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Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

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Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#221

Post by mindcrime »

closeparen wrote: post #219
mindcrime wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the whole point of having armed forces! Armed forces exist to provide achieve foreign policy goals (deterrence, coercion) through the credible threat of its lethality. WTF? No, just no. The only foreign policy goal the armed forces exist to serve is defense of the homeland. Everything else is a misuses of the military. Just because it's commonplace in this day and age doesn't mean it's OK or that anyone shoul…

For better or worse, defense of the homeland is not accomplished by literally standing at the US border waiting for someone to step over the line, but by working to neutralize threats and prevent their emergence abroad.

Fair enough, I'll admit the line is a little fuzzy. But there's clearly a point where we've gone way beyond any reasonable notion of "defense" and are engaging in offense, oppression, empire building, etc. And I'd argue that we're way over that line these days.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#222

Post by alexanderwept »

kadendogthing wrote: post #220
tomnipotent wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should a conservative bakery be allowed to refuse service based on religious beliefs?

We codify against pointless discrimination against protected classes of people for a reason. Some things are no longer worth debating and serve no purpose but to actively harm people. So no, they shouldn't be allowed to do that. Can you explain how discriminating against minority members of society is somehow logically relatable to selling a technological product that immediately expands the governments surface area…

>We codify against pointless discrimination against protected classes of people for a reason. Some things are no longer worth debating and serve no purpose but to actively harm people. So no, they shouldn't be allowed to do that.

But where do we draw a bright line? Sure, maybe we want religious people baking cakes for gay weddings. But should Muslim bakers be forced to draw likenesses of the Prophet Muhammad if a customer requests it? Should a bikini wax establishment that only works on women be forced to wax the intimate areas of a pre-op transwoman?

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#223

Post by tokyodude »

finnthehuman wrote: post #128
Rainymood wrote: post #46

Hopefully my opinion is not controversial but the tech behind this is really cool. It is equally easy to imagine a future where this tech is helpful and beneficial for all society. It is also equally easy to imagine a dystopian future where this tech is used by evil authoritarian governments. I am personally very conflicted on this issue because the tech is really cool (actual big data machine learning/CV) but can be…

But you’re not describing a double sided blade (that “cuts both ways”), you’re saying that sword making is cool.

How is it not a double sided blade.

Better surveillance would catch and/or possibly stop car thieves, bike thieves, muggers, vandals, robberies, some rapes, life threatening drivers, hit and run drivers, bad cops.

I get that there's no magic wand to make sure the tech is only used for good but that's true of pretty much everything. Knives can be used to cut food or to stab people.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#224

Post by Brybry »

GuB-42 wrote: post #191

Don't focus on profit, say the employee who focus on his pay. The real reason why people work at Amazon is because the pay is better, or the perks are better than the other jobs they applied to. If they go see their boss in order to negotiate a rise, they don't want to hear "sorry, no rise for you, but you should be happy, we didn't sell our product to the police". The vast majority of employees are motivated by thei…

Money is most definitely not the only thing employees care about.

When you're picking a job you care about location, stability, company culture, hours, vacation policy, etc.

I know plenty of people who have taken lesser paying jobs for a large variety of reasons and morality is definitely one of them. If you're against the death penalty then it's a bit hard to justify working a court job that puts people on death row.

You, personally, may only be focused on your pay but that doesn't mean the vast majority of people are.

Glassdoor certainly hints that this is not true for most people. [1][2]

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/salary-happiness-research/

[2] https://www.glassdoor.com/research/more-money-change-value-a...

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#225

Post by yesenadam »

rayvy wrote: post #208

I really hate that 50% of this thread has ran off on a military-related tangent. Could have been a good discussion about facial recognition, morality, and authority, but instead, because one looney posted some "super-uber-pro-military" comment, the first 50% of my scroll is related to that one topic . Will post this in ASK HN another time, but HN really needs some sort of drop down mechanism where we can show/hide a…

You know about clicking on the [-] next to the offending top-level comment, right? Seems it solves that problem.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#226

Post by EpicEng »

isoskeles wrote: post #163
azemetre wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because ICE was the result of 9/11 hysteria, it's a government organization whose duties were already being done elsewhere. I don't think people realize it was only formed in 2003...

I don't see what it being formed in 2003 has to do with anything. What exactly is being advocated in abolishing ICE when you bring up that another agency was doing its duties? Are you saying that other agency can take over those duties again? Most of the abolish ICE crowd just wants to get rid of ICE and ICE's duties. I don't think they want the CBP doing roughly the same thing ICE is doing. They'll just demand we ab…

ICE is extremely militaristic in its approach. Think if it like replacing all police officers with SWAT team members.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#227

Post by tokyodude »

abc-xyz wrote: post #93
dwb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you justify this ethically?

If given the choice between (1) increasing their personal wealth by 1% + tech that will violate billions of people's rights and result in the death of millions, or (2) no increase in wealth + no surveillance tech, then I'm afraid a disheartening large percentage will pick option 1 and find a naive and shortsighted way to justify their decision.

Fortunately that's not the choice being presented. The choice being presented is developing a tech that has just as many positive uses as negative just like many things. Cars can carry people or weapons. Knives can be used to cut food or stab people. Facial recognition can be used to stop crime or harass.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#228

Post by User23 »

dwb wrote: post #64
User23 wrote: post #26

"If we want to lead, we need to make a choice between people and profits." As an AMZN shareholder, I pick profits. Well, growth actually.

How do you justify this ethically?

Pretty easily actually. I'm ethically responsible for my own actions, not for the actions of law enforcement or anyone else who uses or misuses Amazon's technology. Amazon on the other hand has a moral responsibility to its shareholders to pursue their interests, not to go tilting at windmills on social justice crusades whose only possible outcome is merely betraying those who chose to allocate some of their savings to the company's equity.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#229

Post by User23 »

nradov wrote: post #160
User23 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public is going to have their own armed flying drones too eventually. The future is going to be so incredibly cyberpunk.

The FAA and ATF won't permit that.

The feds don't permit marijuana smoking either. How's that going?

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#230

Post by kadendogthing »

alexanderwept wrote: post #222
kadendogthing wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We codify against pointless discrimination against protected classes of people for a reason. Some things are no longer worth debating and serve no purpose but to actively harm people. So no, they shouldn't be allowed to do that. Can you explain how discriminating against minority members of society is somehow logically relatable to selling a technological product that immediately expands the governments surface area…

>We codify against pointless discrimination against protected classes of people for a reason. Some things are no longer worth debating and serve no purpose but to actively harm people. So no, they shouldn't be allowed to do that. But where do we draw a bright line? Sure, maybe we want religious people baking cakes for gay weddings. But should Muslim bakers be forced to draw likenesses of the Prophet Muhammad if a cus…

>But where do we draw a bright line?

It's an evolving conversation. There is no line to be drawn. We learn, we codify, we move on.

Let's stick to applicable conversations, shall we?

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