21–30 of 295 posts
Ah, the public corporation! Fictive structures created so that profit-making shall never be interfered with by moral or ethical concerns! Just creating shareholder value, what else can you expect us to do!
Regulating this technology seems like regulating encryption. Futile. You can never put the tech genie back in the bottle. Especially since presumably many of the foundation layers of this technology are open source with wide scale applications. Will they outlaw machine learning? TensorFlow? Obviously whatever Amazon is doing is more complicated than throwing a ton of face images at TensorFlow but as technology progre…
Ah, the public corporation! Fictive structures created so that profit-making shall never be interfered with by moral or ethical concerns! Just creating shareholder value, what else can you expect us to do!
Queue the torrent of HN comments that conflate "is technically legal" and "Is morally responsible", after all the highest form of morality is making money.
I try to keep them more substantive overall, but what else can be said about this. Clearly there are still major ethical concerns with access to these facial recognition black boxes and clearly amazon shareholders are far more concerned with expanding into any legal market as quick as possible.
Amazon is /the/ poster child of late capitalism as far as I'm concerned. Ruthlessly efficient, impossible to escape even if you hate them (I mean, come on, like I'm gonna go to a store when I just grab it on Prime now), and literally run all the retail stuff as a revenue front to expand deep into subterranean territory (AWS, etc). No nod to "Don't Be Evil" here, just a gigantic black box that can pump out money for shareholders. Enough money and leverage to apply impossible pressure in almost any market they decide to want to dominate (Still waiting to see what they do to grocery with the WF buy).
And still mostly building the layers and connections for domination. They haven't even switched into eat-the-world mode yet, they are still just grinding and building resources...
Regulating this technology seems like regulating encryption. Futile. You can never put the tech genie back in the bottle. Especially since presumably many of the foundation layers of this technology are open source with wide scale applications. Will they outlaw machine learning? TensorFlow? Obviously whatever Amazon is doing is more complicated than throwing a ton of face images at TensorFlow but as technology progre…
This isn't about regulation of facial recognition tech (in the legal sense), this is about voluntarily choosing to not pursue a course of action because it is unethical and how shareholders have overruled decision makers on that matter.
Responding to the shareholder vote, Democratic U.S. Representative Jimmy Gomez said, “that just means that it’s more important that Congress acts.”
Republican members of the committee expressed concern about U.S. citizens having their rights violated and their information shared with the likes of the FBI without elected officials’ oversight. A second hearing on the topic is scheduled for June 4.
Any federal regulation would follow a major decision by San Francisco officials earlier this month to ban city personnel from using the technology. That contrasts with New York, Chicago and Detroit, where law enforcement have reportedly used facial recognition or acquired it with the hope of speeding up post-crime investigations.
Ah, the public corporation! Fictive structures created so that profit-making shall never be interfered with by moral or ethical concerns! Just creating shareholder value, what else can you expect us to do!
I'm sure there are and the only way we can explore these benefits is to allow the population access to the technology.
What was the point of taking this to shareholders? On what planet would anyone expect them to vote any other way?
Ah, the public corporation! Fictive structures created so that profit-making shall never be interfered with by moral or ethical concerns! Just creating shareholder value, what else can you expect us to do!
Queue the torrent of HN comments that conflate "is technically legal" and "Is morally responsible", after all the highest form of morality is making money.
Shouldn't this technology be outlawed outside law enforcement? It sounds like it can be used like a powerful tool.
Yeah I don't care much about what Amazon does with it, at least compared to the police. Amazon doesn't have the ability to kill me or lock me in a cage for 50 years.