Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by conjectures » Tue, Jun 19, 2018, 12:34 PM UTC

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…

This misses the point. Which is that, 'everyone agrees not to do risky things' is not a stable equilibrium. Russia couldn't trust the US not to do it and vice versa.

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

#112

Post by lucb1e » Tue, Jun 19, 2018, 12:41 PM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #32

jonknee wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A much more accurate title than that would be "Shareholders representing X% of Amazon demand it to stop selling facial recognition". I mean Jeff Bezos and myself are both shareholders, but his stake is worth mentioning. Activist funds are able to shake things up with a lot less than 19 shareholders, so the count isn't important at all unless it's giant.

Yeah but 19 is a much larger number, visually, than 0.25% or whatever

If it's 0.25% then at least we know it's not important.

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

#113

Post by Fnoord » Tue, Jun 19, 2018, 12:48 PM UTC

conjectures wrote: post #111

Fnoord wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This misses the point. Which is that, 'everyone agrees not to do risky things' is not a stable equilibrium. Russia couldn't trust the US not to do it and vice versa.

That lack of risky things is a Fata Morgana. Risky things were done. The world was almost destroyed, multiple times.

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

#114

Post by Fnoord » Tue, Jun 19, 2018, 12:52 PM UTC

tashoecraft wrote: post #109

Fnoord wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 v…

It almost escalated, multiple times, where it boiled down to someone in lower chain of command refusing to take the destructive action.

The book and series The Man In The High Castle (SPOILER) is essentially about the disturbed equilibrium between a nuclear and non nuclear power.

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

#115

Post by skywhopper » Tue, Jun 19, 2018, 12:52 PM UTC

This is interesting. The marketing has certainly been disturbing, reinforcing the worst uses for this sort of tech and overstating its usefulness for those cases. But ... unlike Google's contract work with the Defense Department, I'm not sure Amazon could legally get away with refusing to sell an on-demand product to a government agency. This service is nowhere close to the worst thing that's running on Amazon's servers on behalf of governments. The software exists and could easily be set up to run directly by governments or their contractors on Amazon's infrastructure (I guarantee that is already going on far more extensively than Amazon's own specific service will ever grow to). Ditto for GCP and Azure and everything else.

I sympathize with these investors, truly, but the only solution here would be to get out of the cloud computing business altogether.

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

#116

Post by derEitel » Tue, Jun 19, 2018, 1:41 PM UTC

I'm starting to think we have the need of something like the ICAN for facial recognition (FR), promoting the regulation of FR worldwide. There a little valid systems where FR is truly helpful. Most of todays applications are around things like "access control" and "tag your friends here", i.e. banalities which are either unnecessary or can be solved with simpler tech.

On the other hand the risks are incredible, FR in combination with AR systems could completely eradicate privacy. Autocratic governments could use it for a new levels of surveillance. Military usage could perfect the use of autonomous weapons etc.

It's just not worth it and should be internationally outlawed. Just like A-bombs and chemical warfare.

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

#117

Post by _jal » Tue, Jun 19, 2018, 1:55 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #85

_jal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Governments are just people, led by politicians ... empowered to do things we lock up, tase, beat, sick dogs on, and/or kill other people for doing. Kind of an important distinction to make. If you have reason to think exhorting your peer-proles to 'pick qualified and capable people' will lead to better outcomes now than it has in the past, certainly, please continue. Some of us, however, don't see that happening a…

Yes, it's called authority. The point of the comment is that we should pick the proper people to give that authority to, instead of fighting against them through some strange corporate proxy. If you want an alternative, why don't you become the qualified and capable person to join the government to shape it the way you want?

And the point of my comment is that those given authority frequently do stupid, destructive things with it, and I believe in reducing the number of stupid, destructive things that happen.

You appear to believe that authority deserves deference simply because people call it 'authority'. I don't. There exist legitimate and illegitimate forms. The illegitimate forms are dangerous, and sometimes stupid, and deserve to be opposed.

And who decides? I do. I am arrogant enough to believe individuals don't need those in authority to make moral judgements for them.

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

#118

Post by ohthehugemanate » Tue, Jun 19, 2018, 3:20 PM UTC

I work in a department at Microsoft that does a lot of Machine Learning and AI work for MS customers. I'm proud that our organization regularly turns down opportunities because of ethical considerations. We have a concrete set of ethical standards, and if a project makes it past that review and into your hands, and you still feel uncomfortable, you are strongly encouraged to flag it for second review in committee. The whole system is called AETHER, for your googling - er, Binging - pleasure.

The ground rule that would apply here is, we don't do anything that makes choices about restricting or injuring humans. So no perp detection systems, no autonomous weapons of any kind... Not even a camera to disable the ignition if you're detected as drunk.

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

#119

Post by remarkEon » Tue, Jun 19, 2018, 7:27 PM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #99

remarkEon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Note that it's also least necessary at border crossings. Says you. It could replace the fingerprint and retinal scan for all we know, plus you don't have to actually physically interact with the person crossing. I don't think it will, but it seems perfectly reasonable to deploy this technology at the border. I see no issue with the definition of "border areas" either. Seems reasonable to assume that if someone has r…

Sure, I'm speculating out my ass here (it's what everyone does on The Internet, right?) Seems to me though, the most recent numbers I've heard for commercial state-of-the-art facial recognition are barely capable of 99% accuracy. I don't know the error rates of fingerprint and retinal scans, but I'd put good money of the combination of passport and fingerprint or passport and retinal scan being several orders of magn…

Why is the accuracy of the technology relevant at all? I think you're assuming that we already have fingerprint and retinal scans of everyone entering, which is quite obviously not true. We might, however, have a rough facial footprint of a known bad actor. I'm fine with this technology being employed in such a manner.

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

#120

Post by kickopotomus » Tue, Jun 19, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

jiggunjer wrote: post #94

frozenport wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tweets are limited in content, unlike other forms of communication their perminance is at the leisure of one American tech company.

You mean like gmail?

Gmail is just one company's implementation of an application layer sitting on top of SMTP. You are free to use any other company's implementation or even host your own and you will still be able to communicate with all other existing SMTP services. Not at all like tweets.