Ring CEO Claims AI-Powered Cameras Can Eliminate Most Crime
Ring’s founder, Jamie Siminoff, has returned to the company, determined to “Make neighborhoods safer.” To that end, Siminoff thinks that artificial intelligence could help Ring not only achieve its original mission but also eliminate most crime.
Speaking to The Verge ahead of the release of his new book, Ding Dong, Siminoff believes AI will make Ring cameras even more effective at securing people’s homes, preventing crime, and generally making neighborhoods safer, better places to live.
Siminoff talks to The Verge about Ring’s new AI-powered Search Party feature, which can turn other people’s Ring cameras into makeshift search parties when people lose a dog, for example.
Basically, when someone’s dog gets loose, an unfortunately common occurrence, they can post a photo of the dog on the Ring Neighbors app, and Ring can start a “Search Party” and use AI to scan through footage from nearby outdoor Ring cameras. If a nearby person’s Ring camera catches sight of the lost dog, the camera owner will be notified and can decide what to do with the footage. Presumably, most people will share the video.
This is a mostly benign use of AI. But Siminoff thinks AI can go much further, and it’s not evident to everyone that all the possible uses are good. While stopping 100 percent of crime is an impossible target, a lot has changed in the space since Siminoff founded Ring. At the time, when Ring was known as Doorbot, Siminoff envisioned a world in which Ring became a “pre-crime” detection system,” TechCrunch reported over a decade ago. If this concept sounds familiar, it has come up in numerous dystopian sci-fi stories over the years.
When Siminoff left Amazon a couple of years ago, Ring’s parent company since 2018, he probably could not have imagined how far AI technology would come in such a short time.
“I think that in most normal, average neighborhoods, with the right amount of technology — not too crazy — and with AI, that we can very close to zero out crime. Get much closer to the mission than I ever thought,” Siminoff tells The Verge. “By the way, I don’t think it’s 10 years away. That’s in 12 to 24 months… maybe even within a year.”
Granted, in most “normal, average” neighborhoods, there aren’t crime waves in the first place. But that doesn’t help sell security products.
As The Verge notes, research doesn’t necessarily support the notion that video doorbells prevent crime, but Siminoff is convinced that AI throws all that out the window.
He also wants to rebuild Ring’s relationship with law enforcement, enabling police to ask Ring users to share their videos anonymously, something that Siminoff thinks is perfectly fine and that concerns about it are “misinformation” and definitely “not controversies.” That’s not how civil rights groups see it, though, as TechCrunch reports.
Ring’s transformation from a convenient doorbell to an AI-powered component of a growing private surveillance network is fascinating. Siminoff describes that and much more in his upcoming book.
Image credits: Header photo and inline article of the Ring doorbell camera were licensed via Depositphotos.
