AIBU to ask whether the death penalty should apply for certain crimes in the UK?

[PenelopeJoanSterling]

Because the topics got mixed up on my previous thread i thought id ask here, for certain types of crime in the uk, would you be either for or against the death penalty for certain crimes and why ?

then you need to study the military and their usage of Ai

personally id partly agree on that id use ai analysis combined with human special operations to run their analysis etc because i bet various military forces are and do use it too

One wonders whether AI was involved in the school bombing in Iran.

Ultimately AI is trained by humans. Fallible, biased, often awful humans. Garbage in, garbage out.

it may have been trained but if it pulls analysis from lots of sources unless you assume all humans are not smart ?

And my point is proven. AI cannot think or make complex, nuanced decisions. All it can do is regurgitate information it grabs from the web.

from multiple sources and it does make some good points and how is that worse or better than humans relying on their own brains to come up with a good analysis ?

Humans (at least most of us anyway) understand nuance, emotion, and morals. AI doesn't even understand what it is saying, not in any true sense of the word. It has no real notion of the complex moral and ethical dilemmas of the death penalty or the emotional harm it causes.

As for putting AI on the jury, AI cannot comprehend mens rea; it doesn't have a mind, nor can it differentiate between trauma and willful violence.

and how good / effective have juries been so far for society ?

I don’t agree with AI deciding cases (anyone else remember Blake’s 7?) but you’d find executioners. There are plenty of soldiers trained to kill on command.

I’m still leaning, like others, to have it as a specific option for the most heinous crimes. As I did say upthread, the example of Sally Clark helps to clarify the nature of the kind of crime that may require the option (to be clear, I would not have wanted her to be facing that penalty). It’s not unprecedented to have different degrees of murder. The French used to have a concept of ‘crimes of passion’ which were specific against individuals, rarely premeditated, and were not considered to carry the same risk to the general public as random shootings and sexual abuse of any underage female unfortunate enough to be within arms reach.

How can you be sure of that?

Most humans are not smart. The average IQ is 100. All humans have inherent biases. You have but to put something - anything - into an AI to realise how incapable they are of critical thinking. They can process reams of material; they are unable to assess the quality of that material. I use AI at work - and I have not yet had a single task from it that I have not had to correct. If you think it's capable of assessing guilt without bringing about major miscarriages of justice, you are in a dystopian nightmare.

I suggest, Penelope, that you back off from goading someone about her religious belief and get back to your original (dodgy and frankly despicable) argument.

i only asked the question about god to learn more so they could enlighten me in their wisdom of their supreme being ?

how is that goading ?

can you define how in a democracy asking a question to learn more about someone beliefs is being disrespectful ?

Yikes. You might have outed yourself, Penelope. Are you the new DPP?
Seeing as you write so learned and all?

then i suggest a combined human / Ai analysis ?

and if your against that then why do you us ai at all ?

The AI you read, as a English speaker, will not have trawled sources from the 7,000 + languages in use around the world. The "points" it makes are culturally-specific, much as "IQ" tests are culture-specific. It's not expanding knowledge across intellectual or cultural boundaries. It's providing a precis of what is already known within those boundaries.

What AI regurgitates is what a human has programmed it to do. It produces the end result for you, as a user, quicker than a human could assess and write out for you. But speed doesn't neecessarily = good information. You, the user, are still responsible for judging the worth of the information.

Given that yesterday you posted three articles that directly undermined the claims you were making (which, therefore, you clearly hadn't read before posting) this last point has possibly gone way over your head. AI is a tool, with specific, limited uses, not a replacement for human effort. Tools are mechanical. As @Frequency points out, they cannot substitute for human understanding of context, morals, nuance, history - all of which are essential components of decision-making in many areas, including trials.

As for "how good/effective have jury trials been for society?" How old are you, 13? Stop wasting the time of posters who've bothered to respond thoughtfully to you by posting teenage inanities.

i was asking the jury question in the style of socrates or platos method of asking because i know there have been some omg jury decisions and i was using that to make the point that people think juries are the bread and butter when actually they are worse than what ai would be in some trials.

overall yes thank you to all for a respectful thread and debates,
and ill admit i dont know apples from pears, but im learning

I don't support it. The justice system is in shambles and there is too much danger of an innocent person being executed.

Also, there isn't the evidence imo that having a death penalty lowers crime rates.

Claim 3: "It's not expanding knowledge across intellectual or cultural boundaries."
Largely false.
This is where the statement becomes too absolute.
AI can absolutely connect ideas across disciplines and cultures.
For example, it can synthesize:

• Japanese manufacturing philosophy with Western operations research
• Chinese military writings with NATO doctrine
• Islamic Golden Age mathematics with modern computer science
• Roman law with contemporary legal systems

That is a genuine form of intellectual synthesis. However, AI generally does not create new empirical knowledge. It is not running experiments or discovering new physical laws on its own during a conversation. There's an important distinction:

• Knowledge discovery → generating genuinely new verified facts.
• Knowledge synthesis → combining existing knowledge in novel ways.

AI is much stronger at the second than the first.

AI is useful where there is a right and a wrong answer with no requirement for nuance or understanding. It's a computer programme. It's true or false, off or on, 0 or 1.

It has its uses, medical diagnosis, for example, but it needs sense checking by a human. And it falls flat where nuance or actual understanding is needed.

We are not where you think we are with AI, not yet. It's a fast-paced industry, especially with developments in quantum computing, but we are nowhere near developing a system with any real understanding, intelligence, or independent thought capabilities.

that i can agree with

Yeah... I think you've encapsulated your intellectual process.

🤣

Golly gosh, PenelopeJoan has been doing some speed reading of AI-generated blurb on "political philosophy" - coincidentially, just 24 hours since I politely suggested she read some political philosophy.

Thing is, reading is no good without understanding. And, sorry sweetheart, you don't understand Socratic or Platonic dialogue through skimming a half page of AI blurb thrown up because you typed the question "What does Socrates say?" into your laptop. Regurgitating AI blurb doesn't make you a Philosopher.

There have been some OMG jury decisions. Has there really? Do tell, explaining why they were "wrong" in the context of the structure of the English/Welsh judicial system and English Common Law.

people think juries are the bread and butter when actually they are worse than what ai would be in some trials. A bold claim about what people think. Evidence, please. An equally bold, and highly subjective, claim about the merits of an "AI trial", so again, evidence.

and ill admit i dont know apples from pears, but im learning. Another suggestion: go away, start learning from the centuries of written texts produced on the subject of crime and appropriate punishment - which will encompass everything covered in this thread - draw your own conclusions, based on actual research and come back to debate on the basis of knowledge. See you in about a year, perhaps two.

i never claimed to be bright or smart so no shit sherlock