Speaking at the Oracle Financial Analysts Conference, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he hopes AI will one day power large-scale law enforcement surveillance networks.
“We're going to have a monitoring system in place,” he said. “All of our officers will be monitored at all times, and if there's an issue, the AI will flag it up and report it to the right people. We're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on, so citizens will be on the best behavior.”
Ellison believes that continuous AI surveillance could significantly reduce crime, but the evidence doesn't necessarily support his claim.
As The Washington Post points out, police data in the US has historically been biased, and feeding it into an AI model could suggest there is more criminal activity in those areas, creating a racially and socio-economically biased feedback loop.
In 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department suspended its crime prediction program after an audit found it had led to increased surveillance of Black and Latino people.