Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

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> Do others really consider facial recognition and voice recognition (as the title suggests) to be like phrenology?

I won't jump to that conclusion but I'm skeptical. Phrenology seemed like it worked (to some) until real rigor and statistically significant sample sizes put it to rest. I suspect that may happen to facial and voice recognition too - if limited to a small, known group size or heavily controlled circumstances it works well, but the second you apply it to nontrivial real world populations over time it loses most of its predictive power. Obviously even in limited applications the technology is far more useful than phrenology ever was, just going by the number of people using Face ID.

At the end of the day, the predictions facial/voice recognition algorithms make are far more specific and obviously testable than phrenology ever was, but we don't even have conclusive evidence that humans can precisely identify individuals using only sight or sound without a mental context that would approach a general AI. Even parents, for example, can have trouble differentiating identical twins without contextual clues like personality traits, schedule, or preferred fashion.

IMHO it all relates to what do you mean by "precisely identify" - if we're talking about automating some process that's currently done by humans, then it does not to be able to distinguish identical twins, it only needs to be roughly comparable to what the humans can do. And the "benchmark human" is not a close relative using contextual clues, it's some bored overworked clerk who'd otherwise be looking at the same pictures.

I think whether or not these methods are pseudoscience is irrelevant. Why?

Even if phrenology had worked most of the time, it would still be a terrible idea. Even if phrenologists could classify criminals with 99% accuracy from the shape of their skull, they'd still be screwing over a ton innocent people when their methods were applied to large populations. Putting somebody in prison because of the shape of their skull is a terrible proposition, even if you get it right more often than not.

That’s sad, but we already do lots of statistical analysis in good or bad ways. It would only help to shed more light on bad ways if we digitize it further. It’s unclear to me if what you assume about that digital racism software isn’t already there (e.g. detectives who prioritize suspects by skull shape or HRs doing the same). The fact that we cannot see it doesn’t make it less terrible.

Edit: I’m basing on a premise that working with a lot of subjects, a human inevitably creates a structure in their brain similar to what we discuss (professional deformation is a thing). I bet that it’s often even worse than $subj because a human mind tends to simplify its job for energy consumption reasons.

If it worked there could have been a effort around Applied Phrenology where bumps are added to peoples skulls to improve behavior

I feel the same way about automatic driving.

Even if the accuracy and error rate surpass humans, every death due to an AV failing is one death too much. However, most people seem to be happy with a failure rate lower then my grandma...

Human eyewitness testimony is also imperfect. How often do you see someone or hear a voice that you think you recognize only to find out it was someone else?

What you are arguing is that voice and face recognition are to be accepted as absolute fact, which is not how they ought to be treated. They shouldn't be considered any more reliable than a human, and any use otherwise should be discouraged. Don't throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

Human eyewitness relates to an event. "Did you see this person on the night of January 14" etc. Phrenology is based on immutable characteristics of a person's physiology. Predicting criminality based on any immutable feature seems categorically wrong to me. If facial and voice recognition are used in relation to specific events, that's one thing, but using them to predict some sort of innate propensity for doing crime sounds like pure bathwater.

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