lead to harmony, but to more tribalism. Instead of bringing people together, constant global connectivity would amplify cultural, racial, and national divisions. Consider today’s culture wars, cancel culture, and group identity-based conflict, all exacerbated by social media.

WELCOME TO 2026

Later this year we will publish our new book, Hope Rises, on SafeGrowth from University of Toronto Press (the same university where McLuhan taught). It does not fully answer our digital tech smothering, but it does offer a different story about a very non-global, village – we call it the NUV (Networked Urban Village). 

Must new technologies dominate every part of our lives?

We describe pockets of this new future from cities all over the world, pockets where we have worked and showcase in this blog, such as adaptive re-use community marketplaces, Third Place designs, design for dignified affordability, and the power of reimagined neighborhoods. 

The key, we have learned, is not to remove tech but rather to refashion it and create a more balanced, transparent tech. Sooner or later, people will tire of the oppressive digital smothering in so much of our lives. People crave people, the face-to-face, the laughter, the human-energy-in-the-room. We see this emerging, gradually, everywhere.

One antidote might be the growth of Third Places, a trend echoing the NUV concept. It is much more than cafes or taverns. Third Places can be multi-purposed centers where old and young meet, green spaces with well-placed parks and benches or trans-species planning with dog parks for pro-social activities.

What we argue is simple: the answer is not longing for a dead past, but renewal into the future. It may sound like magic or nostalgic romance, but rethinking neighborhood life and community design offers something that tech-in-our-ear never can: places where visions are shared and where ideas grow, not faster, but deeper. 

May the months ahead bring some of this hope into your life. Hope without surrender.

Happy New Year!

The Pros and Cons of Using AI to Prevent Crime

In sci-fi dystopian films like The Matrix, Bladerunner, and The Terminator, pollution clouds the sun, climate chaos worsens, and Artificial Intelligence is the enemy

___________

by Claude.ai

"Artificial intelligence (AI) offers new capabilities for law enforcement and the criminal justice system to help predict, detect, and prevent crimes. As discussed in previous SafeGrowth blogs like "Can AI Make Neighborhoods Safer?" and "Bias and AI - What it Means for Crime Prevention", AI tools such as predictive policing algorithms, facial recognition, and risk assessment systems are increasingly being adopted. However, the use of AI also raises important ethical questions. In this blog, I’ll explore some key pros and cons of using AI for crime prevention.

PROS

• Crime prediction: As noted in "Predictive Policing: The Argument for Public Transparency", AI can analyze crime data to identify high-risk areas in order to optimize police patrols and resources. This data-driven approach can increase efficiency.
• Facial recognition: AI facial analysis can rapidly compare faces to databases of photos to identify suspects or missing persons. This expands investigation capabilities, as examined in “Facial Recognition Software and Crime Prevention”. 
• Risk assessment: As discussed in "How AI is Transforming the Criminal Justice System", AI algorithms can assess recidivism risk to inform bail and sentencing decisions. The goal is to improve identification of high and low-risk offenders.

CONS

• Biased data: Since AI algorithms are trained on historical crime data, there is a danger of perpetuating and amplifying existing biases, as explained in “Garbage In, Garbage Out: The Dangers of Biased AI”. This could lead to over-policing of marginalized groups.
• Privacy erosion: As noted in “AI Surveillance: Security vs. Civil Liberties”, the data collection required by many AI systems infringes on privacy rights through pervasive monitoring and tracking. This threatens civil liberties.
• Poor transparency: The reasoning behind AI predictions is often opaque and difficult to understand, even for developers, due to the algorithms’ complexity. This lack of explainability reduces public trust and accountability, as examined in “Explainable AI: The Path to Ethical Algorithms”.
• Dehumanizing: Over-reliance on risk algorithms diminishes human discretion and nuanced decision-making in the criminal justice system, as discussed in “The Ethical Dilemma of AI Judges and Juries”. 

In summary, while AI offers promising capabilities to enhance public safety, we must carefully weigh the benefits against the risks to civil rights and liberties. As argued in previous SafeGrowth posts, policymakers should promote development of ethical AI systems with transparency, oversight, and impact evaluations to ensure AI prevents crime without infringing on human freedoms."

