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Notes -
You mentioning self driving cars in contrast to mass shooting just gave me a dystopian vision of a future where you could have as many guns as you wanted but they were all equipped with an AI technology, where every gun would be programmed to identify the target as being an aggressive threat or not before being shot at. Raises many ethical and philosophical questions, might be good for a sci fi story. Has anyone ever gone down this line of thinking before?
I'd be against this technology on broadly libertarian grounds and in fear that the government or someone else could just reprogram the guns to stop working altogether or not work against cops/military personnel, and besides that in the real world we'd have the old regular guns around anyway so all the "bad guys" would have the pre-AI guns or jailbreak the new ones and we'd run into the same problems as before anyway
It’s sort of the premise of the anime Psycho Pass. Police are armed with goofy sci-fi handguns that scale their output to the threat of the target. This is part of the city’s mass surveillance, which can read an individual’s mental state perfectly. So the guns will outright refuse to shoot a nonviolent target. The plot unfolds when the system refuses to recognize a complete psychopath.
Of course, this is starting from a Japanese baseline, so no reasonable civilian has any desire or ability to own a weapon.
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