I disagree. A private company with a confidential algorithm is determining police response based on Facebook posts.
The "secret sauce" of machine learning algorithms is almost always "shit that makes no sense, but makes it perform well on our testing set." That said, I can buy such an algorithm being good at making the predictions it makes. Give it as a project to a machine learning class and I bet most everyone would come up with something that works pretty well. I don't buy anyone doing it I'm-willing-to-let-it-advise-the-cops-to-kick-someone's-door-down well though.
A thoughtcrime is the act of thinking of committing a crime. It looks more like a device police are currently using as a consultant in regards to dangerous situations. They don't appear to be using it to arrest those who merely think of committing a crime.
— Part I, Chapter I, Nineteen Eighty-Four ------This articleAny sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.
In promotional materials, Intrado writes that Beware could reveal that the resident of a particular address was a war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, had criminal convictions for assault and had posted worrisome messages about his battle experiences on social media. The “big data” that has transformed marketing and other industries has now come to law enforcement.
Is this a refutation? It doesn't seem to dispute my point. I said, "It looks more like a device police are currently using as a consultant in regards to dangerous situations." What you quoted from the article is merely a promotional example of the technology's capabilities. If your quote had said "Beware flags potentially dangerous situations, predicting and reporting criminal activities or highly suspicious conversations to the user..." then I think it would be a decent refutation. Instead, the article even says, "... the program flags issues and provides a report to the user." That's it. The rest of the article suggests, as I said, "police are currently using it as a consultant in regards to dangerous situations."
Your point is that "thoughtcrime" was improperly used in the title, as evidenced by your own made-up definition of "thoughtcrime." I refuted that by quoting the actual description of thoughtcrime from Nineteen Eighty-Four indicating that thoughtcrime was fought in Orwell's novel through intensive blanket surveillance in order to determine dissent. I followed up with an example of Intrado's intensive blanket surveillance in order to determine facts or statements outside the norm of society. Your response to this is that your new narrowly-determined standards for evidence do not meet your own proprietary requirements, at which point I 1) cease to care what you think 2) cease to humor your argument. Have a nice weekend.
It seems more like you're just doing a poor job of arguing your point, and that's why you don't want to continue. Otherwise, you're right, that was my initial point. I believed the use of 'thoughtcrime' was incorrect in the title. I still believe so. Then you made a counter argument, and I don't think you bothered to read what you quoted. You offered a quote from the article that didn't at all challenge what I was saying. You then pulled an excerpt from Nineteen Eighty-Four that didn't even define a thoughtcrime. It just details the surveillance capabilities of the Thought Police. For your convenience, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary: So no, I wasn't operating under my "own made-up definition of "thoughtcrime."" I was operating under the definition. The first use of the phrase in the novel that I can think of is after Winston is writing "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER" over and over. The novel then explains that the criminal act of writing this doesn't matter, because the Thought Police would have already known Winston was thinking "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER". This is a thoughtcrime. It is a thought that is criminal in and of itself. Your quote from the novel say the extent of a thoughtcrime can go so far as to include any simple support for political dissent. Even so, as I keep saying, this is not what Beware currently appears to be used for. The article says it's being used for consultation. Anyway, you have a good weekend, too. :)An instance of unorthodox or controversial thinking, considered as a criminal offence or as socially unacceptable
Much like banning porn, this tech is not the goal, but the means. Once they can ban porn the next logical course of action is banning the people we don't like. The tech is exactly the same; banning porn or gay media or conservative talk is the same thing from a technology point of view. Once you get stuff like this working, the next logical step is to act before the thought becomes physical. You don't want to be soft on crime now, do you Mr. Elected Official? Questions for further observation and research deal with processing the subtle differences between structured and noisy data, weighted social media input layers, and time-series analysis. PDF of a study on if this can be done. Some neat stuff in there, including how to deal with the firehose of offal you get from shoveling all the social media shit they are trying to gather. Another paper with an abstract that makes me want to read the paper You have curtains on your windows not necessarily because you are doing something wrong, but because having a private space is needed for human mental health.A thoughtcrime is the act of thinking of committing a crime.
Don't worry, man. As excited as I am for the future of technology, I am concerned with its implications and potential for misuse.