Prominent thinkers in the fields of artificial intelligence say that predictive policing tools are not only 'useless,' but may be helping to drive mass incarceration.

In a letter published earlier this month the experts, from MIT, Harvard, Princeton, NYU, UC Berkeley and Columbia spoke out on the topic in an unprecedented showing of skepticism toward the technology. 

'When it comes to predicting violence, risk assessments offer more magical thinking than helpful forecasting,' wrote AI experts Chelsea Barabas, Karthik Dinakar and Colin Doyle in a New York Times op-ed. Predictive policing tools, or risk assessment tools, are algorithms designed to predict the likelihood of someone committing crime in the future.

With rapid advances in artificial intelligence, the tools have begun to find their way into the everyday processes of judges, who deploy them to determine sentencing, and police departments, who use them to allot resources and more. 

Read More...