Re: Rejection policy of the Cypherpunks mailing list

[Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>]

jim bell wrote:
> At 09:05 PM 1/28/97 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote:
> >I dare say that the downside of this is much less pleasant than the
> >virtual anarchy (in the bad sense) we suffer now.  If the police get
> >out of control, A.P. will arrive just in time to plug a few of those
> >holes, so to speak.  Ideally, future robotics should be able to provide
> >something like Gort (sp?) to take the place of human officers, given
> >advances in the kind of pattern matching needed to deter aggression and
> >the like.  Those who don't make it past the robots, well, the rest of
> >us can learn to behave, and we'll be much better off when we do.

> Your comparison with the fictional Gort, in the movie "The day the earth
> stood still" is of course apt.  It was only after I'd written most of the
> essay that I realized that an AP-type system would function much as Gort did.

There are some things that just go off in my mind like a light bulb
coming on, and the realization that the system would take care of
itself was one of those things.

> Occasionally we (CP) see a spoof where somebody claims to have developed a
> software program to "replace the judicial system" or something like that.
> Well, the problem with such a claim (aside from the obvious and enormous
> AI-type difficulties) is that the current system contains numerous biases.
> Writing a program to replace the legal system would presumably require that
> these biases be measured (and admitted-to!) and implemented into a
> well-defined system.

There is also a great deal of disinformation in the system, which
leads to a misperception on the public's part about just what those
biases might be.

Examples that come to mind are the OKC bombing and the OJ murders.
In both cases, grand juries composed of middle class people (all or
almost all White in the Simpson case) would not indict based on the
evidence they were given, and so they were dissolved and an excuse
was made up to cover someone's butt.  Now some of the fallout is
blowing in in the form of revelations about the FBI crime lab.

> What we'd discover is that the current system only barely resembles the
> guarantees in the US Constitution. At that point, there would be an argument
> between those who will insist that the Constitution be followed, and those
> who believe that the current de-facto system, however biased, be maintained
> as-is.

I don't see any reason why we can't develop programs to do certain
levels of preliminary analysis in these cases, much like the programs
which have been around for years on PC's, i.e., Mind Prober, Decision
Analyst, and so on.  I gotta believe that teams of people who prepare
these cases are using this stuff anyway, albeit discretely.  If it's
brought out into the open, and the public can look at case facts that
have been processed thru multiple software sites, it would have to be
a helluva lot better than Joe Schmucko's byline in the L.A. Times,
for example.