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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 w

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.

buildzr 7y ago
There's undeniably a freedom tradeoff here as facial recognition systems expand and many corporations and governments gain access to millions of capable sensors sending this data. 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.
- tty2300 7y ago
  Even locally is bad. Retail will use this right away to track everyone and what products they look at.
ahelwer 7y ago
There are very, very few moral applications of facial recognition. Logging into your phone/laptop or assisting people with prosopagnosia, I guess. Everything else basically enables mass surveillance. It is frankly astonishing, and an exemplar of technologist naivete, that so much effort was (and continues to be) dumped into developing this technology.
- joombaga 7y ago
  I googled it. pros·o·pag·no·sia /ˌpräsəpaɡˈnōZH(ē)ə/ noun PSYCHIATRY a neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize the faces of familiar people.
  - oil25 7y ago
    "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by neurologist Oliver Sacks is a fascinating story about visual agnosia - it was also my first introduction to artificial intelligence.
    - acastroe 7y ago
      That's interesting, my Intro to AI professor also had us read this in college (UCI). Is this common introductory material for the field?
    - plandis 7y ago
      That whole book is fascinating!
- joemag 7y ago
  Flagging “America’s most wanted” in public places like train stations or airports. Looking for missing children. Having home automation react differently to different family members. Those are all usages I am personally totally ok with.
  - tw04 7y ago
    >Flagging “America’s most wanted” in public places 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.
    - cle 7y ago
      Laws have a tendency not to stop dictators. They are the law. 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.
      - Jaepa 7y ago
        Yes, but that is kind of the point. The lack of checks and balances tend to lead to totalitarianism.
        judge2020 7y ago
        So in what way will facial recognition and "criminal spotted on 5th avenue" either dissuade or encourage totalitarianism/removing checks and balances?. If a Gov't falls into totalitarianism, a facial recognition ban (both internally within AMZN as well as on a national/local level) won't stop them from requiring AMZN to provide them facial recognition behind-the-scenes.
        roenxi 7y ago
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  Some of the developers may be naive, as people often willfully are for the preservation of their paychecks. The governments and corporations funding the development know exactly what they're doing.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- edanm 7y ago
  > There are very, very few moral applications of facial recognition. 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".
- aurelianito 7y ago
  There are lots of applications. For instance, I would love to have an app that gives me contextual information about the people I am talking with. Specifically about the things that he/she already told me, as their name. I don't see anything inmoral un this.
- plandis 7y ago
  It’s entirely possible I’m being naive about this I think that’s a fair criticism. I do also think that it’s equally naive to attempt to block any single company from developing this technology. As long as there is profits to be made company’s will develop facial recognition technology. This is why I mentioned regulating it’s use. 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.
awakeasleep 7y ago
same thing with land mines? What about an autonomous drone? 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?)
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  A land mine can only be a landmine. 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?
  - baddox 7y ago
    A landline could prevent a burglar from walking on my property.
    - IntelMiner 7y ago
      Or it could also kill a pizza delivery boy
      - hutzlibu 7y ago
        Or yourself or the people helping you, after you had a stroke and don't remember anymore that and where your placed them.
      - baddox 7y ago
jrochkind1 7y ago
Sure, anything can be used for good or evil, uranium, an ICBM, whatever.
anigbrowl 7y ago
And yet you can't buy hand grenades at 7-11 even though that would be insanely useful.
Christian_Baker 7y ago
No. PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE http://fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf http://fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf 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.
- tedunangst 7y ago
  What about the possibility that a bad person uses the hammer to build a sarin gas bomb, uses it to destabilize the government, seizes control, and then executes entire races and gene pools? It's all about the consequences, not the probability, so doesn't that make selling a hammer just as wicked?
  - chunkstuntman 7y ago
    The US government routinely monitors purchase and search histories to prevent the active ingredients of something destructive like that from falling into nefarious hands, and you're posing a wholly disingenuous argument
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - roenxi 7y ago
      Gp isn't remotely disingenuous, they are pointing out that 'probabilities ... are irrelevant [w]hat matters is the consequences' is a philosophy guaranteed to lead to stupid decisions. 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?'.
croo 7y ago
It's more like selling a sword. You may use it to chop up watermelon but we both know that's not the main use case.
specialist 7y ago
All technology has a moral component, it's never neutral. 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 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".

