Report by The Justice and Home Affairs Committee (House of Lords): “In recent years, and without many of us realising it, Artificial Intelligence has begun to permeate every aspect of our personal and professional lives. We live in a world of big data; more and more decisions in society are being taken by machines using algorithms built from that data, be it in healthcare, education, business, or consumerism. Our Committee has limited its investigation to only one area–how these advanced technologies are used in our justice system. Algorithms are being used to improve crime detection, aid the security categorisation of prisoners, streamline entry clearance processes at our borders and generate new insights that feed into the entire criminal justice pipeline.
We began our work on the understanding that Artificial Intelligence (AI), used correctly, has the potential to improve people’s lives through greater efficiency, improved productivity. and in finding solutions to often complex problems. But while acknowledging the many benefits, we were taken aback by the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence tools potentially being used without proper oversight, particularly by police forces across the country. Facial recognition may be the best known of these new technologies but in reality there are many more already in use, with more being developed all the time.
When deployed within the justice system, AI technologies have serious implications for a person’s human rights and civil liberties. At what point could someone be imprisoned on the basis of technology that cannot be explained? Informed scrutiny is therefore essential to ensure that any new tools deployed in this sphere are safe, necessary, proportionate, and effective. This scrutiny is not happening. Instead, we uncovered a landscape, a new Wild West, in which new technologies are developing at a pace that public awareness, government and legislation have not kept up with.
Public bodies and all 43 police forces are free to individually commission whatever tools they like or buy them from companies eager to get in on the burgeoning AI market. And the market itself is worryingly opaque. We were told that public bodies often do not know much about the systems they are buying and will be implementing, due to the seller’s insistence on commercial confidentiality–despite the fact that many of these systems will be harvesting, and relying on, data from the general public.
This is particularly concerning in light of evidence we heard of dubious selling practices and claims made by vendors as to their products’ effectiveness which are often untested and unproven…(More)”.