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Given the current state of best of breed, up close facial recognition, using the term "works" in a life and death scenario is an irresponsible overreach. "Fail

Given the current state of best of breed, up close facial recognition, using the term "works" in a life and death scenario is an irresponsible overreach. "Fail early, kill innocents often" is a terrible paradigm.

deleted 7y ago
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JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
Generalized systems search massive databases, these systems can have much narrower data sets. "Who is X?" and "Is this X?" are very different computationally. Also; "fail early, kill innocents" is a great paradigm for staying in power. The beatings will continue until moral improves.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
"Fail early, kill innocents often" is perfectly acceptable in foreign countries especially if the population there is viewed as backwards in some way.
saulrh 7y ago
Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to be better than human performance. I heard a lot of stories out of Afghanistan and Iraq that ended up boiling down to "They had a big thing on their shoulder and it was pointed at a tank so we had to kill them", nevermind that that was a TV camera one in ten times.
- kelnos 7y ago
  I don't really like that line of thinking. Saying, "well, a human wouldn't have been able to do better" serves only to absolve anyone of any responsibility for the death. It's a lot easier to say it was "unavoidable" if a human isn't responsible.
- Jweb_Guru 7y ago
  > Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to be better than human performance. Firstly, it's about time we stop pretending that people wait until technology does something better than humans do before they deploy it. It will be deployed long before that point. Secondly, there are more reasons to be concerned about this sort of technology than just whether it is effective at its intended purpose (identifying people who do not want to be found, at long range, for the purpose of assassination).
  - lucasmullens 7y ago
    I guess I'm a bit confused, why would they deploy something when humans are still better off without it?
    - DiabloD3 7y ago
      Because military contractors like money.
    - d4mi3n 7y ago
      Politics. Money. Expediency. The cheaper and easier you make it to do something, the easier it is for you to get signoff to do it. Humans require oversight and care. A robot staking out an area? Not nearly as much, and folks don't get nearly as much backlash when a robot doesn't come back home.
    - apazzolini 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...
    - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
      People routinely replace humans with services that don't do the job as well if it s cheaper to deploy, well marketed, does something else that the human wouldn't, or part of a mutually beneficial arrangement between the manufacturer and the buyer. For a case in point that has nothing to do with the military, have you ever interacted with an automated call system that you felt was easier to use and more helpful to you than a human answering the line would have been? I have literally never experienced that, but I have witnessed a huge percentage of companies switch from humans to automated call systems.
- jacobush 7y ago
  For a site with a readership so familiar with "scaling out", I am surprised about takes like that. Does it matter if the technology makes the precision a bit better and the individual person evaluated for being killed, has a little better chance of surviving, thanks to being identified by a machine? When... the machines allow many more people being killed. After all, this is what automation allows us to do. How many qualified and highly trained snipers could the military deploy? Not very many, compared to how many drones and other augmented systems they can deploy now and in the future. Imagine every street corner equipped not only with CCTV, but augmented sniper turrets. I wouldn't bat an eye if a the next invaded city was blanketed with systems like these.
  - saulrh 7y ago
    > Imagine every street corner equipped not only with CCTV, but augmented sniper turrets. I wouldn't bat an eye if a the next invaded city was blanketed with systems like these. We already do that. It's just that the computers are squishy, unverifiable, black-boxed wetware that tend to commit war crimes, and the actuators are twitchy pieces of crap that are so bad at shooting that they have to be equipped with machine guns. What do you think soldiers are doing when they get shot at or blown up by insurgents or accidentally shoot reporters or civilians? They're not sitting in their base playing cards, that's for sure.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      I know. But that wetware doesn't scale out easily, their families vote at home and so on. Machines are cheap. 100 humans with 15% failure rate will kill a number of people, sure. 100 thousand automatic machines with 5% failure will kill many, many more. Possibly forever, because there will be no need "take our troops home". The troops are already at home, pressing kill/live in their drone baracks.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  'computer said boom' is the next level in isolating the killers from the killed. It makes it that much easier to do the killing and 'a la carte' will make it even more so. Imagine if one of the superpowers one of these days would develop the technology to smoke anyone they wanted anywhere on the surface of the planet with 100% accuracy. Do you believe that would lead to more or less deaths? Do you believe this would lead to unchecked use of that power? Personally I'm not too optimistic.
dfsegoat 7y ago
I'm sorry, but I couldn't find specific reference to where they were saying this tech would SOLELY be used in "life and death scenarios" or be linked to any sort of "kinetic action" The only mention which comes close: > “Fusion of an established identity and information we know about allows us to decide and act with greater focus, and if needed, lethality,” "Fusion" is military parlance for "we would use a variety of sensor inputs and systems" to make inferences. So, this would likely be only one component of many others used to determine identity and/or hostile intent.

