I’m sure this won’t be used for horrible dystopian decision making

The city is San Jose.

I so, so hate that journalists and editors everywhere - from NBC to WaPo to podunk local papers - seem to have pretty much acquiesced to the fact that headlines are just going to be clickbait going forward.

Look, another city ignoring the affordable housing situation, and actively developing a software to be the bad guys.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

For the last several months, a city at the heart of Silicon Valley has been training artificial intelligence to recognize tents and cars with people living inside in what experts believe is the first experiment of its kind in the United States.

Last July, San Jose issued an open invitation to technology companies to mount cameras on a municipal vehicle that began periodically driving through the city’s district 10 in December, collecting footage of the streets and public spaces.

There’s no set end date for the pilot phase of the project, Tawfik said in an interview, and as the models improve he believes the target objects could expand to include lost cats and dogs, parking violations and overgrown trees.

City documents state that, in addition to accuracy, one of the main metrics the AI systems will be assessed on is their ability to preserve the privacy of people captured on camera – for example, by blurring faces and license plates.

The group, made up of dozens of current and formerly unhoused people, has recently been fighting a policy proposed last August by the San Jose mayor, Matt Mahan, that would allow police to tow and impound lived-in vehicles near schools.

In addition to providing a training ground for new algorithms, San Jose’s position as a national leader on government procurement of technology means that its experiment with surveilling encampments could influence whether and how other cities adopt similar detection systems.

The original article contains 1,487 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

There’s no easy solution. Some are evicted from their homes with crushing debt, some have safety nets to depend on, some want to end their homeless situation as soon as possible, some, however, are content with eating discarded food and begging for cash to buy alcohol. Not everyone is a hopeless drug addict or a temporarily inconvenienced millionaires, and this is not even mixing charity into the problem.

My guess is whoever thought on implementing AI into this probably consider this a problem that can be made easy by offloading all our human problems into a black box. It isn’t going to be that way.