Life Inside a Skinner Box: Confronting our Future of Automated Law Enforcement

Life Inside a Skinner Box: Confronting our Future of Automated Law Enforcement

From smart pajamas that monitor our sleep patterns to mandatory black boxes in cars to smart trash carts that divulge recycling violations in Cleveland, virtually every aspect of our lives is becoming instrumented and increasingly connected to law enforcement, government, and private entities. At the same time, these entities are incentivized to further collect, process, and punish in the name of financial advantage, public safety, or security. The trend of automated law enforcement is inescapable and touches every citizen. This talk will explore the implications of automated law enforcement, study the incentives at play, survey recent advances in sensing and surveillance technology, and will seek to answer the following questions and more. Were laws written with the idea of universal and perfect enforcement in mind? What are the implications of living in a society where every transgression might be detected and punished? What happens to the discretion of the officer on the beat, and the larger system of law, when we take the human out of the loop? Where does a security savvy, privacy conscious, and law abiding society end and a police state begin? You'll leave this talk with an awareness of the problem of automated law enforcement, challenges we face in ensuring such systems are properly constrained, ideas for your personal research agenda, and tools to help improve the prospects of our collective future.

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