SLOW CRIME / Geoff Manaugh
Slow Crime → looking at the emergence of urban-scale AI through the lens of police forensics. The hypothesis of "Slow Crime" is that a ubiquitous, multi-scalar Artificial Intelligence network will be able to detect (and make legible) otherwise invisible long-term events that diverge from expected norms.
Notion of "crime"→ in this case is a euphemism referring to any deviation from the status quo...
To discuss "Slow Crime" would require at least two areas of focus:
Look at unexpected sensory inputs through which an urban AI could piece together, or detect, indirect evidence of something happening elsewhere (for example, imagine an Artificially Intelligent sensor-network using acoustic information to produce a visual map of an urban ecosystem, or an AI sensor-network extrapolating evidence of human movement from ambient electromagnetic data in the landscape)
As a research methodology, utilize the police narrative as a hermeneutic device, foregrounding detection, or the detective, as an unusually engaged form of explanation for something that otherwise defies straight-forward accounting.
Causes, effects, circumstantial evidence... → "Slow Crime" is about piecing together something that prior to AI could not even be detected...









