Comment by whizzter

That is a critical point that AI companies want to remove. _they_ want to be the system of record. Except they _can't_. Which makes me think of LLMs are just really bad cache layers on the world.

Many countries have solved this with a special background check. In Canada we call this a "vulnerable sector check," [1] and it's usually required for roles such as childcare, education, healthcare, etc. Unlike standard background checks, which do not turn up convictions which have received record suspensions (equivalent to a pardon), these ones do flag cases such as sex offenses, even if a record suspension was issued.

They are only available for vulnerable sectors, you can't ask for one as a convenience store owner vetting a cashier. But if you are employing child care workers in a daycare, you can get them.

This approach balances the need for public safety against the ex-con's need to integrate back into society.

[1] https://rcmp.ca/en/criminal-records/criminal-record-checks/v...

That's the reality in my country, and I think most European countries. And I'm very glad it is. The alternative is high recidivism rates because criminals who have served their time are unable access the basic resources they need (jobs, house) to live a normal life.

No one is forcing you to hire formerly incarcerated nannies but you also aren’t entitled to everyone’s life story. I also don’t think this is the issue you’re making it out to be. Anyone who has “gotten in trouble” with kids is on a registry. Violent offenders don’t have their records so easily expunged. I’m curious what this group is (and how big they are) that you’re afraid of.

I also think someone who has suffered a false accusation of that magnitude and fought to be exonerated shouldn’t be forced to suffer further.

Then before I give you my business or hire you, I also want to know that you are the kind of person that thinks they have a right to any other person's entire life, so I can hold it against you and prevent you from benefitting from all your other possible virtues and afforts.

So I likewise, require to know everything about you, including things that are none of my business but I just think they are my business and that's what matters. I'll make that call myself.

> That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself.

Well, no ; that's not up to you. While you may be interested in this information, the government also has a responsibility to protect the subject of that information.

The tradeoff was maintained by making the information available, but not without friction. That tradeoff is being shattered by third parties changing the amount of friction required to get the information. Logically, the government reacts by removing the information. It's not as good as it used to be, but it's better than the alternative.

What criminal records do you have? Please provide a way to verify. Until then, you cannot be trusted in any capacity.

> I'll make that call myself.

This is why this needs to be regulated.

>That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself.

Thanks, but I don't want to have violent people working as taxi drivers, pdf files in childcare and fraudsters in the banking system. Especially if somebody decided to not take this information into account.

Good conduct certificates are there for a reason -- you ask the faceless bureaucrat to give you one for the narrow purpose and it's a binary result that you bring back to the employer.

France has a similar system to the German Führungszeugnis. Our criminal record (casier judiciaire) has 3 tiers: B1 (full record, only accessible by judges), B2 (accessible by some employers like government or childcare), and B3 (only serious convictions, the only one you can request yourself). Most employers never see anything. It works fine, recidivism stays manageable, and people actually get second chances. The US system of making everything googleable forever is just setting people up to fail.

The UK has common law: the outcomes of previous court cases and the arguments therein determine what the law is. It’s important that court records be public then, because otherwise there’s no way to tell what the law is.

If someone is charged with and found innocent of a crime, you can't just remove that record. If someone else later finds an account of them being accused, they need a way to credibly assert that they were found innocent. Alternately if they are convicted and served their sentence, they might need to prove that in the future.

Sometimes people are unfairly ostracized for their past, but I think a policy of deleting records will do more harm than good.

Historical record, as one example. We gain considerable value from official records from the past, why would our descendents be any different?

Right, except there are some cases where that information should be disclosed prior to their death. Sensitive positions, dealing with child care, etc. but those are specific circumstances that can go through a specific channel. Like we did with background checks. Now, AI is in charge and ANY record in ANY system is flagged. Whether it’s for a rental application, or a job, or a credit card.

The UK has multiple legal systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_Act_1980

Applies to England and Wales, I believe there are similar ones for Scotland and NI

No? So I can report a petty theft from 35 years ago?

> People should fully understand that their actions reflect their character

As if "character" was some kind of immutable attribute you are born with.

> People should fully understand that their actions reflect their character and this should influence them to always do the right thing.

Shame the same standards don’t apply to the people running the government.

> The AI should decide

That is a great recipe for systematic discrimination.

