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Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

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Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#161

Post by gaius »

mackrevinack wrote: post #58
product50 wrote: post #14

Won't the tech be built regardless of Amazon? It is either SV companies help with it and reduce costs or else blood-suckers such as IBM will come in with their contracts and low tech but costly solutions..

probably, but the problem is that the people at amazon signed up to do X and now they are being asked to do Y. if they had joined a company specifically to do Y then it wouldn't be an issue

What is X tho’? Exploiting minimum wage warehouse workers? Shipping counterfeit goods? Industrial scale tax shenanigans? Adtech? They were OK with all of this, remember.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#162

Post by Ilverin »

ENOTTY wrote: post #72

> Regardless of our views on the military, no one should be profiting from “increasing the lethality” of the military. It makes no sense for these two clauses to exist together. If you do not believe that people should profit from increasing the lethality of the military, then you do not believe in the utility of having a military. Especially when the author follows up with this sentence: > We will not silently build…

> If you do not believe that people should profit from increasing the lethality of the military, then you do not believe in the utility of having a military.

Alternative: You can believe that circumstances dictate if the military is doing good or bad things. If the military is doing bad things, it is a reasonable argument to oppose them. Clearest example is Yemen.

A less clear and debateable example is: the excessive size of the US military may cause other countries like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran to build up their own militaries to defend themselves when they would otherwise reduce their military spending. In some cases, mutual disarmament can work, however, it hasn't been tried sufficiently hard (e.g. USA hasn't ever proposed reducing its number of aircraft carriers by treaty, so carriers require asymmetrical warfare capability in order to deter aggression from USA).

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#163

Post by isoskeles »

azemetre wrote: post #157
spaginal wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why abolish ICE? What specifically is the issue with ICE short of news and celebrities demanding it because it’s in vogue? They serve a legitimate law enforcement function in our country, which by last check doesn’t have open borders and prosecutes those that cross illegally?

Because ICE was the result of 9/11 hysteria, it's a government organization whose duties were already being done elsewhere. I don't think people realize it was only formed in 2003...

I don't see what it being formed in 2003 has to do with anything.

What exactly is being advocated in abolishing ICE when you bring up that another agency was doing its duties? Are you saying that other agency can take over those duties again?

Most of the abolish ICE crowd just wants to get rid of ICE and ICE's duties. I don't think they want the CBP doing roughly the same thing ICE is doing. They'll just demand we abolish CBP.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#164

Post by fixermark »

spamizbad wrote: post #145
allthecybers wrote: post #139

This argument conflates a number of issues and frankly loses steam on that basis. The running list of demands so far: Don’t sell facial recognition, don’t work with the government, kick a paying customer off of your system because of who they provide services to and while we are at it you shouldn’t be working with anyone I don’t like. Is that it? For now, but check back with me cause I might want to add greedy invest…

A balance is going to have to be found here. A nightmare scenario for technology is one where it’s perceived as boot-licky and enabling the worst parts of government. Finding talent was hard even when tech was perceived as good or at least neutral; if it’s seen as an imperialist cog or even just an enabler for our governments bad behaviors it will make developing organizations even harder.

Will it? Or will it make developing the wrong type of organization harder?

I'm not clear if you're predicting a drought of Computer Science students or a drought of Fortune 500 company computer science hiring candidates.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#165

Post by losteric »

allthecybers wrote: post #139

This argument conflates a number of issues and frankly loses steam on that basis. The running list of demands so far: Don’t sell facial recognition, don’t work with the government, kick a paying customer off of your system because of who they provide services to and while we are at it you shouldn’t be working with anyone I don’t like. Is that it? For now, but check back with me cause I might want to add greedy invest…

For what it's worth, those 450 "signatures" were just members of an email list. That email list was founded to discuss ethical issues and draft a letter of complain, but discussion quickly fizzled without consensus on issues or solutions.

Then, a month later, this was published out of the blue. No prior communication, no broader input, not even the opportunity to opt-out.