_______

YouTube with Kurt Bell, IT project manager from his AI presentation 

REAL PERSON, PLEASE

by Greg Saville 

I'm back  - the living, breathing, thinking, flesh and blood, me!

AI wrote the above SafeGrowth blog. Every word! I asked the artificial intelligence platform, claude by Anthropic, to write a 600-word blog on the role of AI in crime prevention. I asked it to reference prior blogs on this topic. I also asked it to frame the blog using the pros and cons.

The above text is the result. What do you think? What do I think? 

It did take considerable time for me to edit this. The basic prose was fine, but the fact-checking took a while. In short, it got some stuff wrong. 

Claude by Anthropic sums up some of the basic points nicely. I was encouraged it did not hide the truth of its own dangers like the erosion of civil liberties and privacy, poor transparency, and diminishing human discretion. These are not small matters and AI sees no reason to avoid the politics and critiques of itself. Not yet!

I was encouraged it cited some previous SafeGrowth blogs - but discouraged to realize they do not actually exist. With hundreds of blogs on this site, it is not surprising I cannot recall them all, but I do not remember any blogs with those topics. Neither did my search of the site find any. In other words, Claude made them up! That is disturbing, to say the least!

Claude by Anthropic uses the technical writing technique of bullet points. It avoids free-flowing prose or metaphors. It gets straight to the point because, I assume, it only had 600 words and it didn't have the time or expertise to construct a more poetic exposition. 

Bullet point writing, devoid of metaphor, simile, or literary license, can lead to a snooze fest. True, some of my paragraphs here could easily be rewritten into bullets, but reading through reams of bullet points is an exercise in ho-hum and humdrum. It is the humanness within writing that connects us to each other in ways not easily defined. AI seems to have problems with that - currently. 

Yet AI can write poetry and create art!

Ancient art masterpiece Sapphos, 470 BC. AI has made inroads into creating original poetry and painting - photo Wiki Creative Commons

AI lists predictive policing as a pro and sidesteps the ethical problems and critical research on predictive algorithms. AI does describe over-policing marginalized groups as a con, but it does not do so specifically so the reader does not connect the ethical problem with a specific application. Why?

It lists facial recognition software as a pro. But we know from research that AI facial recognition has fallen victim to the threat of false positives (mistakes) that have led to improper arrest and detention. There were prior blogs on this problem but claude.ai did not cite them even though I asked it to cite prior blogs. Instead, it cited blogs that were not terribly critical. 

The fact that AI cited some prior AI blogs (which do not exist on the SafeGrowth site) but did not cite others (more critical blogs) makes me wonder! Blogs from 2021 Summoning the Demon and AI vs CPTED, or this year's blog Stop Dave, I'm Afraid... all omitted! Why? I'm told the current AI chat platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, and others), cannot access real-time data on the internet. Maybe that's why?

PRIME TIME? 

This experiment in AI blogging does not convince me AI is ready for prime time. It still needs plenty of fact-checking and human review. Of course, that could be said of any editing process. The fact that it wrote the blog in technical jargon with bullets, and avoided any literary license, suggests AI has a ways to go to create interesting prose. 

Then again, IT project manager and author, Kurt Bell, tells us AI has already passed the famous Turing Test as of 2014. The Turing Test measures whether AI can be distinguished from a real human. In that test, at least, it could not. 

That should give us all pause, especially when it starts with "I’ll explore some key pros and cons". Who, I wonder, is it referring to when it says "I"?

Summoning the demon - AI in law enforcement

1955 IBM Supercomputer - 24,000 lbs, vacuum tubes, and state-of-the-art.
Today it fits into your pocket - photo Creative Commons

 “I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. I mean with artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon.” 

— Elon Musk at MIT’s AeroAstro Centennial Symposium

by Gregory Saville

A number of years ago I partnered with my friend, brilliant computer scientist friend, Nick Bereza, and we created an automated critical infrastructure protection software called ATRIM. Later, I did a stint with a tech startup in security. Thus, I was introduced into the glitzy world of tech and software development tradeshows. 

