Artificial Intelligence (AI) is promising to make cars safer by taking the most error-prone human decisions out of the equation of driving. The average driver must make well over a hundred decisions for every mile they drive, and one poor decision while driving could result in a deadly accident.
I don’t have any research to back it up, but I can imagine that a police officer must also make hundreds of decisions in an average police encounter with a suspect. As we see in the news, poor decisions by some police officers have resulted in fatal encounters.
What if AI can aid police officers in decision-making? Police officers often must make life or death decisions in a fraction of a second, often with incomplete information. Is she reaching for her cellphone, or a gun? Is he behaving in a threatening way out of fear, or has he decided to attack the officer? Is that gun real, or a toy? These are all questions that AI may be able to solve faster and with more accuracy than a human.
Imagine if police bodycams can be upgraded to provide enough historical training data and real-time data to an AI so that it can make accurate decisions for police officers quickly? Perhaps the system can be connected to the officer’s gun, so the gun is only operable if the AI determines that a threat is present. If the AI determines based on past encounters that the way a suspect is moving toward the officer is non-threatening, it could disable the officer’s gun to prevent an accidental shooting.
Having an AI make life or death decisions can also remove biases the officer may have from the decision making process. Such a system could provide a fail-safe system to prevent errors in the officer’s judgement from resulting in innocent deaths. In the event that an accidental injury does occur, the AI’s decision not to lock the gun could also provide plausible evidence that the officer’s decision to shoot was reasonable.
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