If there were some truth to physiognomy, wouldn't these systems be the best way to defeat injustice?
If there were some truth to racism, wouldn't that system be the best way to defeat inequality?
Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence
21–30 of 58 posts
Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it could work. How do you know there is no signal there? Whether it does or not is an open question in my mind.
Because it would be the equivalent of a natural built-in evil bit and an extremely bizarre thing - for the same reason that the evil bit is unlikely to be used. Any system that claims to work on that sort of input is almost certainly picking up socio-economic status of different races, or something similar, with no causal predictive power.
You are saying that there is no genetic component to personality? That's dumb. Are you saying there is no genetic component to facial features? Also dumb. Are you saying that there is no crossover whatsoever between the genetics that govern facial features and personality? Also dumb. There will be crossover above 0, it would extraordinary if there were 0 crossover. So there is likely some small correlation between facial features or skull shape and personality. How big is the effect, I don't know. The problem here is that you are judging the value of a person based upon their personality, not that their personality might be bound up in some way with their genetic makeup.
Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence
#23> The reanimation of the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology at scale through computer vision and machine learning is a matter of urgent concern. When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality, criminal proclivity etc through facial features then what exactly is 'pseudoscience' about it? Sure it can and will be abused but that doesn't mean to ignore it or label it as 'pseudo' simply because it hurts…
It is pseudo because it does none of the things you said with none of the accuracy you propose.
What it does well, is tell you whether the specific picture of a person you feed it looks roughly similar to other pictures of other people that belong to a certain category.
All of it's predictive power comes from the fact that the datasets they are trained on are completely imbalanced and that society has inherent biases, so it just picks up on that and magnify it.
I can guarantee you that a picture of a white male CEO in a suit and a picture of a black young adult in everyday clothing will score extremely differently on the model no matter what their personal criminal proclivity is.
Human (cops) do the same thing: they are used to a certain population being more at risk of criminal activities and thus they will control anyone from that population much more (e.g. stop and frisk in NYC).
This is illegal in most places. We are doing the same thing all over again, except now, we can do that through a blackblox brand "AI" on it, call it science and legalize it again.
Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence
#24> The reanimation of the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology at scale through computer vision and machine learning is a matter of urgent concern. When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality, criminal proclivity etc through facial features then what exactly is 'pseudoscience' about it? Sure it can and will be abused but that doesn't mean to ignore it or label it as 'pseudo' simply because it hurts…
Yeah, that -might- be true, but what if people just lie to the computer? Also, love the idea that computers figured out the knack in reading head bumps the humans just couldn't crack.
Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence
#25> The reanimation of the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology at scale through computer vision and machine learning is a matter of urgent concern. When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality, criminal proclivity etc through facial features then what exactly is 'pseudoscience' about it? Sure it can and will be abused but that doesn't mean to ignore it or label it as 'pseudo' simply because it hurts…
Yeah, that -might- be true, but what if people just lie to the computer? Also, love the idea that computers figured out the knack in reading head bumps the humans just couldn't crack.
> love the idea that computers figured out the knack in reading head bumps the humans just couldn't crack
So, natural selection has evolved a criminal gene and a linked head bumps gene, but hasn't given us human the ability to detect that? That sure would have been useful. Nature "knew" and patiently waited hundred of thousands of year, keeping that useless gene alive, that eventually computer vision would appear and finally allow us to detect it?
Yes, that sounds plausible. Let's push to prod.
Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Research, also of correlations (as a starting point), is to some of us "in general definitely a good thing". But. Your use of 'accurately' probably does not consider actual sensible practices in the assessment of data, where you assess the occurrances of false positives and false negatives in more revealing considerations. One of the first online articles found through a quick search seems to be very good already as…
You make a good point of distinguishing between a scientific model and a predictive oracle. I think the political use of pseudoscience isn't helpful though. There could be a lot of understanding to be gained from these systems.
> I think the political use of pseudoscience isn't helpful though. There could be a lot of understanding to be gained from these systems.
If you meant, using the label of 'pseudoscience' to undermine research (in the broadest terms), or to promote blind faiths (e.g. scientism) or "arbitrary requirements for social membership", of course it is deterior (though the economic/financial matter is more complex). But in the specific context, the attribution of pseudoscience is (though often with little care and an improper naïvety) to be a substantially legitimate warning of "do not encourage shallow beliefs amounting to prejudices".
Many of us believe that similar research may reveal interesting correlations which may then trigger good insights. But there has been a trend (especially in cultures that have shown very little appreciation of subtlety as an ideal) that seem to encourage a return to the archaic ignorant use of stereotypes. Apply that to law enforcement, and - sorry, just inventing a sufficiently acceptable example, after today's article about "Irish Baileys" - the idea subtly or less subtly emerges to arrest sober Irishmen just because.
Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence
#27Seeing a lot of "Well but what if it works" here, and I'll weigh in as someone who does AI - including CV-related applications involving convolutional neural networks - professionally and has participated in academic research in that field as well: I would estimate that roughly 80% of all "AI-based inference" that's currently being sold commercially is snake oil. Whether it's ad-tech, malware detection, facial recogn…
Bad data: thanks for saying it out loud.
The idea that everything coming from a sensor is data will provoke a lot of harm.
Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence
#28If there were some truth to physiognomy, wouldn't these systems be the best way to defeat injustice?
If there were some truth to racism, wouldn't that system be the best way to defeat inequality?
That's a devious analogy. Racism is not the same as acknowledging genetic differences. If people with darker skin are more likely to suffer from D vitamin deficiency, wouldn't we want to be informed about it? Reversely, should pale people simply ignore being burned by the sun when visiting tropical places?
Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence
#29[deleted]
Re: Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence
#30If faces don't carry information, why are we so good at distinguishing them?