I find this a weird take. Are you saying you _want_ unaccountable and profit driven third party companies to become quasi-judicial arbiters of justice?

We didn't? It must be a small minority of countries that dole out the same punishment for both.

This is probably not the place for this discussion, good luck

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> Blocking (or more accurately: restricting) access works pretty well for many other things that we know will be used in ways that are harmful. Historically, just having to go in person to a court house and request to view records was enough to keep most people from abusing the public information they had.

If all you care about is preventing the information from being abused, preventing it from being used is a great option. This has significant negative side effects though. For court cases it means a lack of accountability for the justice system, excessive speculation in the court of public opinion, social stigma and innuendo, and the use of inappropriate proxies in lieu of good data.

The fact that the access speedbump which supposedly worked in the past is no longer good enough is proof that an access speedbump is not a good way to do it. Let's say we block internet access but keep in person records access in place. What's to stop Google or anyone else from hiring a person to go visit the brick and mortar repositories to get the data exactly the same way they sent cars to map all the streets? Anything that makes it hard for giant companies is going to make it hard for the common person. And why are we making the assumption that AI training on this data is a net social ill? While we can certainly imagine abuses, it's not hard to imagine real benefits today, nonetheless unforeseen benefits someone more clever than us will come up with in the future.

> What do you think the "right way" to deal with the problem is because we already know that "hope that people choose to be better/smarter/more respectful" isn't going work.

We've been dealing with people making bad decisions from data forever. As an example, there was red lining where institutions would refuse to sell homes or guarantee loans for minorities. Sometimes they would use computer models which didn't track skin color but had some proxy for it. At the end of the day you can't stop this problem by trying to hide what race people are. You need to explicitly ban that behavior. And we did. Institutions that attempt it are vulnerable to both investigation by government agencies and liability to civil suit from their victims. It's not perfect, there are still abuses, but it's so much better than if we all just closed our eyes and pretended that if the data were harder to get the discrimination wouldn't happen.

If you don't want algorithms to come to spurious and discriminatory conclusions, you must make algorithms auditable, and give the public reasonable access to interrogate these algorithms that impact them. If an AI rejects my loan application, you better be able to prove that the AI isn't doing so based on my skin color. If you can do that, you should also be able to prove it's not doing so based off an expunged record. If evidence comes out that the AI has been using such data to come to such decisions, those who made it and those who employ it should be liable for damages, and depending on factors like intent, adherence to best practices, and severity potentially face criminal prosecution. Basically AI should be treated exactly the same as a human using the same data to come to the same conclusion.

The founders of modern nation-states made huge advancements with written constitutions and uniformity of laws, but in the convenience of the rule of law it is often missed that the rule of law is not necessarily the prevalence of justice.

The question a people must ask themselves: we are a nation of laws, but are we a nation of justice?

Jesus ... that gives me a new perspective on Japan ...

> However, there's also jobs which legally require enhanced vetting checks.

I think the solution there is to restrict access and limit application to only what's relevant to the job. If someone wants to be a daycare worker, the employer should be able to submit a background check to the justice system who could decide that the drug possession arrest 20 years ago shouldn't reasonably have an impact on the candidate's ability to perform the job, while a history of child sex offenses would. Employers would only get a pass/fail back.

Other people have rights like freedom of association. If you’re hell-bent on violating that, consider the second-order effects. What is the net social negative when non-criminals freely avoid working in industries in which criminals tend to be qualified to work?

In many sane countries, companies can ask you to provide a legal certificate that you did not commit X category of crime. This certificate will then either say that you did not do any crimes in that category, or it will say that you did commit one or more of them. The exact crimes aren't mentioned.

Coincidentally these same countries tend to have a much much lower recidivism rate than other countries.

Arrests being a matter of public record are a check on the government's ability to make people just disappear.

But the Internet's memory means that something being public at time t1 means it will also be public at all times after t1.

So here in the U.S., the Karen Read trial recently occupied two years of news cycles— convicted of a lesser crime on retrial.

Is the position that everyone who experienced that coverage, wrote about it in any forum, or attended, must wipe all trace of it clean, for “reasons”? The defendant has sole ownership of public facts? Really!? Would the ends of justice have been better served by sealed records and a closed courtroom? Would have been a very different event.

