9 of 12 members of an ethics board appointed by Axon to advise its technology decisions have resigned, citing the company’s plan to install Taser-equipped drones and pervasive surveillance at schools. “After several years of work, the company has fundamentally failed to embrace the values that we have tried to instill,” the departing members write. “We have lost faith in Axon’s ability to be a responsible partner.”
Axon (formerly Taser) has grown into a juggernaut of law enforcement software and hardware in recent years, providing not just the familiar and formerly eponymous electric weapons, but body cameras and entire digital platforms for evidence management. Setting aside for now the inherent risks of privatizing such things, Axon has been rather surprisingly thoughtful with its tech, soliciting the advice of the communities these tools will be used in as well as the cops who will wear or wield them.
The AI Ethics Board was established a few years ago as it became clear that machine learning was an extremely valuable tool but also one that could easily be poorly built, applied abusively, or some combination of the two. The board, a collection of experts, academics, and industry professionals, would provide a tempering perspective on the tech that suggested safeguards, accountability measures, and so on.
It had a good start, the resigning members wrote in a statement:
Each of us joined this Board in the belief that we could influence the direction of the company in ways that would help to mitigate the harms that policing technology can sow and better capture any benefits. For a time, we saw that influence play out in some of Axon’s decisions. From not equipping any of its products with facial recognition capabilities, to withdrawing a new software tool to collect data from social media websites, to promoting desperately needed legislation to bring the use of license plate readers under control, we observed tangible evidence of the difference we were making.
I chatted with CEO Rich Smith back in 2020 and found he had a refreshingly honest take on the question of whether tech is the answer to an ongoing policing crisis.
“Tech isn’t a panacea. It’s not going to solve these problems for us,” he said. But equally true, he continued, is the fact that without technology, some of these problems will be insoluble. Body cameras and other digital tracking of police encounters is not an unmixed good but how else do we expect such events to be systematically recorded? The ones who will define these tools are not the police but the companies that make them, and Axon has jockeyed to put itself in that position.
But recently it may have gone too far in the matter of how much and what type of tech should be brought to bear as a deterrent against mass shootings.
“[Axon] intends to develop Taser-equipped drones, pre-position them in potential targets for mass and school shootings, …read more