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Comment by speedplane | Hacker News Reader

I am less concerned that there may be visibly identifiable characteristics of homosexuality. I am more concerned that these features can be automatically discerned by computers on a massive scale. It's one thing for an individual homophobe to call out someone because they look gay. It's quite another for a government or organization to do that to millions of people in seconds, and then act upon it at scale.

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Do you think the authors of the paper are the first to think of this idea of detecting personal traits with facial features? How much cost do you think it takes for implementing detection with this particular set of features?

If it can be done it will be done. In this particular case it doesn't even cost much. You should have started to be concerned when machine learning evolved into a paradigm that is only possible to achieve any kind of real world performance with an amount of data and computing resources available only to megacorps and governments.

> If it can be done it will be done. Nonsense. Scientists and grad students have ethical standards and refrain from unethical research all the time. This paper was written by a business school grad student, who may be more interested in clicks than in moving the state of the art forward.

I think what I implied was it will be done by entities without moral considerations, such as capitals and governments. In this sense it's not very productive to censor individual researchers from publicizing these kind of findings. Technology will evolve. The question to ask is who will control the technology. By censoring you're just blinding yourself from what's coming. And my second point was the imbalance of power started when individual control of intelligence capabilities was no longer possible after the field moved to "data driven" and "deep learning" paradigms.

You can study the idea and science without doing the deed. The U.S. could have learned about atomic bombs without dropping one. Tech companies can learn about image recognition without categorizing everyone based on their photo.

I love the fact that the authors also see that implication and include a warning.

> Additionally, given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people’s intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women.

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