Comment Re:My two cents (Score 1) 143
This really isn't different than a police officer viewing the recording to see the offender's face, then going through books of mugshots to find the face, then investigating those people that the officer thinks might be the offender. This is simply the computer taking the image that the police officer identified and searching those "books" for close matches, then the police looking at the MO of the crime as compared to the MO of the person previously arrested, and investigating ones that have the most commonality first.
Well, since a lot of manual bars were and are lowered when we go from manual matching to computerized search you have to be a bit more careful with that argument. (It's close to being an antique if nothing else).
It's akin to the difference between going out fishing with a pole or two, to scouring the ocean with a fleet of trawlers. In essence it's the same activity, but the effects can be vastly different.
It's for example not at all improbable that the quality of match will decrease significantly when computers are involved for the single simple fact that a search doesn't "cost" nearly as much as with the manual system, and therefore it will be used much less judiciously. It goes from "Won't do that until there's a clear chance it will succeed", to "Well, it doesn't hurt to try." If people (e.g. courts) are still used to the evidentiary value of the old process, which wasn't typically used unless police thought it worthwhile, then the risk of falsely accusing someone just went up. (Perhaps even significantly). And that's just one risk off the top of my head.
So it's often not that computers allow a significantly different behaviour in theory (in fact we're crap at coming up with fundamentally new and exciting ways of using computers), we're masters at automating the old "manual" ways of doing things. It's that automating something tends to lead to difference use cases in practice, as it enables usage that would previously have been prohibitively expensive, and that we're usually crap at predicting what those effects would be.
(Compare mass surveillance. Hitler and East Germany did it, but they were about the only ones as the cost were staggering when all you had were manual methods of collection and analysis of the collecte data (the latter typically dominated cost). It was cost prohibitive for everybody but the most hard core of tyrants. Today the methods are so cheap that it happens almost by "accident" when it comes to the private sector, and even well run democracies fall into the "mass surveillance" trap, since it's it's so cheap and keeping it secret is much easier due to lower number of people who have to be involved. And the latter is one of those secondary effects that we're crap at foreseeing. It used to be that you couldn't keep that level of surveillance secret, there were just too many people involved. Everybody had to know they were oppressed, which meant that some organisations wouldn't dream of using it, lest they be tarred with that brush. Today it's relatively much easier and that's much of the outrage (what little there is, unfortunately), that people have come to the realisation that the US can, in a sence, be East Germany, without having to look like it. (Well, that likeness is of course not to be taken too far, obviously there are clear differences, but you get my drift.)