251–260 of 295 posts
If there is a ban, it should be country law, not just one company. How is this gonna achieve anything if another company goes ahead anyways?
Corporations don't like to watch their competitors profit from things they are not allowed to do themselves.
If there is a ban, it should be country law, not just one company. How is this gonna achieve anything if another company goes ahead anyways?
One simple ethical rule that I live by: If I ever find myself saying “if I don’t do this, somebody else will”, I don’t do the thing. It’s a good indicator that the thing in question is the wrong thing to do. Other people will still do it. That’s true. There will always be evil people in this world. But it won’t be me . And that’s important.
Let's say we're talking about the clickbait/trolling problem in political discourse. We can berate some prominent individual, but that individual is inevitable. If she wasn't doing the clickbait, someone else would be and we'd be beratying them.
Focusing on the individual when a problem is systemic can be empty, righteous moralising.
Why would shareholders reject something that can make them money? This is not a charity.
In my mind selling facial recognition seems no different than selling a hammer. It’s amoral, it can be used for good or bad. Id much rather see laws to limit when and how the technology can be applied.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without doubt, landmines are a effective and cheap killing tool. But they kill or cripple anyone. And the person placing them, usually does not remove them anymore.. so lots of one legged children in the end, as normally (rightfully!) war places see peace again. But with mines being cheap to deploy and removing them beeing very expensive they tend to stay where they are, until your childrens children walk over them a…
At the time the landmines were placed the US was at a stalemate with North Korea (and China) - and even the stalemate was pure luck as NATO forces were close to full defeat at many points after China entered the war. US backing did not make their survival a sure thing.
If there is a ban, it should be country law, not just one company. How is this gonna achieve anything if another company goes ahead anyways?
You've basically described the prisoner's dilemma. However, there are stable strategies where cooperation benefit all parties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This same argument could be made about any decision to abstain from anything. If a country banned facial recognition the work could happen in another country. You can make it even more farcical by changing the act you abstain from: Why not kill someone? They will die eventually. For any actor, their choice to do or not do something matters. It might not matter much, but it has some impact. I would not describe Amazon…
Yes, AI regulation needs to be global to be effective. The difference between "we should abstain from our moral values because everyone dies anyway in the end" and "we should find ways to pursue our moral values effectively" is substantial. You don't have to be nihilistic to not accept cheap signaling being sold as a solution to real problems. Few corporations deciding to not do dirty work, just providing their lower…
Amazon making a pledge not to work on facial recognition does not seem like cheap signaling to me! Cheap signaling would be Google's "AI Ethics Board" staffed with people unlikely to make trouble while Google continues to work on AI. A pledge not to work on technology is an expensive signal!
Ideally, sure, to stop something everyone agrees not to do it. But history is stuffed full of examples where one company could have made a difference. Imagine if IBM refused to work with the Nazis or if Dow Chemical refused to sell agent orange to the US.
It is impossible to solve anything "forever." Facial recognition will be developed, but how long that takes and how well the world can grapple with the consequences matters!
If there is a ban, it should be country law, not just one company. How is this gonna achieve anything if another company goes ahead anyways?
The point is that if enough ethically-minded people who believe facial recognition is bad see Amazon doing things like facial recognition the company will lose customers and staff. The people proposing a ban presumably feel there enough of those people now (and in the future) that Amazon's bottom line is under threat and it needs protecting from itself. The idea of outsourcing your company's ethics to the government…
So if Amazon plays unethically, and plays well, and you are competing, you are going to be seriously hampered by not playing along too. And you will have a hard time justifying it to your shareholders or potential investors. Amazon couldn't even win this argument and the game's just starting.
I think ethical companies like the kinds of regulations that keep the playing field level and make ethical transgressions illegal. It gives them a strong support to make their ethical stand.
Look at all of the information that's being gathered today with no respect for the individual's privacy. I'm old enough that this is outrageous, and I really can't believe that people are standing for it. Yet it seems that every new app builder has to enter the market with a data-collecting free offering. If this were illegal, then they could compete on quality and price.
One thing I've learned as I've gone through some things is that if you're the only one in the game who's playing by the rules, you're going to lose.
What was the point of taking this to shareholders? On what planet would anyone expect them to vote any other way?
The rest are employees [1] with self-interest and giant funds with big piles of them whose only metric is returns. Of course they'll all vote for the gain.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052816/top-4-...