I’m very pleased to have another article in the BSFA Focus magazine’s ‘Shape of Things to Come’.

With this one, I take the section on Police and Justice in “All Tomorrow’s Futures” and expand and extrapolate into some new ideas.

I cover quite a bit in the article, but to give you a flavour of the areas I was thinking about, here are some examples:

• the tension between wanting every crime to be prosecuted and the desire for lower taxes
• whether human bias or machine bias is better for justice (presuming bias will always be there)
• can an automated system eradicate the disastrous effects of human ego in righting wrongful convictions
• where and how is the inevitable use of AI best deployed.

I really enjoyed pondering and writing about this, especially using All Tomorrow’s Futures as a launch pad for ideas, and I hope it gives some food for thought around how we might work towards a free, fair and flawless justice system.