Does the artificial intelligence identify the future killers?

The British Ministry of Justice is developing a tool that predicts the possibility of committing murder by using police data. The project, initially called the “Murder Forecasting Project”, is very similar to the story of Minority Report. The algorithm examines data such as people’s history, mental state, addiction, and suicide desires to identify people who may commit serious violence in the future.

The program, exposed by the Statewatch Observer Group, is based on data from 100 to 500,000 people. Critics, including the researcher of the group, Sophia Lial, believe that using such algorithms can lead to the strengthening of structural discrimination in the criminal justice system, as raw data and unfair assumptions are inputs to these systems.

In response to the criticism, the Ministry of Justice has stated that the project is merely a research aspect and aims to better understand violent patterns among prisoners and judicial supervision. However, the use of predictive technologies in law enforcement is still the subject of discussion, as the history of such tools shows that they have often been associated with ethical problems and privacy violations.