AI Update

Let's take a quick tour of this week's AI news. Despite all the potential AI-enhanced tools at law enforcement's disposal, such as DNA, facial recognition, phone and GPS location, and even genetic genealogy, Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was caught by low-tech ordinary citizens at a McDonald's in Altoona, PA:

“Don’t that look like the shooter from New York?” one of the regulars, who only gave his first name, Larry, recalled his friend joking.

“He probably heard us,” Larry said of the man seated maybe 10 feet away in the back, near the restrooms of the fast-food restaurant in Altoona.

All joking aside, Larry’s friend was correct: That man turned out to be the wanted fugitive suspected of calmly pulling out a pistol with a silencer on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and gunning down the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in a brazen assassination that gripped the nation.

A worker behind the counter used a low-tech phone to call the low-tech Altoona cops:

About 9:15 a.m., a pair of officers found the man “wearing a medical mask and a beanie” sitting “in the rear of the building at a table,” looking at a laptop, according to a criminal complaint. There was a backpack on the floor near the table. They asked him to pull down his mask.

Altoona Police Officer Tyler Frye and his partner “immediately recognized him,” the complaint said.

“We didn’t even think twice about it,” Frye, who has about six months on the job, told reporters after the arrest. “We knew that was our guy.”

High tech?

New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch said, a “combination of old-school detective work and new-age technology” led to the capture of a suspect.

This is the purest moonshine. The highest tech involved was security camera footage, which police have known how to use for decades.

“There’s numerous linchpins in this case, and the fact that we’ve recovered an enormous amount of forensic evidence, an enormous amount of video,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters. “I really couldn’t put it on one thing, but if I had to, it would be the release of that photograph” of the suspect’s exposed face.

Which was finally seen by the regulars at an Altoona McDonald's. Alan Dershowitz has asked why Mangione's family, who must certainly have recognized him in that same photo, apparently kept quiet.

This is actually quite similar to how Ryan Routh, the man arrested for poking his gun at Trump through a West Palm Beach golf course fence, was identified and caught:

In a news conference Sunday afternoon, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said a man, widely identified as Ryan Routh, was hiding in the bushes on the perimeter of Trump International Golf Club when a Secret Service member, who was about a hole ahead of Trump on the course, noticed a barrel of a gun sticking out of the bushes and "engaged" with the man.

“He was able to spot this rifle barrel sticking out of the fence and immediately engaged that individual,” Bradshaw said.

The man then fled. Bradshaw said a witness came forward saying he saw someone flee from the bushes and get into a black Nissan vehicle. The witness apparently took a photo of the car and license plate.

The story claims "A license-plate reader and AI technology, in part, helped track him." But license plate readers simply aren't AI; optical character reading technology has been around for decades, it's on your home scanner. It's generally acknowledged that if a low-tech alert citizen hadn't been there to snap a photo, finding and catching Routh would have been much more difficult, maybe impossible.

It's also worth pointing out that law enforcement "experts" who spoke to media before Mangione was caught thought he was so good, he must have been a professional:

Former FBI special agent Terry Rankhorn said that some aspects of the gunman's behavior "paint a picture of a professional killer like Jason Bourne," who may have used an accomplice to give him a warning when his target was near.

"We see a textbook professional assassination unfold on the video footage," Rankhorn told Newsweek.

No, it wasn't. Mangione was a deeply troubled lone wolf whose activities before and after the assassination were disorganized and counterproductive -- he continued to wear the same clothes and kept the same gun, and although, with a passport and currency in his backpack, his best move would have been to head for the border, he wandered at random in western Pennsylvania until he was caught at random by old-fashioned alert citizens and a rookie cop.

We've had three high-profile assassinations or attempts in the last six months that have actually been major black eyes for high-level law enforcement, and for that matter, private executive security and the Secret Service. UnitedHealthcare by definition had security protecting its CEO, but a random nut job was able to wait for him on the street, get behind him, and fire multiple shots. There are now a lot of namby-pamby articles about how "insurance companies and hospital organizations are considering new security measures in light of Thompson’s killing".

Baloney. Oddly, no story I've seen so far has identified UnitedHealthcare's security head, who should be fired, as well as any private security the company had engaged for executive protection. The real story in all these is that conventional security assumptions haven't been working, and especially as applied to security and law enforcement, the multibillions spent on AI are a massive waste. I can't imagine this is lost on Trump, Musk, or Ramaswamy.