Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree -- wouldn't you rather help law enforcement and our military protect our well-being?
Be a true patriot; set all passwords to ‘password’.
'No Secrets' [1]
Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments
51–60 of 128 posts
Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments
#52Gtryy
Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments
#53After Facebook, Amazon is the other company I wouldn't trust to not do evil. Even if many more shareholders join in on this, I don't see Jess Bezos caring about these things. The Amazon stock won't suffer even if he publicly says he won't listen to such shareholders. On the contrary, the stock may just shoot up. The larger question on this topic is, "If the big technology companies do not sell the technology to the g…
The problem comes down to the engineers and researchers involved.
As an INDUSTRY, we have some very important decisions to make, one of which is, "will we work on this type of system knowing full well what it will be used for?"
Yes, everyone has their price, but the fact remains that the tools are nigh useless without the expertise of the knowledgeable people to integrate and fine tune the final product. If there is enough ethical backlash by we tech people, the progress any government makes can be set back decades.
It can't be stopped at this point most likely, as the data and initial research is out of the bag as it were, but it does"t have to be carried one inch further.
Personally, I won"t touch it. No benefit is worth the risk of this type of system being leveraged against a population. I've fully thought through the security, search and rescue, administrative, etc... applications, and as cold as it may sound, it is not worth it. The invasion of privacy, the chilling effects put on public discourse, the enabling of active population social engineering through ubiquitous surveillance and negation of dissidents is not a legacy worth having anything to do with.
Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments
#54While I applaud this effort, this will not stop the use of the technology. It will simply steer them to another provider or a custom implementation (on top of AWS if they so choose to) of this now well-understood technology.
Sure. But let's be clear - it is good to have as many software developers as possible steering away from unethical work.
Yeah but... that means the people who do take on this work will be the zealots who never doubt what they're doing. That's not to say that non-zealots should take on this work to keep the zealots out. I'm just saying that we're screwed so long as there are no laws prohibiting governments for doing this sort of stuff, because there will always be devs willing to use their powers for evil.
Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments
#55Governments are just people, led by politicians. It would be far better if efforts were spent on recognizing and electing qualified and capable people to run the government as wanted instead of this silly run-around with commercial companies.
> It would be far better if efforts were spent on recognizing and electing qualified and capable people to run the government
Our current generation of technologists is not good at this. For whatever reason, the political turf is ceded. Something is better than nothing.
Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments
#56Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments
#57What percentage is a group of share holders?
Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments
#58Preventing facial recognition techniques from spreading would seemingly require some attempt at keeping them secret. But aren't AI techniques often openly published in scientific papers? And it seems likely that there is also open source software available?
Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments
#59After Facebook, Amazon is the other company I wouldn't trust to not do evil. Even if many more shareholders join in on this, I don't see Jess Bezos caring about these things. The Amazon stock won't suffer even if he publicly says he won't listen to such shareholders. On the contrary, the stock may just shoot up. The larger question on this topic is, "If the big technology companies do not sell the technology to the g…
The problem comes down to the engineers and researchers involved. As an INDUSTRY, we have some very important decisions to make, one of which is, "will we work on this type of system knowing full well what it will be used for?" Yes, everyone has their price, but the fact remains that the tools are nigh useless without the expertise of the knowledgeable people to integrate and fine tune the final product. If there is…
Too many people don't care. Just look how many people are plugging away at AI even though it could easily lead to extinction level events. Even before that people were making the H bomb and even other smaller scale weapons. Too many people are too greedy and don't care.
I just don't think this kind of opting out is going to do much. Maybe slow things down a little, but not that much.
Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
A giant corporation might be evil, but where I live the government pretty much has a mandate to systematically erode the last 200 years of advancement in civil rights. The sooner facial recognition data is integrated en masse, this mandate will be exponentially easier to carry out. A corporation aiding the government in this process is essentially an extension of Corpgov and is not to be trusted with facial recogniti…
Trump won't end civil rights in the US, not unless you let him. I'm not American so it's not my responsibility, but probably you should throw work into politics and reforms of the political system.
These machinations were not set forth by Donald Trump. This erosion has been a long time coming. He is a drop in the ocean.