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The points that this article and many of the comments here seem to make about the dangers of these racially-caused mistakes miss the more fundamental problem of
by shadowprofile77 7y ago
The points that this article and many of the comments here seem to make about the dangers of these racially-caused mistakes miss the more fundamental problem of this technology being used ever more widely in the first place. Facial recognition will invariably get better (virtually certainly to the point of almost completely avoiding mistakes based on a persons ethnic makeup) and that's what's really terrible, because it hints at the sort of constant surveillance future we have coming toward us. If anything, it's almost comforting to know that right now, at the very least, these algorithms don't yet work well enough to avoid politically unfortunate errors, because the political consequences of these errors slow down the scenario of total, nearly error-free ubiquity that anyone who even slightly values privacy should be very worried about.
- raxxorrax 7y agoThe inherent problem facial recognition and similar systems have is that they just rely on an extremely narrow context. But I agree that it is not constructive to points towards bias (in many discussions actually), since that will just normalize the presence of the technology itself. Suddenly it just needs to solve the problem of improving some statistics instead of justifying the deployment of cameras everywhere in the first place. So the criticism is a particularly bad one that omits to ask the hard questions.
- tu7001 7y agoCorrect, spread the word!
- menzoic 7y agoI would agree if these systems weren't being used to accost and prosecute people in the affected groups in the real world today. Considering that humans are willing to blindly follow these false results I'd say it's even more frightening rather than comforting.