9 ms·

This reads like "we're behind, not catching up, not making money, and really need an excuse to drop this" to me, but I might just be too cynical.

hindsightbias 6y ago
Ginni dropped this last year, revamped products cleansed now.
mc32 6y ago
Even more cynical: they’re not _actually_ dropping it from development—they hope players at the fore are pressured to drop it and they can swoop in saying they’ve fixed all the issues that affected others. Surprise!
vmception 6y ago
I could relate to that, I'm the type of CEO that wants to party in Ibiza with gogo dancers on my story, but wants to keep a welcoming and inclusive work environment so would be looking for any of the thinnest controversies to resign and disappear with my golden handcuffs and consolidated shareholdings. So far nobody has dug up all the little nuggets I've left in public records. Sucks
coderintherye 6y ago
I will say that 3 years ago when we tested all the major vendors' image recognition technology, they all failed spectacularly. And this wasn't some small project, we ran tens of thousands of our images through (out of over a million) and worked with several Phd students in our efforts. A picture with a white college kid in the frame would get the output of "human". Put an African borrower in the frame and you got at best a failure to recognize a human, and at worst a reference to an animal. I would hope the situation is much better now, but the bias (and just sheer inaccuracy) of the tools was readily apparent and we gave up on image recognition for the time being.
- formercoder 6y ago
  There are real technical challenges here. Lighter skin has more contrast between light and dark.
  - gugagore 6y ago
    Worth noting that sometimes technical challenges may arise because of the way technology was designed as opposed to being inherently challenging https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s-shirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-tone-standard https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s... but, yes, dark skin reflects less light than light skin. by definition.
  - ponker 6y ago
    But the fact that the technology is considered viable given this failure mode is what reflects the bias. If a vendor has tech that can only distinguish white faces it will sell it as “detect your best customers and offer them special deals when they enter your store.” If the tech can only recognize black faces it will be sold as “recognize known criminals in the neighborhood and alert police when they enter your store.”
    - nostromo 6y ago
      I'd like to know what cartoon villain tech company you're referring to...
  - centimeter 6y ago
    White people also have higher facial variance in general. I vaguely remember in university we had an assignment to generate “eigenfaces” or something and if you partitioned the faces by race the output of the SVD would be much wider for white people. This isn’t especially surprising when you consider the fact that white people have more light/dark contrast, more hair colors, more eye colors, etc. I think a lot of the “bias” complaints levied against algorithms like this are not bias at all, but just humans who are unhappy the world doesn’t quite live up to their idealized model.
umvi 6y ago
Never let a good crisis go to waste. A few months back, covid-19 was the perfect scapegoat for a lot of companies to drop projects (or go bankrupt, cough OneWeb).
Frost1x 6y ago
>...but I might just be too cynical. This was exactly my translation of the statement. When analyzing large business decisions, I find the most success when viewing through cynicism. Self-interest is after all the primary driver of most businesses.
hkai 6y ago
Both things can be true at the same time. IBM is looking for a nice excuse and also with facial recognition people won't get away with minor crime when cops are not looking. If every person who breaks into a car or sells something in the street is caught, this would be an insane surge in the prison population.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Presumably, the higher likelihood of prison time would then deter people from crimes that previously had a positive expected value.
- legostormtroopr 6y ago
  > If every person who breaks into a car or sells something in the street is caught, this would be an insane surge in the prison population. Isn't this a good thing? Breaking into peoples cars is wrong, we want to prevent people from doing this.
  - hkai 6y ago
    Apparently it's a bad thing, since California virtually legalized car break-ins (it's not a felony, so it's not really investigated). Would you rather lose your car window or would you rather sacrifice someone's life?
    - silly-silly 6y ago
      Honestly, I'm fine with 'someones life', because its not 'someones life'. You're exaggerating the argument. Stop trying to justify social degeneration as acceptable.
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      I'm fine with "sacrificing" a few years of life of people who decided to smash my car's windows, yes.
- bsenftner 6y ago
  Don't rule out a 3rd factor: in the facial recognition industry it is difficult to earn a profit. In general a FR client already has an existing camera network they want to add FR - meaning the quality control over the image quality is already gone. They also already have a security video management system, so whatever FR solution IBM proposes has to interoperate with that other pre-existing video management software. So right there, two traditional sources of major profit are already occupied, and in order to play in this industry one's FR software needs to be able to work with any pre-existing camera network(s) as well as interoperate with any pre-existing video surveillance software... setting all that up is not cheap and the customer is often low-tech and expecting magic...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Voloskaya 6y ago
On the other hand, the more ethical companies will be the ones moving the slowest in that field, since there is a lot of work needed to make this technology safe, and they would also make less money since they would have to refuse some customers. Not saying that this is what happened at IBM though.
baddox 6y ago
That view is extremely popular for essentially every action made by any well-known company or individual. Personally, in cases where there isn’t a specific explanation for why a particular decision has secretive motivations, I do find it a touch too cynical.
- unishark 6y ago
  Well the alternative would be that they have chosen to take a moral stand that they expect will cost themselves and their investors money. So the explanation is pretty basic for disbelieving that story.
  - baddox 6y ago
    Why is that the only alternative? Couldn’t the consequences of this particular action in fact be a good financial decision due to negative feelings toward face detection software held by some portion of IBM’s potential customers or the general public?
    - unishark 6y ago
      I suppose so. But isn't that view a cynical one also? It's not a moral stand if it's to your benefit.
      - baddox 6y ago
        I don’t understand why it would be a problem if making a moral choice is also advantageous for other reasons. In fact, surely we should strive to arrange society in such a manner that these things align.
        unishark 6y ago
        But we don't have such a society today. So there's a distinction between those making a sacrifice and those that are not.
catalogia 6y ago
I share your cynicism, but I think it's worth examining if IBM's cynical cop-out might also be true. Is it possible to develop facial recognition systems that couldn't be used for mass surveillance? Or, is it possible to develop mass surveillance systems that could only be used in the pursuit of moral (or at least morally neutral) goals? I'm generally of the opinion that tools are intrinsically amoral; neither moral nor immoral. A hammer could be used to build an orphanage, or be used to hit orphans; it's an amoral tool that could be used for good or evil. But I think when tools become sufficiently powerful, that sort of perspective starts to break down. Weapons of mass destruction are good examples of this from the past century. Could there conceivably exist digital systems too powerful to consider morally neutral? Personally I think so, and I think facial recognition technology might qualify.
- baddox 6y ago
  And it would be worthy of public outrage if a tool manufacturer were supplying hammers to child abusers for the purpose of child abuse. The fact that hammers can also be used to construct buildings is completely irrelevant. This entire “tools are amoral” argument seems to deny the fact that in most cases we don’t need to judge the intrinsic morality of a particular tool, because we can just look at how the tool is actually being used.
apengwin 6y ago
It's like Don Draper's Why I'm Quitting Tobacco letter in the Times.
tootie 6y ago
They may be 5th in the cloud race, but the market is huge. I'll bet they're earning far more than you'd think. They have a few very, very large clients.

