In the television show, Futurama, there’s a great scene that shows a Macintosh computer churning on a process while displaying “Judging…” on the screen. In the future, computer programs do the judging.

Both my mother and I received stern letters from the DMV this month telling us that we were bad drivers and that we needed to be more careful. This letter was generated automatically, since we’d each received two moving violations in the past month.

Each of my infractions were directly because of computers doing the “Judging…” The first was a speeding ticket. I was going 5 miles over the speed limit. Without a laser, it would have been imperceptible. We’ve all seen the of cars that speed, darting in between the traffic on the highway. This is the type of speeding that’s obvious to human perception — it’s clearly outside the norm, and clearly dangerous. The second infraction was a camera taking my photograph for running a red light. This was at 12pm, not a car on the road, and really it was one of those situations where you just reach a little on a yellow light. Everyone does it. I’ve actually done this with police sitting in the intersection, and they didn’t even bother to pull me over.

It caused me to wonder. How will computers doing the “judging” change everything?