The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into law enforcement practices has sparked a global debate on ethics, privacy, and accountability. From facial recognition systems in public spaces to predictive policing algorithms, AI is transforming how crimes are detected and prevented. However, the benefits of efficiency and data-driven decision-making are accompanied by concerns about fairness, bias, and the potential erosion of civil liberties. One of the most controversial applications is predictive policing, which uses historical crime data to forecast the times and places where crimes are likely to occur or who might commit them. Proponents argue that this allows police to allocate resources more efficiently and reduce crime rates. However, critics warn that such systems may reinforce existing societal biases. If past data reflect biased policing practices, such as over-policing in marginalized communities, then the algorithm may perpetuate these injustices by disproportionately targeting the same areas or groups. Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) is another AI-driven tool that has gained traction. While it has proven useful in identifying suspects, it raises serious concerns regarding surveillance and individual privacy. Studies have also shown that FRT is less accurate in identifying people of color and women, increasing the risk of false accusations and wrongful detentions.
The lack of transparency in how these systems operate further complicates the field of law and practice. Many AI tools used in law enforcement are developed by private companies that treat their algorithms as proprietary, meaning that even law enforcement officers may not fully understand how decisions are made by these AI tools. This is often referred to as the “Black Box” problem. This opaqueness undermines accountability, making it difficult to challenge wrongful predictions or decisions in a court of law. As AI continues to evolve, lawmakers and civil rights advocates are calling for stronger regulations, awareness that these technologies are used responsibly. Proposals include the mandatory auditing of algorithms, public disclosure of data sources, and legal safeguards to protect against discrimination. Without such measures, the unchecked use of AI could lead to a justice system that prioritizes efficiency over equity, ultimately compromising democratic values and rule of law. AI holds the promise of revolutionizing law enforcement, its application must be guided by ethical frameworks that prioritize human rights, transparency, and fairness. Otherwise, technology intended to protect society may end up harming the very individuals it seeks to serve.


When people who are talking don’t share the same culture, knowledge, values, and assumptions, mutual understanding can be especially difficult. Such understanding is possible through the negotiation of meaning. To negotiate meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. You also need the flexibility in world view, and a generous tolerance for mistakes, as well as a talent for finding the right metaphor to communicate the relevant parts of unshared experiences or to highlight the shared experiences while demphasizing the others. Metaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in large measure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorize your experiences. Problems of mutual understanding are not exotic; they arise in all extended conversations where understanding is important.
When it really counts, meaning is almost never communicated according to the CONDUIT metaphor, that is, where one person transmits a fixed, clear proposition to another by means of expressions in a common language, where both parties have all the relevant common knowledge, assumptions, values, etc. When the chips are down, meaning is negotiated: you slowly figure out what you have in common, what it is safe to talk about, how you can communicate unshared experience or create a shared vision. With enough flexibility in bending your world view and with luck and charity, you may achieve some mutual understanding.
Communication theories based on the CONDUIT metaphor turn from the pathetic to the evil when they are applied indiscriminately on a large scale, say, in government surveillance or computerized files. There, what is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included, and it is assumed that the words in the file have meaning in themselves—disembodied, objective, understandable meaning. When a society lives by the CONDUITmetaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are the likely products.
Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humanity such a burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons. Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might hide from the problems and the generals. To the contrary, there was a high insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coart forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, but always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
...Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.