Next from the "holy shit, AI is really happening" file, we learn today that L.A.'s city buses may soon come strapped with their own snitching equipment. The kind of traveling, near-ubiquitous surveillance that would wind up costing drivers money when they fail to follow parking rules.
Okay, maybe it's not that bad.
KTLA reports that Metro is teaming up with a company called Hayden AI with the plan to initially install 100 cameras on city buses. The intent is to have these cameras automatically ticketing drivers who are parked in bus lanes. And destroy John and Sarah Connor (we kid).
The cameras look out of the buses' dashboards, while an onboard computer uses artificial intelligence to analyze the video and automatically issue citations to cars if they are in the way of the bus.
However, a Hayden rep reached out to the channel to say the cameras can "only create evidence" that will then be reviewed by local parking authorities, due to a recently passed law that prevents it from happening automatically.
Sounds pretty good if it keeps the bus coming on time and moving faster, while raising some additional funds for the city in the process. As long as you're not the kind of @$#%& that parks in a bus lane, you should be okay as these robotic narcs come onboard. That is currently being anticipated in the spring of 2024.
Of course, technology can be a tricky little devil, as we know from such once-benign-seeming inventions as plastic, Facebook, and rentable electric scooters that people leave all over the place.
While we already are more accepting of ticketing bus cameras than we are of the traffic cameras of an earlier era, our nascent comfort with this AI-powered technology could pave the way for far more nefarious forms of surveillance from city authorities to creep in, such as the LAPD and its eventual robot dog-armed Precrime division.
Hayden AI is emerging as the country's foremost company focused on using AI to ticket people to innovate bus and bike lane traffic solutions, recently being awarded a patent for its system that automatically validates video evidence of traffic violations.
It currently has contracts in San Francisco and New York, in addition to L.A.
