Facebook is backing away from facial recognition. Meta isn’t

I'm not the least bit skeptical of this vision, but that's because I see direct use along Facebook's (Meta's) business model.

If you are selling advertising (influencing) access to a population through heightened metrics and more ability to target amenable customers, there are many useful things you can learn and correlate through things like delay before click-through, where the mouse pointer hovers, and so on. This is done on a massive scale and it's extremely revealing, allowing for deep and fascinating connections into the human subconscious.

This is NOTHING to what you'd get tracking micro-expressions on the human face, something that is largely involuntary on a whole different scale.

This is like mapping the human genome, but for human behavior. It's absolutely revolutionary. Even with the most primitive recognition the big data generated will be transformative.

The inevitable result, WHOEVER does this (if it isn't Facebook, it'll be somebody else. If it isn't the soulless commercial sphere it'll instead be the government. Or 'all of the above') will be this outcome: you can then pay to manipulate entire populations to your whims. All you have to do is have an outcome, a plausible means of influencing them, and this ability to micro-target everyone who is susceptible to your message and skip over anyone who might whistle-blow on you or raise a coordinated objection.

This… changes the conditions under which democracy is practiced, and under which anti-democracy can be consistently maintained. It's a technology that is easily wielded by just plain old humans that are no smarter than the 'masses' to be manipulated.

The really interesting question is what happens when AI or larger-than-human frameworks get involved and have this technology. If there is a Singularity, there will be no objections. If AI rules us, it'll be as the domesticated animals we essentially are, and there will be no call for tyranny and widespread violence: if anything, this suggests that violence and horror become artifacts of fallible human implementation of these things. The more sophisticated use of it will be bloodless, with any desired outcome 'willingly' adopted by the populations targeted.

I do not think the solution to hate speech and discrimination is to hide the traits that make us different.

If the future of the metaverse is on the blockchain, each digital identity will have a reputation to uphold. I think transparency in people's actions, a reputation system, and a simple moderation system is sufficient to manage toxic behavior.

What makes facial recognition so dangerous is that it's so trivial and so cheap to deploy. You literally walk into a supermarket and tills have facial recognition built in to automatically bind your shopping to "you" even if you don't have an account or pay with cash. It's abused to hell basically and you will be facially recognized pretty much everywhere you go in public. It's definitely an "unethical" technology because of how it's generally used.

DNA testing isn't, because the technology is far too expensive and time consuming to be used this way. The second supermarkets start scanning my DNA to give me special offers, I'll complain about it too.

My point is, this sort of "well it could be used this way!" argument isn't helpful at all. Retina/fingerprint scanning could be used this way too, but it isn't - that doesn't make the argument against facial recognition invalid, or it any less unethical.

I've seen a genius use of face analysis lately: nvidia new video codec for chat.

https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression

Basically it creates an AI model of your face, send that to the other party, and then when you move, it only sends key face points. The other party uses the AI model to create a virtual hi-res picture of you, thispersondoesnotexist style, except it looks perfectly like you. Then it uses the face points to move it the way you move.

The result: it consumes almost no bandwidth and you get the experience of a hi-res video call.

Of course, then I realized the trap: it's a perfect honey pot to get everyone to scan their face.

This is, IMO, what's going to happen with the VR. Big companies like Facebook/Meta are going to use the online avatar as a motivator to let them scan everything that can identify you. It will make the virtual you so realistic! Scan your face, your cat, your whole flat!

People will jump on that, with no thinking about the consequences what so ever. After all, they are crazy about the way services like snapchat can change your face on a video.

It's already game over. Like with Ken of the North star, we don't know it, but we are already owned.

> If you are selling advertising (influencing) access to a population through heightened metrics and more ability to target amenable customers, there are many useful things you can learn and correlate through things like delay before click-through, where the mouse pointer hovers, and so on. This is done on a massive scale and it's extremely revealing, allowing for deep and fascinating connections into the human subconscious.

Counterpoint: no it isn't and no it doesn't. All of these models presume that they can infer what has the user's primary focus, when in fact users are distracted by all sorts of things that are not connected to the computer in front of their face. This is all just the daily sturm and drang to sell to marketing departments, which is Facebook's real business model (lying to advertisers [1]).

> This… changes the conditions under which democracy is practiced, and under which anti-democracy can be consistently maintained. It's a technology that is easily wielded by just plain old humans that are no smarter than the 'masses' to be manipulated.

I'm all for the presumption of the worst when it comes to tech corporations, but some consideration of likely outcomes based on historical trends is prudent. The fact is the only corporations who have a vested interest in what you're saying here are military contractors, and they are content to charge the DoD, FAA, CIA, etc $10k per line of custom code to run on their Access 2000 databases and IBM AIX systems.

At the end of the day, there's more money in lying to the Ford/GM marketing departments than there is trying to organize a fake coup for Elon Musk in Bolivia. After all, if they were willing to pay for the lithium, they'd just pay for it. The whole point is trying to get it on the cheap. Car marketing departments, on the other hand? They'll pay, and pay a lot.

1. https://www.google.com/search?&q=facebook+lies+to+advertiser...