Courts are accustomed to balancing interests, but since the public usually is not a direct participant they get short shrift. Judges may find it inconvenient to be scrutinized, but that’s the ultimate and only true source of their legitimacy in a democratic system.

Let's say a cop kills somebody in your neighborhood. Some witnesses say it looked like murder to them, but per your wishes the government doesn't say who the cop was and publishes no details about the crime.. for two years, when they then say they cop was found not guilty. And as per your wishes again, even then they won't say anything about the alleged crime, and never will. Is this a recipe for public trust in their government?

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> You can just say "B was more qualified"

Sometimes can you can't prove B was more qualified, but you can always claim some BS like "B was a better fit for our company culture"

I couldn't parse the intended meaning from "lack of commitment to no longer commiting crimes"), so here's a response that just answers the question raised.

Do you regard the justice system as a method of rehabilitating offenders and returning them to try to be productive members of society, or do you consider it to be a system for punishment? If the latter, is it Just for society to punish somebody for the rest of their life for a crime, even if the criminal justice considers them safe to release into society?

Is there anything but a negative consequence for allowing a spent conviction to limit people's ability to work, or to own/rent a home? We have carve-outs for sensitive positions (e.g. working with children/vulnerable adults)

Consider what you would do in that position if you had genuinely turned a corner but were denied access to jobs you're qualified for?

The short answer is that it's up to a judge to decide that, up to the law what it's based on and up to the people what the law is.

Sure there is still some leeway between only letting a judge decide the punishment and full on mob rule, but it's not a slippery slope fallacy when the slope is actually slippy.

It's fairly easy to abuse the leeway to discriminate to exclude political dissidents for instance.

Because we as a society decided it creates externalities we don't want to deal with. With a list of exceptions where it actually is important because risk-reward balance is too much.

Which is why in any country where criminal history is considered discrimination, this information is simply not provided. Because these companies have learned over the years that "please don't do X" just doesn't work with corporations.

it's hilarious that "people" downvote comments pointing out the logical conclusion of the policies they defend

wouldn't making it illegal to discriminate based on criminal records prevent an elementary school of refusing to employ a candidate that is "fit for the job" (graduated from a good university, has years of experience in the field, etc) who just happens to have a child rape conviction on the basis that he has a child rape conviction? doesn't 1 + 1 equal 2?

> If you prohibit the punishment of minors, you create an incentive for criminals to exploit minors.

This - nearly all drug deliveries in my town are done by 15 years olds on overpowered electric bikes. Same with most shoplifting. The real criminals just recruit the schoolchildren to do the work because they know schoolchildren rarely get punishment.

We protect minors because they are children, and they are allowed to make mistakes.

At a certain point, we say someone is an adult and fully responsible for their actions, because “that’s who they are”.

It’s not entirely nuanced—and in the US, at least, we charge children as adults all the time—but it’s understandable.

> Why are we protecting criminals, just because they are minors? Protect victims, not criminals.

Protect victims and criminals. Protect victims from the harm done to them by criminals, but also protect criminals from excessive, or, as one might say, cruel and unusual punishment. Just because someone has a criminal record doesn't mean that anything that is done to them is fair game. Society can, and should, decide on an appropriate extent of punishment, and not exceed that.

If you were hiring a childminder for your kids, would you want to know that they had 6 accusations for improper conduct around children in 6 different court cases - even if those were all acquittals?

The UK has an official system [1] for checking whether people should be allowed to work with vulnerable people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disclosure_and_Barring_Service

If it was reported in a newspaper then that would likely already be the case.

It is the UK we're talking about after all...

Jail time is not always the entire punishment, especially on the enlightened continent, where jail time is used sparingly. Keeping the conviction on record is a thing, because consecutive convictions often carry come with higher punishment. So depending on a crime cathegory, there is X years after which the record no longer counts, but it's not 0.

A less incompetent employer would look at the conviction, realize if was for stealing a candy bar 25 years ago, and decide it doesn't matter.

Though if the details of the case were not public or hard to access they might assume it was worse than it was. (Realistically no child would get prosecuted for stealing a candy bar one time, but I'll grant maybe there are other convictions that sound worse without context.) Maybe the problem is actually that the data is not accessible enough, rather than too accessible?

that part of Christianity somehow is lost on Americans somehow.