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I’m not sure how I feel about facial recognition. On one hand, I think code is just information and no piece of information should be illegal to possess. I also

by mruts 7y ago

I’m not sure how I feel about facial recognition. On one hand, I think code is just information and no piece of information should be illegal to possess. I also think we need to protect our rights with math and code not laws. But I’m not sure that would help against the very real and dystopian future that seems just around the corner. Facial recognition is probably the key cornerstone of said future and I’m not sure what we should do. Banning facial recognition also feels wrong to me, and violates the aforementioned axiom about information. Moreover, many cities are already blanketed in thousands of government cameras and facial recognition doesn’t seem like anymore an abridgement of our privacy than the cameras alone. Maybe we should just ban police cameras on streets? But the ship has probably already sailed on that one.

eloff 7y ago
Human rights are not a mathematical or computer science concept, they are in fact a law concept. I know it's tempting for computer people on hackernews to want to solve problems with the tools of their own domain - but law is exactly the place where rights need to be protected, not code.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  But it would help a lot of developers didn't work on technologies that clearly lead to a dystopian future, or for companies that are working toward the direction. I know that would never happen, but it would sure help.
- mruts 7y ago
  If you don't have axiomatic beliefs, then where do your beliefs come from? Some abstract feeling? Whatever "feels" right? Clearly (to me at least), you need a system of axiomatic beliefs. If your axioms don't form a coherent system (i.e you can prove a contradiction), then you really don't believe anything at all. It's surprising to me that very few people think about morality this way. Everyone has a different view of morality of course, but you should at the very least try and distill it into an elegant system that is a) consistent and b) has sufficient predictive power to be useful. An example of a system that fulfills a) but not b) would be something like: There's no morality anyone can do anything they want. That's only one axiom and pretty elegant as systems go. The problem with it is that it's so trivial that it can't assign value judgements to anything at all, rendering it all but worthless. The system that I tend to follow has three primary axioms: 1) There are two kinds of things in the world: people and property. 2) People own property and they can do anything they want with said property as long as it doesn't violate the rights of others to do the same. Moreover, the person himself is property and thus is solely owned by himself. 3) By violating the axioms above, one forfeits his right to the above axioms. While not perfect, this system is internally consistent and also has sufficient predictive power: If someone punches me, he's violating my property of myself (2), and therefore can be sent to jail (3). If I break into someones house, same thing: violates (2) and therefore can be punished by (3). There are some things that the system can't assign judgements to, however: What are children? What rights do they have? What about abortion? What exactly violates someone else's property? Does air pollution can't as violation? What about the environment? What rights to animals have (the system says they're property, but some people might have a problem with others torturing animals, for example)? Where does the government get it's legitimacy? Can the government levy taxes? etc etc etc In truth, the things it can't make judgements about are probably than the things it can. But I personally haven't found a better or more elegant system to frame the world in, so I generally stick with it while being aware of it's limitations.
  - techsupporter 7y ago