Pretty unethical. As someone who was on that list, that letter is in no way representative... most had pragmatic complaints, like ethical oversight mechanisms to ensure engineers weren't transitively supporting dictatorships. This letter is so hand-wavy, simultaneously cynical and naive.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#166

Post by ovi256 »

spamizbad wrote: post #145
allthecybers wrote: post #139

This argument conflates a number of issues and frankly loses steam on that basis. The running list of demands so far: Don’t sell facial recognition, don’t work with the government, kick a paying customer off of your system because of who they provide services to and while we are at it you shouldn’t be working with anyone I don’t like. Is that it? For now, but check back with me cause I might want to add greedy invest…

A balance is going to have to be found here. A nightmare scenario for technology is one where it’s perceived as boot-licky and enabling the worst parts of government. Finding talent was hard even when tech was perceived as good or at least neutral; if it’s seen as an imperialist cog or even just an enabler for our governments bad behaviors it will make developing organizations even harder.

This talent scenario is a plausible one that could turn the balance from huge companies taking all the oxygen out of the system towards smaller ones being able to innovate again.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#167

Post by SilasX »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #87
ENOTTY wrote: post #72

> Regardless of our views on the military, no one should be profiting from “increasing the lethality” of the military. It makes no sense for these two clauses to exist together. If you do not believe that people should profit from increasing the lethality of the military, then you do not believe in the utility of having a military. Especially when the author follows up with this sentence: > We will not silently build…

> If you do not believe that people should profit from increasing the lethality of the military, then you do not believe in the utility of having a military. That doesn't follow. One can believe in the utility of the military while at the same time holding that it must operate purely as a public service, so that no incentives are created for a state of permanent war. Famously, an American president expressed this ver…

That would be a different argument. The parent was addressing the ridiculously overbroad claim that no one should profit from "increasing the lethality" of the military. Believing the military should be a "public service" is orthogonal to that, or at least uncorrelated.

You need to consider how broad "increasing lethality" is. The military is more lethal when the troops are healthier. Boom, you "increased lethality" by being a provider of combat meals or training equipment. By sending them less error prone weapons. By coming up with more aerodynamic shapes for the planes that consume less fuel.

If you want e.g. a tighter civilian review of military decisions so that they face tougher and more reliable consequences for unjustified killings, or less foreign deployment, then say that. Focusing on the "lethality of military" is the wrong target.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#169

Post by Pfhreak »

bsenftner wrote: post #121

Click bait journalism. Pointless article. Bad journalism tricking you for ad dollars with nonsense. I am a lead software scientist in the Facial Recognition industry. Amazon's ‘Rekognition’ service is a sad, expensive joke. No body takes that software serious. It is poor quality. It is expensive. It is marketed to the consumer public for Amazon's stock, not for actual serious FR use. It is not appropriate for any ser…

You have a lot of experience in the industry, and are able to make your own evaluations of a product based on (I'm guessing) years and years of daily interaction with that domain.

Do you think police departmant purchasers are as well informed as you are?Able to make the same thorough analysis?

What happens when a facial recognition product that you believe performs poorly is used and everyone thinks it performs well? (Hey, we made all these arrests based off this product, it's really working well for us!)

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#170

Post by Pfhreak »

yAnonymous wrote: post #138
bun_at_work wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is asking for citations regarding the rise in crime you referred to. Understand - crime rates have been going down historically. Things are not getting worse, they are getting better. While that doesn't mean everything is OK yes, crime is going down. Therefore, your argument for increased surveillance because of increased crime is wrong. In short, crime is getting better, not worse, and your argument for increased…

I never said that crime as a whole increased, but the violence reached a whole different quality. You (deliberately?) misinterpret comments you don't agree with. Stabbing people -which was never a big issue- has become very common, for example. Kicking people when they're down and out etc. Hurting people for fun. Someone I knew was stabbed and murdered for no reason at all. Not even a robbery. Just killed. Even in fi…

>I never said that crime as a whole increased,

> generally a complete refusal to accept the law become more common

I definitely read your original comment as suggesting that, in general, lawlessness was on the rise.

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