deleted 7y ago

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JackRabbitSlim 7y ago

Generalized systems search massive databases, these systems can have much narrower data sets. "Who is X?" and "Is this X?" are very different computationally. Also; "fail early, kill innocents" is a great paradigm for staying in power. The beatings will continue until moral improves.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

"Fail early, kill innocents often" is perfectly acceptable in foreign countries especially if the population there is viewed as backwards in some way.

saulrh 7y ago

Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to be better than human performance. I heard a lot of stories out of Afghanistan and Iraq that ended up boiling down to "They had a big thing on their shoulder and it was pointed at a tank so we had to kill them", nevermind that that was a TV camera one in ten times.

kelnos 7y ago
I don't really like that line of thinking. Saying, "well, a human wouldn't have been able to do better" serves only to absolve anyone of any responsibility for the death. It's a lot easier to say it was "unavoidable" if a human isn't responsible.
Jweb_Guru 7y ago
> Doesn't have to be perfect, just has to be better than human performance. Firstly, it's about time we stop pretending that people wait until technology does something better than humans do before they deploy it. It will be deployed long before that point. Secondly, there are more reasons to be concerned about this sort of technology than just whether it is effective at its intended purpose (identifying people who do not want to be found, at long range, for the purpose of assassination).
- lucasmullens 7y ago
  I guess I'm a bit confused, why would they deploy something when humans are still better off without it?
  - DiabloD3 7y ago
    Because military contractors like money.
  - d4mi3n 7y ago
    Politics. Money. Expediency. The cheaper and easier you make it to do something, the easier it is for you to get signoff to do it. Humans require oversight and care. A robot staking out an area? Not nearly as much, and folks don't get nearly as much backlash when a robot doesn't come back home.
  - apazzolini 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...
  - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
    People routinely replace humans with services that don't do the job as well if it s cheaper to deploy, well marketed, does something else that the human wouldn't, or part of a mutually beneficial arrangement between the manufacturer and the buyer. For a case in point that has nothing to do with the military, have you ever interacted with an automated call system that you felt was easier to use and more helpful to you than a human answering the line would have been? I have literally never experienced that, but I have witnessed a huge percentage of companies switch from humans to automated call systems.
jacobush 7y ago
For a site with a readership so familiar with "scaling out", I am surprised about takes like that. Does it matter if the technology makes the precision a bit better and the individual person evaluated for being killed, has a little better chance of surviving, thanks to being identified by a machine? When... the machines allow many more people being killed. After all, this is what automation allows us to do. How many qualified and highly trained snipers could the military deploy? Not very many, compared to how many drones and other augmented systems they can deploy now and in the future. Imagine every street corner equipped not only with CCTV, but augmented sniper turrets. I wouldn't bat an eye if a the next invaded city was blanketed with systems like these.
- saulrh 7y ago
  > Imagine every street corner equipped not only with CCTV, but augmented sniper turrets. I wouldn't bat an eye if a the next invaded city was blanketed with systems like these. We already do that. It's just that the computers are squishy, unverifiable, black-boxed wetware that tend to commit war crimes, and the actuators are twitchy pieces of crap that are so bad at shooting that they have to be equipped with machine guns. What do you think soldiers are doing when they get shot at or blown up by insurgents or accidentally shoot reporters or civilians? They're not sitting in their base playing cards, that's for sure.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    I know. But that wetware doesn't scale out easily, their families vote at home and so on. Machines are cheap. 100 humans with 15% failure rate will kill a number of people, sure. 100 thousand automatic machines with 5% failure will kill many, many more. Possibly forever, because there will be no need "take our troops home". The troops are already at home, pressing kill/live in their drone baracks.
jacquesm 7y ago
'computer said boom' is the next level in isolating the killers from the killed. It makes it that much easier to do the killing and 'a la carte' will make it even more so. Imagine if one of the superpowers one of these days would develop the technology to smoke anyone they wanted anywhere on the surface of the planet with 100% accuracy. Do you believe that would lead to more or less deaths? Do you believe this would lead to unchecked use of that power? Personally I'm not too optimistic.

dfsegoat 7y ago

I'm sorry, but I couldn't find specific reference to where they were saying this tech would SOLELY be used in "life and death scenarios" or be linked to any sort of "kinetic action" The only mention which comes close: > “Fusion of an established identity and information we know about allows us to decide and act with greater focus, and if needed, lethality,” "Fusion" is military parlance for "we would use a variety of sensor inputs and systems" to make inferences. So, this would likely be only one component of many others used to determine identity and/or hostile intent.