In my last article I stated that AI only benefits the world with a strong middle class. To some extent it is a vague belief. However, without belief and assumptions, this world is not explainable. You must start somewhere to get somewhere.

There are several categories I mentioned that can be steered with AI in one or another direction. Following those categories, I am going to showcase in a series of blogs how we can design a system with AI to alleviate the harm and move to the right direction. The first topic I am going to focus today is Control and Crime. What I was referring to be the dilemma about using AI and big data that highly automated real time system can prevent the crime from happening, but at the same time those systems can be abused to exert totalitarian control.

How to design an AI system that truly targets at protecting people from crime while respecting their freedom? Let me take Germany as an example, as I have lived in Germany for more than 20 years now. I went to school in Germany, was active as volunteer in social engagements, graduated from German universities, participated in various debates about politics, was a scholarship holder of a German foundation, worked in a German consulting company for more than 7 years and now working at a software vendor with an even higher outreach to German enterprise companies in various industries. One thing worth mentioning about myself, I am also a passionate reader of German philosophy and a passionate thinker about how we can make the world a better place.

In Germany, well, to be fair, in all the countries around the globe, we are facing the same huge problem. This is complexity. “I know that I don’t know.” means in this context, the more advanced our human civilization, the less individuals will really understand what is going on. The cognitive overload, we face daily in our society, is so heavy that any simplification of the whole will be happily received by everyone, except maybe the academia milieu who enjoys the complexity as part of their intellectual superiority or the business elites who use the loopholes in the complex structure such as tax system to maximize their income. This is why the circulation of conspiration theory is well received, this is why a highly academic political establishment is moving away from solving the problem to imposing moral imperatives, this is why a feeling of injustice and distrust in the political system grow over time.

This has severe consequences. Naming some examples: In Germany we observe that radical party such as AFD is gaining increasing popularity. At the same time, the federal government really struggle to push economic reforms forward to set the incentives for growth. One alarming trend reported that more than 1 million criminal proceedings couldn’t be processed timely in the year 2025.

Let’s connecting the dots: a complex political and economic structure slows down the reform process as the interdependency of measures become increasingly unpredictable. A complex system of law leads to long queue time and is endangering the core of any democracy, the rule of law. The complexity in language and in our perception about the world also intensifies the gap between academic and “normal” people so that more radical and simple theories will gain support regardless of whether it is true or not. In the end we will see more crime in our society because non-functioning of the rule of law, spread of fake news and conspiracy theories, and the non-functioning of federal government to take meaningful measures to stabilize the economy.

What can we do with AI and how can it help? A vicious cycle and a virtuous cycle

1. A vicious cycle: one emotional way of reacting to crime is to blame another group of people. In this case, government may suggest using AI to profile or cluster human behavior to predict the probability of someone to commit crime. Connecting algorithm with a real time data from various sources such as camera data, internet surfing data etc. This will inevitably result in more centralized control and increase the risk of abuse.
2. A virtuous cycle: Leverage AI to detect conflicting rules and meaningfulness of existing ruleset in our law system to reduce the number of paragraphs and thus less room for loopholes. Create AI systems to help the lawmakers and the judges to process the open cases more efficiently instead of solely relying on manual processes. And very importantly, create public guard railed AI systems to help the wide public to digest complex topics, e.g. a publicly certified chatbot to answer questions in simple terms and reliable ways.

In a virtuous cycle of an AI system, AI is considered as companion to reduce complexity and spread knowledge. In a vicious cycle, AI is used to control and restrict people. This makes the difference whether AI will benefit the few or a broader group of people. To reduce the crime, we should empower the people with AI, not the opposite!