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At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

algorithmwatch.org

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Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#61

Post by asdff »

three_seagrass wrote: post #39
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a red herring. They want you to assume that mass violations of privacy are okay as long as they're not racist. They're also ignoring classism - It's fine if the rights of the working class are violated, as long as they're all violated equally. Never-mind the people who can afford privacy on the free market.

When it comes to the police force surveillance, prejudicial bias is more a problem than a red herring. It's true that mass surveillance is an issue but how it is implemented can be an issue as well. I'm curious - how does a wealthy person retain their privacy from this type of mass surveillance but the working class does not?

The same way they do now to consume luxury goods and services and avoid papparazo and working folk. Blacked out SUVs and back entrances. You think Kylie Jenner has set foot on an LA sidewalk?

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#62

Post by whatshisface »

strictnein wrote: post #51
noarchy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those cameras have any kind of outside accessibility over a network, the NSA is probably just one of many with potential access.

The NSA doesn't have access to US security cams and couldn't care less about them. Come on people...

Random people find access to unsecured networked security cameras all the time, of course NSA could find them if they wanted.

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#63

Post by Barrin92 »

> This is why, after decades of controversy, Google Translates still renders the gender-neutral “they are doctors” in German as “sie sind Ärtze” (masculine) and “they are nurses” as “sie sind Krankenschwestern” (feminine). Google Translate was not programmed to be sexist. The corpus of texts it received happened to contain more instances of male doctors and female nurses. [...] BriefCam’s spokesperson added that they used “training datasets consisting of multi-gender, multi-age and multi-race samples without minority bias,” but declined to provide any evidence or details.

Okay, will we at some point admit that we want machine learning algorithms to be able to interface with symbolic rules rather than pretending that everything is a data issue as if we're living in the era of 1930s inductionism? It's clear that the misgendering issue here is not a stochastic one that ought to be solved by 'balancing out' data, it's that we want to impose strict linguistic rules and constraints on a system in a clear manner.

There really needs to be more work done in AI that makes it possible to interface with the models we built rather than trying to reframe everything as a data problem and then shove it in some end-to-end black box and then hope that whatever comes out at the other end is correct.

The automated systems used in the article are supposed to make judgements about "Detection of body movements that constitute assault." This requires genuine understanding and high-level capacity to reason rather than just pixel-based inference from some camera.

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#64

Post by jshevek »

fnord123 wrote: post #3

@mods, actual title is "Unchecked use of computer vision by police carries high risks of discrimination" which is the big issue here.

>which is the big issue here

There are at least two issues, and both are worth discussing. Interestingly, if we prevent the surveillance problem we also prevent the racist surveillance problem, so in this way one could argue that (in this specific situation) the surveillance problem is more fundamental.

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#65

Post by Tomte »

Barrin92 wrote: post #63

> This is why, after decades of controversy, Google Translates still renders the gender-neutral “they are doctors” in German as “sie sind Ärtze” (masculine) and “they are nurses” as “sie sind Krankenschwestern” (feminine). Google Translate was not programmed to be sexist. The corpus of texts it received happened to contain more instances of male doctors and female nurses. [...] BriefCam’s spokesperson added that they…

Google translates it that way because German nouns have grammatical gender, and doctors are grammatically male, while nurses are grammatically female. It has nothing to do with training ML models (except insofar as most training input is grammatically correct).

Of course, some people are unhappy about it and experimenting with gender stars and gender gaps and other creative orthography, but this is the status quo.

It's quite strange to demand that some ML model is more "progressive" than society and speakers themselves.

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#66

Post by Barrin92 »

Tomte wrote: post #65
Barrin92 wrote: post #63

> This is why, after decades of controversy, Google Translates still renders the gender-neutral “they are doctors” in German as “sie sind Ärtze” (masculine) and “they are nurses” as “sie sind Krankenschwestern” (feminine). Google Translate was not programmed to be sexist. The corpus of texts it received happened to contain more instances of male doctors and female nurses. [...] BriefCam’s spokesperson added that they…

Google translates it that way because German nouns have grammatical gender, and doctors are grammatically male, while nurses are grammatically female. It has nothing to do with training ML models (except insofar as most training input is grammatically correct). Of course, some people are unhappy about it and experimenting with gender stars and gender gaps and other creative orthography, but this is the status quo. It…

The issue here is that grammatical gender is not useful information when reasoning about the semantics of some sentence. Toothpaste in German is grammatically female, that's not a reason for an ML system to make feminine assumptions about toothpaste after it combs through data, it has nothing to do with progressive values, it's that the ML system cannot distinguish between a spurious correlation and actual meaning. Today many more medical graduates are women, this will change the ratio in the future and the inference from grammatical gender will be wrong. We should be able to tell an intelligent system from the get-go to ignore something we know to be spurious rather than fiddling around with the data.

