In my mind selling facial recognition seems no different than selling a hammer. It’s amoral, it can be used for good or bad.
Id much rather see laws to limit when and how the technology can be applied.
Id much rather see laws to limit when and how the technology can be applied.
It is frankly astonishing, and an exemplar of technologist naivete, that so much effort was (and continues to be) dumped into developing this technology.
pros·o·pag·no·sia
/ˌpräsəpaɡˈnōZH(ē)ə/
noun PSYCHIATRY
a neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize the faces of familiar people.
Those are all usages I am personally totally ok with.
And what happens if we descend into military rule or a dictatorship? With "America's most wanted" fliers, the general public can just refuse to participate. With facial recognition, anyone deemed an "enemy of the state" can easily be tracked and eliminated.
Always assume the worst and work your way back to the good when doing the cost-benefit analysis.
In reality laws are only as powerful as their enforcement, and if there is no will to enforce, like what happens during transitions to dictatorships, then they’ll just be ignored.
There are other, better, arguments in favor of personal liberty to use against facial recognition by law enforcement. Efficient, highly automated systems crush people who just happen to get caught up in them.
A tool that could track individuals and was under the perview of Executive Branch (eg Homeland Security) sounds pretty dangerous. Any political rivals of family members who go for STI screening, abortion clinics, gay bars, oncologist, or couples consoling could be either leveraged or leaked for political effect. Or you it could be used to track groups of people, activist, reporters. Or any number of ways I wouldn’t be able to think of.
What I was trying to say is that if you are trying to establish a totalitarism not having any checks and balances on something like that would be handly.
Technologies take time to develop and deploy, and the fact of their development and deployment is a red flag that tells you something bad is coming and gives you time to react before it can actually be put into place.
Setting everything up for turnkey totalitarianism is not wise.
Also, in a functioning state, the bureaucracy (mostly) follows the law and the judicary's interpretation of the law. Then again, functioning states don't tend to turn into dictatorships.
(Fun fact: Article 20 (4) of the German constitution explicitly authorizes every German to resist when someone abolishes freedom and democracy. Considering the mentality of the average German, this is probably necessary.)
The general public will be misled by the media. Already politicians are claiming that the media isn't truly independent or objective with claims of "fake news". If the media falsely claim that you are a dangerous criminal, the public will eat it up and ask for dessert.
We wear masks.
It only works if it scans _everyone_ .
Additionally what happens when the technology isn’t perfect and innocent people get mistakenly flagged as persons of interest?
The other thing is once it’s installed and in operation, what’s to stop it being used for other purposes? - being used to target people peacefully protesting against the government or whatever.
It’s a slippery path from there into a surveillance state - China is already pretty much there with their social credit system - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
I for one don’t want to wake up someday soon and discover it’s 1984...
Because of that, there’s unlikely to be universal acceptance or rejection. And without popular opinion, it will be hard to pass any laws that change the status quo.
There absolutely is an expectation of privacy in public. Being seen in public by a series of uncoordinated people is massively different from a PI tailing you and recording your actions. This form of privacy is generally termed "obscurity".
That is actually completely legal to do in all circumstances, precisely because there is no expectation of privacy in public.
> CCTV cameras monitored by humans are COMPLETELY different from a facial recognition system recording the identities and movements of all people. There is no comparison.
Which is not necessarily how facial recognition would necessarily work. More likely would be to scan for known suspects and fugitives. But then we’re back to the “how is it used” question.
Any technology which searches for fugitives will necessarily scan everyone. There is no such thing as targeted facial recognition, it can only work by mass surveillance.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html
I'm suggesting a far simpler use case: It scans your face and if you don't match any of the fugitives it's looking for, it forgets about you. I think this use case is far more likely because it's a lot simpler and cheaper to pull off. And that's a big difference.
"A general ability to stabilize a vulnerable world would require greatly amplified capacities for preventive policing and global governance."
To illustrate lets imagine a really really good system that had a 0% false negative rate¹ , and a 0.000001%² false positive rate. If we were to sample the entire country looking the the FBI's most wanted we would end up with ~3290 matches, 3280 of which are going to be other people³.
Considering high value of the individual the chances of harassment or wrongful arrest (or worst) is pretty high.
1: In reality the false negative and false positive rate are going to be directly inversely related. The more you decrease the false positive rate the higher your false negative rate is.
2: That is 1 in 1 million
3: In this ideal situation it is assuming there is an even distribution. At this point computer vision is significantly worst for false positives for people of color.
Even with the false positive rate it's much more likely an individual identified by the system is a target than a random individual.
> It's definitely a problem if you use the face recognition as your only criteria - but if it alerted security to pay more attention to someone or to double check their documents?
Where do you imagine this is happening? If its in an environment where papers are expected as standard (e.g. an airport), sure, this is relatively benign. If it's when you're walking through a mall and now you're being stopped and searched, how is that not bordering on harassment?
> Even with the false positive rate it's much more likely an individual identified by the system is a target than a random individual.
Much more likely than without the system, sure. Chances of it being a random individual and not the target? 99.6% (using the math above of 3280 innocents to 3290 people identified).
If a system had a failure rate of 99.6% when harassing people, I don't think I'd describe that as 'much more likely' to be a target than an innocent random.
I believe there is no better way to identify wanted criminals at scale, do we want to comb the streets with policemen and "harass" 10x more people in hoes of finding them?
It's not a death penalty to be checked and bothering additional 3200 people in the whole country is a ok tradeoff to find wanted person in my opinion.
It feels like you want to cripple the way police looks for criminals because they don't act very kind towards suspects. Maybe police is the problem and not surveillance?
