Set in one of those near-generic near-future gone awry environments which you would probably hesitate to describe as 'speculative', Mercy does have one or two interesting observations to make about the potential use of AI within a justice system — though for plot purposes these have been shackled to the need for an all-encompassing 'public' cloud which offers zero protection for personal privacy, plus a really quite ludicrous imposition of time pressure.
For this set up to work things have to be paced 'just so'. By this I mean the director needs to be able to throw a given quantity of detail at the audience such that they will likely remain satisfied even if they really only take in c80% of it, and the action must propel itself forward in such a way that nobody really has that much time to ponder some of the sillier conceits on display. (Or indeed dwell too much on the overall predictability.)
I have to say that Timur Bekmambetov came through for us in these respects.
Rebecca Ferguson is excellent again, because another of the tightrope walks here is the projection of empathy in the simulation, entirely through facial signals.
It did make me ponder whether AI judges like Maddox might even be a good thing here in Guatemala. In a case in which I was involved a couple of years ago one of the witnesses for the defence (who was not actually a witness at all) claimed to have had a clear vision of the events from a window at the front of a house here in Panorama.
The way that the audiencias are structured here makes it very hard for the 'other side' to point out discrepancies in a timely manner, but an AI judge would probably have immediately detected and commented on the complete lack of windows on the exterior facade in question.
No comments:
Post a Comment