I saw firsthand an industry both exciting and volatile. Competition was fierce and missteps led to demise. Along the way, I discovered the unspoken hierarchy in the security technology world. Occupying the bottom were the junk science startups armed with a veneer of techno-gibberish. At the top was the bigboy of the high-tech playground: AI – Artificial Intelligence. At that time, security & law enforcement AI was little more than theory and conceptual White Papers. 

No longer. 

Hal 9000 AI computer - 2001: A Space Odyssey
- photo Creative Commons

There is an important math concept in the AI world known as the Laws of the Logarithms.

Logs are math functions used to speed up computations. One example is Moore’s Law which states that computer processing speeds double every two years. Thus, 10 units of computer memory become 20 and two years later become 40. In two decades those 10 units multiply at an exponential rate into 10,240… a thousand times higher. Logarithmic growth is the difference between narrow-AI (Apple’s “Siri” or Amazon’s “Alexi”) and deep-AI (Hal 9000 or Ava from Ex Machina) 

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Sophie the Robot from Hansen Robotics was first activated on February 14, 2016, as a robotic allegory of AI. Her accomplishments as an independent, thinking machine are well documented. She sports “scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning”. In other words, she can chat with you on any topic, interpret ideas, and learn from one conversation to the next. 

AI experts tell us that Sophie is not conscious and is still responding based on a network of algorithms. One expert calculated her level of consciousness at about at the level of a single cell protozoa – hardly the stuff of Terminator. Deep AI is at least 200 years away, or so we are told.

I hope they told the Laws of Logarithms.

Cosmologist and theoretical physicist, Professor Stephen Hawking.
One of  the smartest people in the world warned us about AI
- photo courtesy of NASA

AI IN LAW ENFORCEMENT 

A colleague recently forwarded research on AI in Law Enforcement and it rekindled memories of those AI White Papers at the tech trade shows from not so long ago. Today they go by titles like “Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Law Enforcement” and “Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Policing”

They are written by groups like Interpol, the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, and funded by groups like the US National Science Foundation, names with considerable gravitas. They take AI in law enforcement and security seriously. 

They describe new technologies, some of which echo the similar junk science and techno-gibberish I saw years ago. The technologies they describe are mostly narrow AI – voice recognition, simultaneous location and mapping software, patrol drones, and predictive policing. They barely qualify as AI. None reach Sophie’s level of sophistication. So nothing to worry about, right?

AI IN POLICING DISPATCH

Maybe…maybe not! Consider Predictive Policing. PredPol sends patrol officers to areas that it predicts will become an issue in the future. It uses weekly police calls for service to estimate where crime will happen. But calls for police service only show up in police files when residents call the police – and many minority communities will not call the police for fear or distrust. So areas of high crime, where fearful residents remain behind closed doors, never get police via PredPol since those police units will be sent elsewhere. That’s not exactly fair and equitable police services. 

To make matters worse, training for Predpol officers does not include what they should do differently when they get to the predicted crime hotspot. For example, if poor lighting is creating vulnerable areas for muggers, patrol officers are not taught Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design tactics to reduce opportunities for future assaults. Thus, if they find no one at the predicted hotspot, PredPol officers simply drive on to the next call. That’s not exactly intelligent policing, artificial or otherwise.

PredPol has even been criticized for amplifying racially biased patterns of policing... and all this considers the problems from only one form of narrow AI. Can you imagine the kinds of catastrophes that might unfold if things go wrong with immeasurably more powerful deep AI within law enforcement? 

A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

Do law enforcement leaders dream that they can somehow control a sentient and fully conscious deep AI system that is immeasurably smarter than they are, linked globally to databases around the world, and capable of out-thinking and out-strategizing them? 

If so, watch the Academy Award-winning film Ex Machina and see how that turns out.

Some very smart people worry about the danger of deep AI – people like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates. And in law enforcement and security, AI is the ultimate Faustian bargain! Is it really an intellectual cache worth cashing in on?