hindsightbias 6y ago

Ginni dropped this last year, revamped products cleansed now.

mc32 6y ago

Even more cynical: they’re not _actually_ dropping it from development—they hope players at the fore are pressured to drop it and they can swoop in saying they’ve fixed all the issues that affected others. Surprise!

vmception 6y ago

I could relate to that, I'm the type of CEO that wants to party in Ibiza with gogo dancers on my story, but wants to keep a welcoming and inclusive work environment so would be looking for any of the thinnest controversies to resign and disappear with my golden handcuffs and consolidated shareholdings. So far nobody has dug up all the little nuggets I've left in public records. Sucks

coderintherye 6y ago

I will say that 3 years ago when we tested all the major vendors' image recognition technology, they all failed spectacularly. And this wasn't some small project, we ran tens of thousands of our images through (out of over a million) and worked with several Phd students in our efforts. A picture with a white college kid in the frame would get the output of "human". Put an African borrower in the frame and you got at best a failure to recognize a human, and at worst a reference to an animal. I would hope the situation is much better now, but the bias (and just sheer inaccuracy) of the tools was readily apparent and we gave up on image recognition for the time being.

formercoder 6y ago
There are real technical challenges here. Lighter skin has more contrast between light and dark.
- gugagore 6y ago
  Worth noting that sometimes technical challenges may arise because of the way technology was designed as opposed to being inherently challenging https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s-shirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-tone-standard https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s... but, yes, dark skin reflects less light than light skin. by definition.
- ponker 6y ago
  But the fact that the technology is considered viable given this failure mode is what reflects the bias. If a vendor has tech that can only distinguish white faces it will sell it as “detect your best customers and offer them special deals when they enter your store.” If the tech can only recognize black faces it will be sold as “recognize known criminals in the neighborhood and alert police when they enter your store.”
  - nostromo 6y ago
    I'd like to know what cartoon villain tech company you're referring to...
- centimeter 6y ago
  White people also have higher facial variance in general. I vaguely remember in university we had an assignment to generate “eigenfaces” or something and if you partitioned the faces by race the output of the SVD would be much wider for white people. This isn’t especially surprising when you consider the fact that white people have more light/dark contrast, more hair colors, more eye colors, etc. I think a lot of the “bias” complaints levied against algorithms like this are not bias at all, but just humans who are unhappy the world doesn’t quite live up to their idealized model.

umvi 6y ago

Never let a good crisis go to waste. A few months back, covid-19 was the perfect scapegoat for a lot of companies to drop projects (or go bankrupt, cough OneWeb).

