DamianTV
04-10-2013, 03:58 PM
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/hate-red-light-cameras-youll-really-hate-speeding-ticket-robots/
STANFORD, CA—Four academics from West Point and Samford University in Alabama set out to answer a seemingly simple question: how would one write a computer program to issue speeding tickets? After all, speed limits are fairly simple—you’re either driving faster than the posted number or you’re not.
In the age of Google and its competitors making fully autonomous cars (and states passing laws to allow them), it’s not hard to imagine fully autonomous law enforcement for traffic violations, either. After all, we already have red-light cameras.
“If anyone thinks it is a simple thing to do, to take a simple law [and convert it to machine-readable code], it is significantly more complicated than one thought,” Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University and one of the paper's co-authors, told Ars.
Hartzog and one of his co-authors presented a paper (PDF) at the “We Robots” conference at Stanford Law School on Monday. Academics, scholars, lawyers, and technologists gathered to discuss robots, autonomous systems, and how they interact with society—the conference, which is also being live-streamed, will conclude on Tuesday.
The four academics, which included two computer science professors from West Point and an English and philosophy professor also from the military academy, collected real-world speed data and assigned third-year computer science students from the famed military institution to “determine algorithmically whether violations occurred” and to issue “mock traffic tickets.”
What is a speeding law, anyway?
As the academics write:
(article continues on link)
Welcome to a world without Privacy...
STANFORD, CA—Four academics from West Point and Samford University in Alabama set out to answer a seemingly simple question: how would one write a computer program to issue speeding tickets? After all, speed limits are fairly simple—you’re either driving faster than the posted number or you’re not.
In the age of Google and its competitors making fully autonomous cars (and states passing laws to allow them), it’s not hard to imagine fully autonomous law enforcement for traffic violations, either. After all, we already have red-light cameras.
“If anyone thinks it is a simple thing to do, to take a simple law [and convert it to machine-readable code], it is significantly more complicated than one thought,” Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University and one of the paper's co-authors, told Ars.
Hartzog and one of his co-authors presented a paper (PDF) at the “We Robots” conference at Stanford Law School on Monday. Academics, scholars, lawyers, and technologists gathered to discuss robots, autonomous systems, and how they interact with society—the conference, which is also being live-streamed, will conclude on Tuesday.
The four academics, which included two computer science professors from West Point and an English and philosophy professor also from the military academy, collected real-world speed data and assigned third-year computer science students from the famed military institution to “determine algorithmically whether violations occurred” and to issue “mock traffic tickets.”
What is a speeding law, anyway?
As the academics write:
(article continues on link)
Welcome to a world without Privacy...