Not sure why this was modded flamebait. I don't see anything grossly inaccurate and any editorializing isn't exactly couched in fantasy.

That largely depends on what the contract actually says, and how the data is 'federated' within Flock's own systems.

It sounds like Flock's business model was to build the massive data-collection system, but since that's expensive, it used contracts with government entities to pay for the build-out. The contracts with each of the entities might well be for the services delivered to them, but since many municipalities have separate contracts for how real estate (and installing something on a light pole counts) then Flock might be maintaining their own contracts separately for the physical placement of their cameras.

So Flock gets agencies/government to pay for the services of license plate data collection with one contract then uses another contract for Flock to pay for the rental for pole space. If the contract to provide data to the polity lapses or is terminated, that doesn't necessarily mean that Flock's permits to maintain equipment on poles is also terminated as they're separate contracts. Granted, operating the cameras is on Flock's dime now, but if they continue to harvest data then they might find takers for that data even if not the original municipality or other agency who paid for the cameras.

The thing that our current interpretation of the Constitution lacks is where the dividing line between one's self and a third-party sits when it comes to the sanctity of one's person, papers, and effects. At the time that the Constitution was written there was no photography, let alone videography, mass-processing of records automatically, etc. Someone had to physically observe someone in public in order to know what they did, and could only repeat with their words what they saw rather than demonstrating it. We don't have good law for 3rd party collection of volumes of data about people and the ability of said 3rd party to provide that data to the government. A ruling, law, or amendment that puts protections on requesting information and establishes some kind of checks and balances system that applies to the government in all its forms is needed. I don't know what the threshold should be either, but clearly right now when we have stories where the justification for a search is, "ASDFG" then something needs to change.

And what does the language matter anyway when you can now type in pseudocode into Copilot and ask it to form perfect equivalent code in any language?

It is possible to put laws into place that require how public-private partnerships work. It would be an imposition upon Flock and upon the police. And that is just fine, and as it should be.

Law enforcement contracting to the private sector should not be allowed to be a bypass of our rights.

The only place I see Al in the legal profession making sense is to do basic caselaw research, where it can cite the sources and the references upstream and downstream to those sources. The lawyer should be responsible to review the claimed caselaw citations to determine the merit of their support for the argument that the lawyer is making, and to pick the particular citations to use that are the strongest for the particular case.

Likewise the same sort of search but inverted, for one's opponent's most likely arguments or rebuttals might be performed, again with the lawyer doing the review based on the citations that the Al tool provided.

There was a television series in the 2010s called Person of Interest where the premise was that one of the main characters had managed to achieve Al, but in order to satisfy legal constraints, the Al was only allowed to spit-out a single phrase about a person, rather than any detail of any sort. It was up to the limited number of persons associated with the Al to figure out why this 'person of interest' had been referenced, whether they were the perpetrator, the victim, a witness, or someone who would suffer downstream effects. While soft science fiction, and pretty clearly taking inspiration from the older series Quantum Leap in having to figure out why they were there, the concept had some merit as to how Al should really be used. It should be treated as untrusted, it should be treated as requiring thorough review. It should be treated as another tool available, but no more trustable or authoritative than any other, and arguably a bit less trustable, a bit less authoritative.

I've seen firsthand in meetings people saying, "Well Claude says..." or "Well ChatGPT says..."

What's bothering me about this is that those running the meeting aren't shutting that crap down immediately.

Except that in basically all of the examples that you cite, the transition was from one proven technology slowly into another technology that was at least approaching some degree of maturity by the time it it mass-market adoption.

In most of those examples. early adopters were nearly all ultrawealthy who were using it for themselves. Those who weren't incredibly rich were technology-enthusiasts of some fashion or another. Those groups initially worked-out most of the showstopper-problems with the technology before widespread adoption, and in many of those industries either compatibility or outright law added extra constraint over time.

AI for the masses has taken a different development path. It's not ready and is misbehaving, to the detriment of many. "Hallucinations" should not be tolerated at this scale of deployment.

Not if you're the police.

Or as it was put nearly two millennia ago, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

This is why systems like this require human oversight. Arguably if there's a judicial review process for allowing searches, then this system needs to be required to use that process. With a system containing precinct, local court district, municipal, county, state, and federal district jurisdictions, the nature of setting up proper permissions alone should be a mandatory herculean effort, probably the most difficult part of the entire system.

Without such a system requiring judicial oversight to confirm that searches are authorized, all we have is a further slide into a police-state.

There are lots of higher-level technical jobs that pay annual salaries far exceeding $100k. If it takes only three years to recoup the $100k, if the employee works for them for five years, they've still saved a fairly considerable amount of money.

On top of that I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's possible to take fees paid to the government as tax-writeoffs. Sufficiently large firms might well simply write off the money spent this way directly against their taxes.

You know what would work better than that?

Subpoenaing the hiring managers and HR staff and their records to see what sorts of applicants they've received domestically and to interview existing staff of the company and any 'heathunter' types they've used to fill jobs before to find out if they're actually having trouble filling jobs or if instead they're simply trying to replace more expensive domestic employees with foreign workers at reduced salaries.

There have been far too many examples where laid-off or soon-to-be-laid-off employees described the active process of training their replacements with great detail. If they wanted to really make a dent they would take those claims seriously and investigate accordingly, and levy heavy, heavy penalties. I'm thinking something like 10x the original employees' salaries kinds of fines.

What loans are they that can be called? I was under the impression that loans are made with specific terms of repayment and that's generally that.

Trouble with trying to run a study on the Amish is that their lifestyles are pretty significantly different all around. Comparing groups on either side of a hard dividing line (there was a study in the UK of shingles vaccines where over/under a certain age was a hard line in the sand) works well because the lifestyles of the population groups are basically the same.

I'm assuming that this works because when the AP is communicating with endpoints in fixed locations, the AP can tell when signal quality changes as attenuators move through the space. This might work better with modern 'beam forming' APs using modern 802.11 standards, but theoretically one could constantly measure the signal strength between a stationary endpoint and the AP and observe when that signal is weaker than it otherwise should be.

If there are insufficient stationary endpoints it might not work so well unless it can somehow measure reflectivity with enough precision to know that something moved through.

That's why it's necessary to take the concept of Communism and understand that it's an unattainable asymptote. Humanity is what gets in the way, we're selfish and we would nearly all of us take in order to have for ourselves even if our peers don't have the option. It would take a post-scarcity economy (think the situation of The Federation in Star Trek) for there to even be a chance at something working, it would require that anyone can have access to almost anything that's new.

I don't look at specific socialist concepts as unattainable though. The way a society treats its young, its old, its infirm, its poor, its powerless, and the way it curbs the excesses of those who've managed to profit off of said society speaks volumes for it. And unfortunately we're failing big-time now because a whole lot of people will voluntarily go against their own best interests and the interests of those in similar circumstances.