How would this face camera thing even work? Like, a camera identifies so-and-so and a police car rushes out immediately? That’s not really how police do stuff.
Rather than the hypothetical of 'is this ok if we have 100% accuracy', how about 'is 100% accuracy ever likely to be possible?'
If it's not, then the previous question is about as relevant as 'if unicorns existed, would you want one?' (and yes, I would!)
I think that's less realistic than developing 100% accurate algorithms, but now we're into anthropology instead of technology...
That's kind of a denying the antecedent propositional fallacy.
How big is the false positive rate with tips received by phone? Law enforcement probably has to deal with much more wrong clues on a daily basis than to double check an image that was flagged by an automated system. And if even a human inspection can't tell the difference between the missing person and an image of the missing person then it's definitely worth checking out.
Instead they should attempt to verify first and try to approach people in civilised manner, not shoot their pets...
It is a misconstrued quote now but Ben Franklin said "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
I mean, we don't even have the technology yet, we don't have almost any real entrepreneurship around how to use it... are you sure there are no good, moral use cases to discover?
I'm afraid that this position is as naive as the flip side - techno optimists who assumed that an 'open internet' is an ultimate good, and there are no bad uses for it. There's definitely more nuance than "it's 95% bad".
In general, once the proverbial genie is out of the bottle I don’t think you can put it back in in today’s world.
The issue is not whether it is amoral or not to do something. The issue is in the inherent asymmetry in making an error.
If i knowingly sell a hammer to a particularly wicked individual, perhaps a dozen or so innocent people will perish due to my actions.
However, if i sell facial recognition to the wrong individual, I may have wiped out an entire generation, gene pool, race, etc.
The probabilities of either event are irrelevant. What matters is the consequences of the fat tails.
Wicked use of a hammer != wicked use of mass surveillance.
To make a sensible decision in a risky context both probability and consequence are needed. There is always a (practically 0%) risk of any action leading to catastrophic global consequences.
In addition, the original Precautionary Principle paper linked is an idea that sounds nice but is actually a bit dangerous. If we applied the PP to the formation of the internet it should have been suppressed right from the get go - we never had and still have no positive evidence that social media won't cause extreme harm to the public (eg, it could have caused mass depression and disengagement with reality and maybe moral corruption :p). The internet is risky - did huge damage to existing industries and triggered the rapid rise of China through knowledge sharing and enabling remote management of industry (why else have we never seen anything like it before?). Impact of research into splitting the atom - did a lot of damage, much more risk.
Proving that something is safe without just doing it is hugely expensive. Technological advancement would not be a fraction of what we have now - the cost of trying things needs to be cheap to encourage progress. We couldn't prove most of the things we do are safe without being able to point to them and say 'seems to be working?'.
Should we research nuclear physics? The worst that could happen is global thermonuclear war, so forget about it. But what's the worst that could happen if we don't? We might need a nuke to divert an asteroid. We might need nuclear power to prevent climate collapse. It could save the world rather than destroy it.
"What you don't know can't hurt you" is contrary to evidence.
Hell, even a bottle of aspirin filled with poison tablets secretly placed on a store shelf could kill a future serial killer.
I believe your judgement mechanism is meaningless. Even the most evil stuff can be used for good, and everything is a tool.
A better metric would apply one of the standard ethical frameworks, like utilitarianism or deontological ethics. (Is this technology going to provide a net benefit? / If everyone used this technology would we live in a desirable world?)
I agree with you about autonomous drones. They have many moral uses. Weaponized ones, not so much.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-landmines/u-s-halts-u...
"While retaining stockpiles, the United States has not used persistent mines for some time. The last field of persistent mines under U.S. control was in Guantanamo, Cuba, and was removed in 1999, the State Department official said."
A hammer can build and destroy.
So it makes sense to ban mines completely, as there is no humane use case.
But for facial recognition, I do see valid use cases. So yes, I do agree with OP and rather have the bad use cases banned/regulated.
And your metric: "If everyone used this technology would we live in a desirable world?"
Totally depends on how it is used. I do see a potential world with facial recognition software and not be a dystopia. I mean, is all Sci-Fi now considered Dystopia?
How can for example robots really interact with humans without that technology?
But they kill or cripple anyone. And the person placing them, usually does not remove them anymore.. so lots of one legged children in the end, as normally (rightfully!) war places see peace again. But with mines being cheap to deploy and removing them beeing very expensive they tend to stay where they are, until your childrens children walk over them as boyscouts.
And south corea had US backing as far as I know.
(even though there were mines on that border, too, but in a limited way that there are no more traces of them today)
Anyway, I am still highly sceptical to the claim, that mines prevented a total communist korea. Debating about that is not really constructive. Do you have studies for your claim?
I still don't know if I fully agree with Postman's Technolopy thesis, but he definitely challenged my younger technophilic self to be more critical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology is a book by Neil Postman published in 1992 that describes the development and characteristics of a "technopoly". He defines a technopoly as a society in which technology is deified, meaning “the culture seeks its authorisation in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology”. It is characterised by a surplus of information generated by technology, which technological tools are in turn employed to cope with, in order to provide direction and purpose for society and individuals.[1]
Postman considers technopoly to be the most recent of three kinds of cultures distinguished by shifts in their attitude towards technology – tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. Each, he says, is produced by the emergence of new technologies that "compete with old ones…mostly for dominance of their worldviews".
I can't think of a single use case where doing this in the cloud is a worthwhile tradeoff. If you want to do this locally, sure, I can see many silly use cases for it, but as soon as you start shipping that data off to say... Amazon, things get pretty sketchy pretty fast in my book. So while I agree there are good use cases for facial recognition, I feel these should never be implemented on centralized services.