More generally, when you change the method of perceiving, you have to change the rule, to prevent dysfunction. How fun would driving be if you got a speeding ticket every time you went 25.01 mph in a 25 zone?
From Ran Prieur's archives.
A lot of laws break down as soon as you introduce machine perception. The reason is that those laws were fairly reasonable (not always) when a human had to assess whether or not you were causing trouble or not, but as soon as you remove that human element, you now have a hard boundary, assessed by a hard machine, by which I mean that they lack any kind of sensitivity to a broader context. To contrast that, a soft gaze is able to take in your entire visual field, whereas a hard gaze ignores context and instead focuses on specific details to stare at.
To come back to law, imagine if something like jaywalking had an entire Big Brother-like installation to detect every jaywalker 24/7. Everyone would be constantly flagged, because people do it all the time. But it wouldn't really improve much our lives, because most jaywalking is done in safe situations (at least where I live), and in fact, I've seen many policemen themselves jaywalk right next to their police station because there simply wasn’t any traffic.
As soon as you introduce machine perception, laws that were once reasonable—such as disincentivizing people from walking recklessly on the street—become absolutely tyrannical. And you cannot count on the law to be changed accordingly, because they are as rigid as the world we live in.
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2024-08-05