And it's not strange at all to demand of an automated system that it behaves exactly the way we want it to behave. It is not human, it has to be more precise because it is rolled out at scale and it needs to do what we tell it to do. When we use industrial machinery in manufacturing we don't go "ah well humans are only precise down to a centimetre, guess we'll let it slide". An automated car trained on speeding drivers must not learn to speed. Automated systems are faster than humans, so errors compound, which requires more precision on part of a machine. If a ML system accidentally learns that ignoring someone wearing a green shirt is okay, and that is rolled out to a million cars, you don't have an accident but a big disaster.

We need a way to interface with ML systems in ways that let us put precise limits on when it makes inferences from data, why it made those inferences and when to follow logical rules, and when to dispose of certain data.

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#67

Post by t0astbread »

Tomte wrote: post #65
Barrin92 wrote: post #63

> This is why, after decades of controversy, Google Translates still renders the gender-neutral “they are doctors” in German as “sie sind Ärtze” (masculine) and “they are nurses” as “sie sind Krankenschwestern” (feminine). Google Translate was not programmed to be sexist. The corpus of texts it received happened to contain more instances of male doctors and female nurses. [...] BriefCam’s spokesperson added that they…

Google translates it that way because German nouns have grammatical gender, and doctors are grammatically male, while nurses are grammatically female. It has nothing to do with training ML models (except insofar as most training input is grammatically correct). Of course, some people are unhappy about it and experimenting with gender stars and gender gaps and other creative orthography, but this is the status quo. It…

Der Arzt/die Ärztin, der Pfleger/die Pflegerin (I think "Krankenschwester" isn't being used formally anymore)

Occupations generally have a male and a female variant and as far as I know you are required to address both in formal speech (so I wouldn't call this an "experiment" anymore).

The only area where I'd say this isn't implemented yet is informal speech. Few people watch their day-to-day language for gender neutrality.

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#68

Post by coribuci »

t0astbread wrote: post #67
Tomte wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google translates it that way because German nouns have grammatical gender, and doctors are grammatically male, while nurses are grammatically female. It has nothing to do with training ML models (except insofar as most training input is grammatically correct). Of course, some people are unhappy about it and experimenting with gender stars and gender gaps and other creative orthography, but this is the status quo. It…

Der Arzt/die Ärztin, der Pfleger/die Pflegerin (I think "Krankenschwester" isn't being used formally anymore) Occupations generally have a male and a female variant and as far as I know you are required to address both in formal speech (so I wouldn't call this an "experiment" anymore). The only area where I'd say this isn't implemented yet is informal speech. Few people watch their day-to-day language for gender neut…

> Der Arzt/die Ärztin, der Pfleger/die Pflegerin (I think "Krankenschwester" isn't being used formally anymore)

Now you are being sexist. Of course Krankenschwester is used but it has a different meaning than Krankenbruder

> Occupations generally have a male and a female variant and as far as I know you are required to address both in formal speech (so I wouldn't call this an "experiment" anymore).

In many languages there are occupations which are specifficaly related to specific genres.

> The only area where I'd say this isn't implemented yet is informal speech. Few people watch their day-to-day language for gender neutrality.

This has become something disgusting. A mother is a mother. A father is a father. A mother can give birth, a father not. Some things will always be gender specific. Or shall we start calling people gender neutral: Mr./Mrs. Donald Trump

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#69

Post by cosmodisk »

Barrin92 wrote: post #63

> This is why, after decades of controversy, Google Translates still renders the gender-neutral “they are doctors” in German as “sie sind Ärtze” (masculine) and “they are nurses” as “sie sind Krankenschwestern” (feminine). Google Translate was not programmed to be sexist. The corpus of texts it received happened to contain more instances of male doctors and female nurses. [...] BriefCam’s spokesperson added that they…

Lithuanian language has it in a very similar way: Daktaras(male doctor) Daktarė (female doctor).

A sentence like 'doctor said no' gets translated into 'daktaras pasakė ne'. Even a human could not translate any better unless wider context is known,which could only be derived from other sentences in the paragraph.

Re: At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU

#70

Post by noarchy »

strictnein wrote: post #51
noarchy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those cameras have any kind of outside accessibility over a network, the NSA is probably just one of many with potential access.

The NSA doesn't have access to US security cams and couldn't care less about them. Come on people...

>The NSA doesn't have access to US security cams and couldn't care less about them.

The same NSA that has vacuumed up phone and internet data, including that of US citizens?

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