    > If you don't have axiomatic beliefs, then where do your beliefs come from? Some abstract feeling? Whatever "feels" right? The answer to your first question is "oftentimes, yes" to the second two. There is this pervasive myth held by people who tend to gravitate towards "functional" fields like ours--that is, technology, math, the logical sciences, and so on--that the human existence can be distilled into a series of logical statements that can be evaluated at different times and, given the same inputs, will always produce the same outputs. (It's the same origin as the myth of the "perfectly rational actor" in economic systems that makes a lot of assumptions that are invalid in the context of how people truly function.) This myth misses a key thing about humans: thinking animals are not computers. What feels right or what beliefs someone holds can and usually do change over time as someone's existence progresses and new experiences are had. This is where some of our greatest benefits, like the ability to experience art in new and different ways depending on the context or situation or even just our mood, and some of our greatest tragedies, like holding one set of people to be negatively different based on an arbitrary criteria, originate. Saying that if someone's beliefs can't be reduced to "code" causes them to be invalid is against the human condition.
  - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    The problem with trying to get to a elegant set of moral axioms is that human morality is a product of multiple conflicting and contradictory goals compiled and obfuscated by evolution, a mother of all one-way optimization processes. Confound it with the fact that most of those goals are not of individuals but of genes and of gene groups. We are mere executors in that regard. At best you could distill down to multiple separate self-consistent trees of moral rules and model individual humans as sets of weights for those.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > law is exactly the place where rights need to be protected, not code. It is possible to do two things at once and provide overlapping protection. When something has both technical and legal defenses, that thing is safer than having only one or the other.
- philwelch 7y ago
  To what extent is there such a thing as a "right not to be recognized"? If there is such a right, can it not be exercised--against machine as well as man--simply by wearing a mask?
criddell 7y ago
Due to some recent health issues, my Dad's driver license was temporarily revoked. He can't drive again until his doctor decides it's safe. So now my step mother is doing all the driving and anytime they go somewhere, they get pulled over by the police. This is a consequence of police cameras and software I had never thought of before and I have mixed feelings about it. I don't think there are any easy answers.
- wguaa 7y ago
  So, working as intended, no?
- givinguflac 7y ago
  Can you elaborate? Are you saying the police in your area have facial recognition and pull over any car where the driver isn't who the car is registered to? I'm confused.
  - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    He probably means police knows registered owner of that car shouldn't drive and stop it to check who is driving.
  - criddell 7y ago
    I think it's just an ALPR system. The car is registered in my Dad's name and since his license is suspended, the machine in the cruiser tells the officer to stop the car.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- acct1771 7y ago
  Public transportation is a good answer, for this specific example, although little you personally can do about that today.
  - 7y ago
PorterDuff 7y ago
Dunno why you are downvoted (I assume that's what greyed text means, if not, mea culpa), but that's the world we live in I guess. I'd say that the more general problem is that we all had privacy at one time due to the difficulties in gathering/parsing/storing. People used to be able to expect that their criminal record was somewhat private, that private conversations in public places were private, that their locations were private. 'Forgotten' can be interchanged for 'private' in these cases. There was no real protection in terms of law, just in terms of practicality. The great irony of modern times is that the sea change was schlepped in with the market for advertising, not your local Stasi. Of course, the cops are happy to use it if it exists.
JohnFen 7y ago
> Moreover, many cities are already blanketed in thousands of government cameras and facial recognition doesn’t seem like anymore an abridgement of our privacy than the cameras alone. It sure does to me.

