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Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

independent.co.uk

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

#121

Post by bigiain »

remarkEon wrote: post #119
bigiain wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The accuracy matters (at least it seems to be so to me) because if all you have is "a rough facial footprint of a known bad actor" and you use a technology with a 1% error rate - given that there's probably something like several hundred million airport border crossings a year in the US - _somebody_ is going to have to deal with a million false positives a day, which doesn't seem like a win given I suspect the number of bad actors for which facial features are know but cannot be detected with the in-place passport/fingerprint/retinal crossing system is probably in the single digits per year...

The aggregated individual cost to the 1% false positives - when deployed against a population of several hundred million travellers a year - seems outrageously high to me.

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

#122

Post by remarkEon »

bigiain wrote: post #121
remarkEon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The accuracy matters (at least it seems to be so to me) because if all you have is "a rough facial footprint of a known bad actor" and you use a technology with a 1% error rate - given that there's probably something like several hundred million airport border crossings a year in the US - _somebody_ is going to have to deal with a million false positives a day, which doesn't seem like a win given I suspect the number…

Easily solved by simply fingerprinting and retinal scanning the positives and the "unknowns", which is essentially the status quo. Nothing changes except our confidence level that we are actually engaging the right people. The cost, to me, is simply in terms of how expensive implementation would be in terms of dollars.

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

#123

Post by candiodari »

chii wrote: post #106
stareatgoats wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

There's also the issue of it almost certainly being used against those governments that refuse to build it. So any decision not to proceed must consider that it's empowering everyone else.

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

#124

Post by candiodari »

losteric wrote: post #70
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…

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.

Absolutely. An offensive weapon might be used to unfairly isolate and target innocent people.

Domestic surveillance will be used to unfairly isolate and target innocent people.

We all know this to be true. Therefore we should be much less apprehensive about developing offensive weapons.

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

#125

Post by candiodari »

pfisch wrote: post #59
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…

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.

But you're confusing the purpose of "caring". You are working under the assumption that the people who care would like to modify the situation in order to prevent these things from advancing further.

And of course, from that perspective you can make the argument that none of the proposed actions make any difference at all. Only outlawing the research itself has any chance of success for that, for obvious reasons. Now the simplest explanation is the explanation I'm afraid : if people are taking actions for reason X that don't have any effect on X at all, then perhaps there's simply another reason.

If you instead look at the reactions in this thread as "given this valid concern, how can I use it as an argument to exercise power over others ?", then you will find people's behavior surprisingly sensible.

People are discussing how to exert direct influence over how these big companies (where a lot of them work) move, and even more transparently about who should decide what. Who should decide who does things and what they're allowed to do.

Does it make more sense now ?

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

#126

Post by int_19h »

manigandham wrote: post #91
int_19h wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we're working on that, too. But it's a slow process, and meanwhile there's damage to mitigate.

Slow doesn't matter if it's effective. This current approach is rarely that, and usually amounts to nothing more than noise. The government is not deterred by a single corporation, no matter how big.

The goal is not to deter them. The goal is to make it more difficult for them to do what they're doing, and thereby ruin fewer people's lives.

And yes, slow absolutely does matter, if you're one of the people caught up in the grinder.

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

#127

Post by salawat »

craftyguy wrote: post #86
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…

> 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?" Can't this easily be defeated by breaking the project up such that different teams are involved in different parts, and none of the parts know the whole thing? E.g. they could all believe they're all involved in some new super secret product development, b…

Hence the "as an industry" part.

If you've ever read Snow Crash, the U.S. Government does something similar to exactly what you are talking about. That is why I've stated that at this point we can only delay the fruition of a state level infrastructure. Not stop it.

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

#128

Post by _khau »

brew-hacker wrote: post #29
Spivak wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really the tool that's unethical or the argument here just about depriving governments they don't like tools in general? "Twenty shareholders from Ford demand they stop selling cars to local law enforcement."

I completely agree -- wouldn't you rather help law enforcement and our military protect our well-being?

They don't protect your wellbeing, they protect the entrenched interests of the hyper-capitalist corporate class.
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