I might be misunderstanding the cost there but isn't it more the amount of people who were going through that system that matters, and not the city size?
By that I mean that we could also look at what 2.7 million dollars (or even that flat cost + operating costs evened out over the period of time of the study) would do, were it put towards every one of those defendants in dire conditions. To ensure for example that they have at least a temporary place to stay, social programs in place, someone to follow their case and offer a reinforced legal counsel (which is available to everyone for free for sure, but I hope nobody kids themselves about how overworked those people are - I could bet everything I have that anyone with a good income would always pick a private lawyer over duty counsel).
As for your last point: it certainly doesn't seem to be the case right now but I can very well see that entering the realm of possibilities. You can't imagine that a system that performs on paper really well and is thrown into a field where people are incredibly over-worked would end up being relied on a little bit too much?
I mean, we see that sort of thing in place for way less reliable things with people who actually know better (i.e. how many scripts and old bits of code hold together much of the world). And in the medical field the development and usage of AI is on a steady rise ("chatbots" in psychology, predictive modeling for decision making and disease diagnosis, "telehealth" assessments using data from IoT devices). If AI gave people more work rather than less, it would be of no use after all.
>and offer a reinforced legal counsel (which is available to everyone for free for sure, but I hope nobody kids themselves about how overworked those people are - I could bet everything I have that anyone with a good income would always pick a private lawyer over duty counsel).
Where did you get the idea that everyone gets free legal counsel for civil or criminal actions?
In many, if not most places in the US, in criminal actions, you must prove that you don't have the means to pay a lawyer before one is "appointed by the court." In fact, many places have very low limits on income/assets before providing free counsel.
The requirements surrounding this are a hodgepodge of state and local rules[0].
As for civil actions, most places do not provide legal counsel[1] at all.
I believe they were referring to England, where you do get legal counsel for free (though my understanding is that restrictions to that have been placed in recent years).
What you are advocating for would not last long at all as a one-time source of funding. On the other hand, letting people out without bail without relying on bail loan sharks, in perpetuity, will do much good on itd own. They don't need the bail loan, they might not lose a job from not showing up to work if they couldnt make bail, etc.
I think, also, that chatbots are an unfair comparison. Those are specifically designed to decrease triage time for non-emergency scenarios.
This is a fundamentally different scenario, where it provides evidence to counter the prosecution. It will always fall to the judge to weigh the score versus what evidence the prosecution provides. If the prosecution has no good reason to demand punishingly high bail, and the model continues to hold up well over time, I see no reason to assume that using it leads to bad outcomes. Remember that the most overworked people are the public defenders, and this is an aide for them.
I understand your point, that's why I tried to say that even a budget "evened out" over the study itself could be interesting to look at.
There are fixed costs in the development of the system but there are running costs (owning or renting the servers, improving the ML and the system at all points, gathering more data, curating, maintenance of the data, etc). I don't think anyone reasonably believes that we can just build a box of truth and that nobody need be involved in that project ongoing afterwards (even just to ensure future browser compatibility, security upgrades, system outages, bias in data gathering, etc).
What I would be interested in seeing is what the very same money put towards such a project would do for a system that desperately needs much more influx of money towards structural pillars like mental health, housing, legal counsel, etc.
Since there's seemingly no A/B testing (with what I mentioned), no double-blind testing (which would test for the impact on the judges), or any form of comparative testing really, it's pretty hard to conclude a lot of things about this project. We surely wouldn't go too quickly to conclusions of usefulness if the subjects of the study were closer to us (i.e. if they weren't already assumed to have done something wrong to be in that situation).
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As for the bad outcomes, I wasn't so much talking at the system at the current instant, but more about the feedback loop this creates: suppose the rating is biased against a community of people such that their measured score is lower than their actual likelihood to show up, then the judge is less likely to give them a chance to be out, which then reinforces the social bias against the category of people and drives what was an initial bias to be a systemic issue.
My masters is in Control Theory so I tend to see systems, feedback loops, and stability of trajectories everywhere, I guess.
By that I mean that we could also look at what 2.7 million dollars (or even that flat cost + operating costs evened out over the period of time of the study) would do, were it put towards every one of those defendants in dire conditions. To ensure for example that they have at least a temporary place to stay, social programs in place, someone to follow their case and offer a reinforced legal counsel (which is available to everyone for free for sure, but I hope nobody kids themselves about how overworked those people are - I could bet everything I have that anyone with a good income would always pick a private lawyer over duty counsel).
As for your last point: it certainly doesn't seem to be the case right now but I can very well see that entering the realm of possibilities. You can't imagine that a system that performs on paper really well and is thrown into a field where people are incredibly over-worked would end up being relied on a little bit too much?
I mean, we see that sort of thing in place for way less reliable things with people who actually know better (i.e. how many scripts and old bits of code hold together much of the world). And in the medical field the development and usage of AI is on a steady rise ("chatbots" in psychology, predictive modeling for decision making and disease diagnosis, "telehealth" assessments using data from IoT devices). If AI gave people more work rather than less, it would be of no use after all.