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Instead she stayed and would then escalate what Christian Cooper said had been a polite request into a conflict. That's an odd reaction for someone scared for her life.

Yet she walked toward him quickly, filling the video screen as she reaches toward his phone camera, with dog leash and her own phone in hand. He asked her to back away: "please don't come close to me," he said twice in a calm, firm voice.

"I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." Christian Cooper responded, telling her to "please tell them whatever you like." And so she does: "There's a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet," she said into her phone, her tone breathless and urgent. "He is recording me and threatening me and my dog."

"I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble!" she cried into the phone. "Please send the cops immediately!"

Amy Cooper's decision to summon the police against a man who did nothing more than ask her to follow the rules reads as nothing short of a potential threat to his life.

She, a white woman (and she didn't have to even say that explicitly; she knew it would be grasped by whoever had answered the phone) would be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection, and her story would be believed on its face; he, a black man, would be seen as menacing and potentially dangerous, and his version of events would be doubted or disregarded.

Ahmaud Arbery, a black man in Georgia, was just out for a run last February when, authorities say, Gregory and Travis McMichael, two white men (one of them a former police officer, as it happened), grabbed their guns, chased him down, and shot him to death. They faced no criminal penalties and were simply let off the hook until a video emerged of their attack, and public outcry forced law enforcement to act. (The two have not been asked by a judge for a plea, and attorneys for the men have told reporters they committed no crimes, according to CNN reporting.) Without the video, the wheels of justice would likely never have even begun to turn.

We see again and again that African Americans who are victims of serious crimes need unimpeachable video evidence to be believed. Overwhelmingly, though, crimes are not caught on video. And even when they are, we have seen repeatedly that law enforcement often doesn't act until they are compelled by a huge public outcry. Without reliably fair law enforcement, there are simply few avenues for justice.

To be sure, it's easy to find legitimate criticism of Twitter "justice." But this only raises the more important question of why our formal mechanisms for justice are so often so inept at providing justice across racial lines -- why the very people and institutions we should be able to trust are instead often threats to the lives and safety of African Americans. When calling the cops is understood as a threat to a black person -- and sometimes even a threat to that person's life-- that's not just an indictment of the cop-caller, that's an indictment of the police, of prosecutors, of juries and of too many in a white American public willing to accept this reality.

Amy Cooper has issued an apology (she told CNN she wanted to "publicly apologize to everyone"), but in explaining her egregious actions, said "I'm not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way." How do you not mean to harm someone when you call the police and falsely claim he is threatening you? "I think I was just scared," Amy Cooper said. "When you're alone in the Ramble, you don't know what's happening. It's not excusable, it's not defensible."

Her woe-is-me complaints are a bit hard to swallow given her own actions, which could have damaged or destroyed the life of an innocent man.

let's keep our eyes on the prize: a justice system that works, rather than one which so often accepts the word of white people at the expense of black lives and freedom.

The Pew Research Center survey asked people different questions but found similar doubts about AI. Just 15 percent of respondents said they were more excited than concerned about the increasing use of AI in daily life.

“It’s fantastic that there is public skepticism about AI. There absolutely should be,” said Meredith Broussard, an artificial intelligence researcher and professor at New York University.

Broussard said there can be no way to design artificial intelligence software to make inherently human decisions, like grading students’ tests or determining the course of medical treatment.

Most Americans essentially agree with Broussard that AI has a place in our lives, but not for everything.

Most people said it was a bad idea to use AI for military drones that try to distinguish between enemies and civilians or trucks making local deliveries without human drivers. Most respondents said it was a good idea for machines to perform risky jobs such as coal mining.

Roman Yampolskiy, an AI specialist at the University of Louisville engineering school, told me he’s concerned about how quickly technologists are building computers that are designed to “think” like the human brain and apply knowledge not just in one narrow area, like recommending Netflix movies, but for complex tasks that have tended to require human intelligence.

“We have an arms race between multiple untested technologies. That is my concern,” Yampolskiy said. (If you want to feel terrified, I recommend Yampolskiy’s research paper on the inability to control advanced AI.)

The term “AI” is a catch-all for everything from relatively uncontroversial technology, such as autocomplete in your web search queries, to the contentious software that promises to predict crime before it happens. Our fears about the latter might be overwhelming our beliefs about the benefits from more mundane AI.