buildzr 7y ago

There's undeniably a freedom tradeoff here as facial recognition systems expand and many corporations and governments gain access to millions of capable sensors sending this data. 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.

tty2300 7y ago
Even locally is bad. Retail will use this right away to track everyone and what products they look at.

ahelwer 7y ago

There are very, very few moral applications of facial recognition. Logging into your phone/laptop or assisting people with prosopagnosia, I guess. Everything else basically enables mass surveillance. It is frankly astonishing, and an exemplar of technologist naivete, that so much effort was (and continues to be) dumped into developing this technology.

joombaga 7y ago
I googled it. pros·o·pag·no·sia /ˌpräsəpaɡˈnōZH(ē)ə/ noun PSYCHIATRY a neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize the faces of familiar people.
- oil25 7y ago
  "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by neurologist Oliver Sacks is a fascinating story about visual agnosia - it was also my first introduction to artificial intelligence.
  - acastroe 7y ago
    That's interesting, my Intro to AI professor also had us read this in college (UCI). Is this common introductory material for the field?
  - plandis 7y ago
    That whole book is fascinating!
joemag 7y ago
Flagging “America’s most wanted” in public places like train stations or airports. Looking for missing children. Having home automation react differently to different family members. Those are all usages I am personally totally ok with.
- tw04 7y ago
  >Flagging “America’s most wanted” in public places 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.
  - cle 7y ago
    Laws have a tendency not to stop dictators. They are the law. 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.
    - Jaepa 7y ago
      Yes, but that is kind of the point. The lack of checks and balances tend to lead to totalitarianism.
      - judge2020 7y ago
        So in what way will facial recognition and "criminal spotted on 5th avenue" either dissuade or encourage totalitarianism/removing checks and balances?. If a Gov't falls into totalitarianism, a facial recognition ban (both internally within AMZN as well as on a national/local level) won't stop them from requiring AMZN to provide them facial recognition behind-the-scenes.
        roenxi 7y ago
jrochkind1 7y ago
Some of the developers may be naive, as people often willfully are for the preservation of their paychecks. The governments and corporations funding the development know exactly what they're doing.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
edanm 7y ago
> There are very, very few moral applications of facial recognition. 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".
aurelianito 7y ago
There are lots of applications. For instance, I would love to have an app that gives me contextual information about the people I am talking with. Specifically about the things that he/she already told me, as their name. I don't see anything inmoral un this.
plandis 7y ago
It’s entirely possible I’m being naive about this I think that’s a fair criticism. I do also think that it’s equally naive to attempt to block any single company from developing this technology. As long as there is profits to be made company’s will develop facial recognition technology. This is why I mentioned regulating it’s use. 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.

awakeasleep 7y ago

same thing with land mines? What about an autonomous drone? 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?)

hutzlibu 7y ago
A land mine can only be a landmine. 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?
- baddox 7y ago
  A landline could prevent a burglar from walking on my property.
  - IntelMiner 7y ago
    Or it could also kill a pizza delivery boy
    - hutzlibu 7y ago
      Or yourself or the people helping you, after you had a stroke and don't remember anymore that and where your placed them.
    - baddox 7y ago

jrochkind1 7y ago

Sure, anything can be used for good or evil, uranium, an ICBM, whatever.

anigbrowl 7y ago

And yet you can't buy hand grenades at 7-11 even though that would be insanely useful.

Christian_Baker 7y ago

No. PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE http://fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf http://fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf 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.

tedunangst 7y ago
What about the possibility that a bad person uses the hammer to build a sarin gas bomb, uses it to destabilize the government, seizes control, and then executes entire races and gene pools? It's all about the consequences, not the probability, so doesn't that make selling a hammer just as wicked?
- chunkstuntman 7y ago
  The US government routinely monitors purchase and search histories to prevent the active ingredients of something destructive like that from falling into nefarious hands, and you're posing a wholly disingenuous argument
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - roenxi 7y ago
    Gp isn't remotely disingenuous, they are pointing out that 'probabilities ... are irrelevant [w]hat matters is the consequences' is a philosophy guaranteed to lead to stupid decisions. 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?'.

croo 7y ago

It's more like selling a sword. You may use it to chop up watermelon but we both know that's not the main use case.

specialist 7y ago

All technology has a moral component, it's never neutral. 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 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".