Argentina’s security forces have announced plans to use artificial intelligence to “predict future crimes” in a move experts have warned could threaten citizens’ rights.
The country’s far-right president Javier Milei this week created the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit, which the legislation says will use “machine-learning algorithms to analyse historical crime data to predict future crimes”. It is also expected to deploy facial recognition software to identify “wanted persons”, patrol social media, and analyse real-time security camera footage to detect suspicious activities.
While the ministry of security has said the new unit will help to “detect potential threats, identify movements of criminal groups or anticipate disturbances”, the Minority Report-esque resolution has sent alarm bells ringing among human rights organisations.
Part of the problem with this approach is that prediction engines are predicted on the idea that there’s more of a thing to predict.
So unless they really, really go out of their way with modeling the records to account for this, they’ll have a system very strongly biased towards predicting more criminal behavior for everyone fed into it.
And biased towards replicating the existing history of arrests and convictions it is trained on