Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

independent.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 128 posts

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#101

Post by StanislavPetrov »

salawat wrote: post #53
newscracker wrote: post #31

After 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…

>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?"

Its the same question engineers and researches who design bombers, and missiles, and weapons of all kinds should be asking themselves. Unfortunately there are always enough people devoid of morality and/or willing to defer to authority and facilitate the violence of authoritarian governments.

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#102

Post by jiggunjer »

confounded wrote: post #37
mankash666 wrote: post #34

The only effective way to achieve this is getting a majority of the board to vote for this. Everything else is mere virtue signalling without effect.

> Everything else is mere virtue signalling without effect. By that definition, isn’t almost every form of non-decisive influence “virtue signaling”? Virtue itself? Marching against a war? Voting for a candidate you like the policies of, but who doesn’t have good media coverage? Declining to purchase unethical goods?

I don't see any issue with the phrase "virtue signaling" per se. My issue is with the implicit or explicit statement that it is useless. Virtue signaling is cool. People who say it with a mocking tone of voice aren't.

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#104

Post by cornholio »

newscracker wrote: post #31

After 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 mass surveillance global market is already huge. Meanwhile, Amazon introduces the very hardware accelerators in the cloud that can make real time tracking of billions of people an affordable reality for any government.

Not only would another company step in to take this market, but Amazon stands to lose a wad of cash if it gives up it's fast mover advantage. Think figures in the tens of billions, maybe more.

Not gonna happen.

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#105

Post by Fnoord »

jiggliemon wrote: post #61
salawat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In a lot of these scientific do or don’t debates - people tend to disqualify that there’s a consequence to not building the technology. In the H-Bomb example, what would happen if Oppenheimer didn’t help develop the bomb? Russia most certainly still would have. And the world would be a different place today. China, Russia, shit - North Korea are all working on super shady projects that you not I would want any part o…

> In the H-Bomb example, what would happen if Oppenheimer didn’t help develop the bomb? Russia most certainly still would have. And the world would be a different place today.

Russia (or well, actually the Soviet Union) stole the atomic bomb plans via its spy network:

"Although the Soviet scientific community discussed the possibility of an atomic bomb throughout the 1930s,[4][5] going as far as making a concrete proposal to develop such a weapon in 1940,[6][7][8] the full-scale program was initiated only in response to the intelligence reports collected by Soviet intelligence through their spy ring in the United States on the secretive Manhattan Project." [1]

That's the problem with your reasoning ("but they are doing it as well" or "they will do it as well"). Your reasoning is what escalated the Cold War and almost brought us WWIII.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#106

Post by chii »

stareatgoats wrote: post #100
jiggliemon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a lot of these scientific do or don’t debates - people tend to disqualify that there’s a consequence to not building the technology. In the H-Bomb example, what would happen if Oppenheimer didn’t help develop the bomb? Russia most certainly still would have. And the world would be a different place today. China, Russia, shit - North Korea are all working on super shady projects that you not I would want any part o…

"If we don't do it, someone else will". There is probably no other argument more responsible for bringing us to the brink of nuclear holocaust than this one. This is the argument that convinced the otherwise pacifist Einstein to write to president Roosevelt, urging for the Manhattan project. So what's evil about it? Nothing by itself, it is self-evident that we can not allow our enemies be more powerful than us. But…

But wouldn't the correct response be to rectify the state/govt, rather than stop working on the tech?

Just because some select group decides that it's their moral imperative, doesn't mean everyone capable of the research has the same feeling, and therefore, any Govt who wants to stay ahead of the pack must be doing the research.

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#108

Post by gnode »

bdhess wrote: post #76
losteric wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developing an offensive weapon is different than working on domestic surveillance technology. Personally, I prefer a world where China has big-brother technology that the US does not.

Facial recognition isn't exclusively a domestic surveillance technology. For example, it could be deployed at national borders, with satellite imagery captured in combat zones, and so on.

Nuclear weapons have minimal potential for domestic use, short of a geographically partisan civil war. Facial recognition conversely has huge potential for domestic use, and arguably little potential for foreign use in a major conflict. If anything, I would say it's only potential for use in conflict would be to improve the ability to quash resistance in an occupation, which is more destabilising to global security.

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#109

Post by tashoecraft »

Fnoord wrote: post #105
jiggliemon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a lot of these scientific do or don’t debates - people tend to disqualify that there’s a consequence to not building the technology. In the H-Bomb example, what would happen if Oppenheimer didn’t help develop the bomb? Russia most certainly still would have. And the world would be a different place today. China, Russia, shit - North Korea are all working on super shady projects that you not I would want any part o…

> In the H-Bomb example, what would happen if Oppenheimer didn’t help develop the bomb? Russia most certainly still would have. And the world would be a different place today. Russia (or well, actually the Soviet Union) stole the atomic bomb plans via its spy network: "Although the Soviet scientific community discussed the possibility of an atomic bomb throughout the 1930s,[4][5] going as far as making a concrete pro…

It's a stretch to say the Soviets stole the atomic bomb plans, if what they got was a rough blueprint of one of the original designs which was not used to produce the size of bomb needed to be useful. The spys may have accelerated the development by a few years at most. Also I believe a lot of the intelligence came a lot from Russia's spy network in the UK, but semantics.

It's generally assumed, by Oppenheimer very vocally, that once an atomic bomb would eventually be produced, the physics weren't that complicated, this is coming from him, not me. This was accelerated by the U.S. showing that it could be done, but would not have prevented the development of a bomb. The U.S. couldn't keep researches from publishing fully, eventually the dots would be connected.

You state that this is what escalated the Cold war and almost brought us WWIII, well, the cold war was scary and developed lots of proxy wars, but it led to a 60 year time period where two of the largest powers never engaged in direct conflict. It's argued routinely that the only reason for this is both sides have nuclear weapons and the mutual assured destruction idea. If neither side had developed nuclear weapons then there would have certainly been another war between U.S. and Russia.

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#110

Post by professorgerm »

bigiain wrote: post #63
_rpd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CNN[1] says that it is "Nearly 20 groups of Amazon shareholders ... which include the Social Equity Group and Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment." [1] http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/18/technology/amazon-facial-rec...

I don't know who those groups are - but they're exactly the sort of name I'd choose for my single-share-holding activist organisation... (It's a more-than-impulse-buy price of ~$1700 right now - but if I were the sort of person who bought single company shares to push my personal causes at shareholder meetings, I'd probably have bought in at a few hundred bucks 5 or more years back...)

I was curious, so I looked up the Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment [1]. They have 16 member organizations, including the Tacoma Dominicans and the Sisters of St Mary of Oregon. Most of their actions seem to be 'dialogue,' which they apparently engaged in over 60 times.

[1]: http://www.ipjc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/NWCRI-Annual-...

Post reply on HN