The products made by Axon, formerly Taser International, are designed to transform police work. It is testing software, aided by artificial intelligence, that can automatically transcribe dialogue and collect identification information, capabilities that could one day obviate written reports, reports The New Yorker. In the near future, its software may be able to search databases to create a detailed portrait of a suspect, including a Facebook-like network of his prior arrests, properties he is associated with, and people to whom he is connected. CEO Rick Smith said, “If we do our job right, police officers should be really engaged, and the tech should start to melt into the background, rather than intimidating in the foreground. That’s where you balance the sci-fi stuff with the world we want to live in. We don’t want to build the dystopian world.” He adds, “Our mission has expanded. We are the tech company that’s going to make the world less violent”
Facial recognition, which techno-pessimists see as the advent of the Orwellian state, is on the horizon. Smith has assembled an A.I. Ethics Board to help steer Axon’s decisions. Tracy Ann Kosa, a privacy researcher and a member of the ethics board, sees the potential of Axon’s technology to exacerbate power imbalances between the police and civilians. “The data belonging to the police department—that’s one of the big philosophical concerns I have,” she said. “There are lots of ways to put controls around access to data, but the larger issue is that once you release that into the wild it is up to each department and each office and each government to figure out how they’re going to do it. That’s the place where we will see the explosion of any issues that already exist in the system, with much bigger consequences.”