(Image: Gerard Dubois)
JOHN GASS was certain he’d done nothing wrong. Yet there it was, in black and white: the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles had revoked his driving licence.
It took him nearly two weeks, numerous calls to the registry and a court hearing to put things right. For the 41-year-old it was a nightmare, threatening his livelihood as a professional driver. For the registry it was clear: Gass had committed fraud by applying for more than one driver’s licence – caught thanks to a facial-recognition algorithm.
In Massachusetts, and most other US states, the headshots on millions of licences are scanned routinely to spot criminals, underage drivers, people using fake names, and those suspended from driving. Yet in Gass’s case, originally reported by the Boston Globe, the computer had made a mistake. It was policing-by-algorithm gone wrong.
Over the past few years, law enforcement agencies have begun replacing human police officers with efficient, all-seeing, algorithms. They watch for crimes using ubiquitous sensors, cameras, facial-recognition software and intelligent computerised analysis. From traffic offences to theft, increasingly it’s an algorithm watching out: alerting police, or even dispatching punishment with no human oversight whatsoever.
Advocates argue that automated policing cuts cost, frees up resources and ensures wrongdoers do not escape justice. Yet many lawyers and computer scientists warn that we may not want to live in the algorithmically enforced world we’re headed for. Not only does it do away with key principles of civilised societies – such as discretion – it could also force us to change our behaviour in undesirable ways.
While the sophistication of automated policing has accelerated in the last few…