by mruts 7y ago

eloff 7y ago

Human rights are not a mathematical or computer science concept, they are in fact a law concept. I know it's tempting for computer people on hackernews to want to solve problems with the tools of their own domain - but law is exactly the place where rights need to be protected, not code.

JohnFen 7y ago
But it would help a lot of developers didn't work on technologies that clearly lead to a dystopian future, or for companies that are working toward the direction. I know that would never happen, but it would sure help.
mruts 7y ago
If you don't have axiomatic beliefs, then where do your beliefs come from? Some abstract feeling? Whatever "feels" right? Clearly (to me at least), you need a system of axiomatic beliefs. If your axioms don't form a coherent system (i.e you can prove a contradiction), then you really don't believe anything at all. It's surprising to me that very few people think about morality this way. Everyone has a different view of morality of course, but you should at the very least try and distill it into an elegant system that is a) consistent and b) has sufficient predictive power to be useful. An example of a system that fulfills a) but not b) would be something like: There's no morality anyone can do anything they want. That's only one axiom and pretty elegant as systems go. The problem with it is that it's so trivial that it can't assign value judgements to anything at all, rendering it all but worthless. The system that I tend to follow has three primary axioms: 1) There are two kinds of things in the world: people and property. 2) People own property and they can do anything they want with said property as long as it doesn't violate the rights of others to do the same. Moreover, the person himself is property and thus is solely owned by himself. 3) By violating the axioms above, one forfeits his right to the above axioms. While not perfect, this system is internally consistent and also has sufficient predictive power: If someone punches me, he's violating my property of myself (2), and therefore can be sent to jail (3). If I break into someones house, same thing: violates (2) and therefore can be punished by (3). There are some things that the system can't assign judgements to, however: What are children? What rights do they have? What about abortion? What exactly violates someone else's property? Does air pollution can't as violation? What about the environment? What rights to animals have (the system says they're property, but some people might have a problem with others torturing animals, for example)? Where does the government get it's legitimacy? Can the government levy taxes? etc etc etc In truth, the things it can't make judgements about are probably than the things it can. But I personally haven't found a better or more elegant system to frame the world in, so I generally stick with it while being aware of it's limitations.
- techsupporter 7y ago
  > If you don't have axiomatic beliefs, then where do your beliefs come from? Some abstract feeling? Whatever "feels" right? The answer to your first question is "oftentimes, yes" to the second two. There is this pervasive myth held by people who tend to gravitate towards "functional" fields like ours--that is, technology, math, the logical sciences, and so on--that the human existence can be distilled into a series of logical statements that can be evaluated at different times and, given the same inputs, will always produce the same outputs. (It's the same origin as the myth of the "perfectly rational actor" in economic systems that makes a lot of assumptions that are invalid in the context of how people truly function.) This myth misses a key thing about humans: thinking animals are not computers. What feels right or what beliefs someone holds can and usually do change over time as someone's existence progresses and new experiences are had. This is where some of our greatest benefits, like the ability to experience art in new and different ways depending on the context or situation or even just our mood, and some of our greatest tragedies, like holding one set of people to be negatively different based on an arbitrary criteria, originate. Saying that if someone's beliefs can't be reduced to "code" causes them to be invalid is against the human condition.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  The problem with trying to get to a elegant set of moral axioms is that human morality is a product of multiple conflicting and contradictory goals compiled and obfuscated by evolution, a mother of all one-way optimization processes. Confound it with the fact that most of those goals are not of individuals but of genes and of gene groups. We are mere executors in that regard. At best you could distill down to multiple separate self-consistent trees of moral rules and model individual humans as sets of weights for those.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> law is exactly the place where rights need to be protected, not code. It is possible to do two things at once and provide overlapping protection. When something has both technical and legal defenses, that thing is safer than having only one or the other.
philwelch 7y ago
To what extent is there such a thing as a "right not to be recognized"? If there is such a right, can it not be exercised--against machine as well as man--simply by wearing a mask?

criddell 7y ago

Due to some recent health issues, my Dad's driver license was temporarily revoked. He can't drive again until his doctor decides it's safe. So now my step mother is doing all the driving and anytime they go somewhere, they get pulled over by the police. This is a consequence of police cameras and software I had never thought of before and I have mixed feelings about it. I don't think there are any easy answers.

wguaa 7y ago
So, working as intended, no?
givinguflac 7y ago
Can you elaborate? Are you saying the police in your area have facial recognition and pull over any car where the driver isn't who the car is registered to? I'm confused.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  He probably means police knows registered owner of that car shouldn't drive and stop it to check who is driving.
- criddell 7y ago
  I think it's just an ALPR system. The car is registered in my Dad's name and since his license is suspended, the machine in the cruiser tells the officer to stop the car.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
acct1771 7y ago
Public transportation is a good answer, for this specific example, although little you personally can do about that today.
- 7y ago

PorterDuff 7y ago

Dunno why you are downvoted (I assume that's what greyed text means, if not, mea culpa), but that's the world we live in I guess. I'd say that the more general problem is that we all had privacy at one time due to the difficulties in gathering/parsing/storing. People used to be able to expect that their criminal record was somewhat private, that private conversations in public places were private, that their locations were private. 'Forgotten' can be interchanged for 'private' in these cases. There was no real protection in terms of law, just in terms of practicality. The great irony of modern times is that the sea change was schlepped in with the market for advertising, not your local Stasi. Of course, the cops are happy to use it if it exists.

JohnFen 7y ago

> Moreover, many cities are already blanketed in thousands of government cameras and facial recognition doesn’t seem like anymore an abridgement of our privacy than the cameras alone. It sure does to me.