Frost1x 6y ago

>...but I might just be too cynical. This was exactly my translation of the statement. When analyzing large business decisions, I find the most success when viewing through cynicism. Self-interest is after all the primary driver of most businesses.

hkai 6y ago

Both things can be true at the same time. IBM is looking for a nice excuse and also with facial recognition people won't get away with minor crime when cops are not looking. If every person who breaks into a car or sells something in the street is caught, this would be an insane surge in the prison population.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
Presumably, the higher likelihood of prison time would then deter people from crimes that previously had a positive expected value.
legostormtroopr 6y ago
> If every person who breaks into a car or sells something in the street is caught, this would be an insane surge in the prison population. Isn't this a good thing? Breaking into peoples cars is wrong, we want to prevent people from doing this.
- hkai 6y ago
  Apparently it's a bad thing, since California virtually legalized car break-ins (it's not a felony, so it's not really investigated). Would you rather lose your car window or would you rather sacrifice someone's life?
  - silly-silly 6y ago
    Honestly, I'm fine with 'someones life', because its not 'someones life'. You're exaggerating the argument. Stop trying to justify social degeneration as acceptable.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    I'm fine with "sacrificing" a few years of life of people who decided to smash my car's windows, yes.
bsenftner 6y ago
Don't rule out a 3rd factor: in the facial recognition industry it is difficult to earn a profit. In general a FR client already has an existing camera network they want to add FR - meaning the quality control over the image quality is already gone. They also already have a security video management system, so whatever FR solution IBM proposes has to interoperate with that other pre-existing video management software. So right there, two traditional sources of major profit are already occupied, and in order to play in this industry one's FR software needs to be able to work with any pre-existing camera network(s) as well as interoperate with any pre-existing video surveillance software... setting all that up is not cheap and the customer is often low-tech and expecting magic...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Voloskaya 6y ago

On the other hand, the more ethical companies will be the ones moving the slowest in that field, since there is a lot of work needed to make this technology safe, and they would also make less money since they would have to refuse some customers. Not saying that this is what happened at IBM though.

baddox 6y ago

That view is extremely popular for essentially every action made by any well-known company or individual. Personally, in cases where there isn’t a specific explanation for why a particular decision has secretive motivations, I do find it a touch too cynical.

unishark 6y ago
Well the alternative would be that they have chosen to take a moral stand that they expect will cost themselves and their investors money. So the explanation is pretty basic for disbelieving that story.
- baddox 6y ago
  Why is that the only alternative? Couldn’t the consequences of this particular action in fact be a good financial decision due to negative feelings toward face detection software held by some portion of IBM’s potential customers or the general public?
  - unishark 6y ago
    I suppose so. But isn't that view a cynical one also? It's not a moral stand if it's to your benefit.
    - baddox 6y ago
      I don’t understand why it would be a problem if making a moral choice is also advantageous for other reasons. In fact, surely we should strive to arrange society in such a manner that these things align.
      - unishark 6y ago
        But we don't have such a society today. So there's a distinction between those making a sacrifice and those that are not.

catalogia 6y ago

I share your cynicism, but I think it's worth examining if IBM's cynical cop-out might also be true. Is it possible to develop facial recognition systems that couldn't be used for mass surveillance? Or, is it possible to develop mass surveillance systems that could only be used in the pursuit of moral (or at least morally neutral) goals? I'm generally of the opinion that tools are intrinsically amoral; neither moral nor immoral. A hammer could be used to build an orphanage, or be used to hit orphans; it's an amoral tool that could be used for good or evil. But I think when tools become sufficiently powerful, that sort of perspective starts to break down. Weapons of mass destruction are good examples of this from the past century. Could there conceivably exist digital systems too powerful to consider morally neutral? Personally I think so, and I think facial recognition technology might qualify.

baddox 6y ago
And it would be worthy of public outrage if a tool manufacturer were supplying hammers to child abusers for the purpose of child abuse. The fact that hammers can also be used to construct buildings is completely irrelevant. This entire “tools are amoral” argument seems to deny the fact that in most cases we don’t need to judge the intrinsic morality of a particular tool, because we can just look at how the tool is actually being used.

apengwin 6y ago

It's like Don Draper's Why I'm Quitting Tobacco letter in the Times.

tootie 6y ago

They may be 5th in the cloud race, but the market is huge. I'll bet they're earning far more than you'd think. They have a few very, very large clients.