After spending a year trying to empty our overcrowded prisons, the Labour government has now decided its best bet is to catch criminals before they strike. Police AI technology will use ‘predictive analytics’ to ‘identify and target the 1,000 most dangerous predatory men who pose the highest risk to women and girls in England and Wales’, reports the Daily Telegraph. A Home Office white paper is set to announce a series of police reforms including expanding the use of AI by forces across the country. Some £4 million has been earmarked to create an interactive AI-driven map of England and Wales crime hotspots by 2030, among other projects being trialled by police chiefs. Rather sinisterly, this follows Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood bragging last month to Tony Blair, now an AI evangelist, of her dreams ‘to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.’ Labour certainly kept that one out of the manifesto.

Will this flip-flopping Labour government really hold its nerve on its ‘Minority Report’ plan after the activist class wakes up to its implications?

How transformative will Mahmood’s robocop dystopia really be? Such initiatives might sound slick and cutting-edge, but as Andrew Orlowski notes, AI-talk is very often employed as a cover for managerial stupidity.........

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