[ExI] free-will, determinism, crime and punishment (& CS techniques - Security and/or Privacy )

[Khaled Aly]

Good day

I've been following this since it started. I feel that a murderer should be 
punished to death in the easiest possible way (e.g. lethal injection), once 
it is proven for very sure that he/she has done so deliberately and under no 
external effects; for two reasons: 1) It is a relief to the victim's family 
unless they choose otherwise; and 2) If I were to choose, being the 
murderer, I'd rather go now/then than spend 20 years in jail. About therapy, 
I think it may work in certain sick cases (there are sick souls that could 
be treated why not, and there are evil souls that will not change, and there 
are those whose life circumstances made them go wrong way and they need 
social rehabilitation - every case is different).

This is my entry to how effective is the overall current justice system. And 
the ever unresolved question about the tradeoffs between personal privacy 
and community security. Do any computer or IT people see a role of 
algorithms helping the justice system to decide (for a start; since 
real-life AI is a bit far ahead). What I mean for example, consider 
obtaining a search warrant. How difficult is it to write some code that 
could 'assist' the decision making. First, it will perform preliminary 
information analysis. Second, if it's open implementation, it will be 
possible to a large technical population to review it and ensure it works as 
intended/declared and for the benefit of justice. And third, within a 
digital world, it can ensure that a court order of privacy invasion for a 
suspect individual will actually expire; provided it began, through the use 
of digital certificates to be provided and revoked in time by court to law 
enforcement. The last of course requires that default electronic 
communication be secured, and be broken only using a court digital 
certificate. This can be as frequent as the low issuing entities would 
decide according to existing situation (exceptional, less exceptional, 
regular). An innocent whose privacy was broken deserves to be advised about 
it at some point.

Beyond this, any computer literate person would confirm that open source 
code is most reliable because it had been reviewed by the expert public. 
Same applies to an open source algorithm that is designed to support the 
justice system deciding what to do with a suspect, a person in trial, or an 
indicted person and let that be an advisory input for trial.

Unlike few people may think, computers and human minds don't work the same 
way. Computers are structured crunching speed machines and minds are pattern 
learning neural machines. They are complementary (until neural network 
computing make it to market and yet it will be v. hard to mimic the brain). 
Why does law enforcement, or as a whole the justice system use computers 
only for data recording purposes. What about the huge analytic power that 
can be made presentable to humans to evaluate and judge. I don't think any 
final sentence should be produced by a machine with the current state of the 
art, or may be never. But speaking preliminary and analytic support, 
incorporating digital technology can potentially resolve many issues and 
cases where the society disagrees about how just the outcome was.

Greatest software technologies came out of open source because it is 
auditable. And that's much like digital democracy. Transparency does not 
compromise rule of law -- it rather enhances it. Sadly, digital technology 
is being consumed for many irrelevant but sellable applications before it is 
being considered to support a sound social infrastructure. And what's more 
relevant than justice...

Cheers
ka, phd

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <stathisp at gmail.com>
To: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 1:36 PM
Subject: Re: [ExI] free-will, determinism, crime and punishment.


> On 28/08/07, Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I was reading this, and had a hazy recollection of learning in
>> undergrad psych that sociopaths are actually made worse by traditional
>> therapy (it helps them learn how to fake being normal).
>
> There's little evidence that "therapy" helps with anything, let alone
> fundamentally changing the personality you were born with.
>
>
> -- 
> Stathis Papaioannou
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