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Google Executive Warns of Face ID Bias (bbc.com)
Facial recognition technology does not yet have "the diversity it needs" and has "inherent biases," a top Google executive has warned. From a report: The remarks, from the firm's director of cloud computing, Diane Greene, came after rival Amazon's software wrongly identified 28 members of Congress, disproportionately people of colour, as police suspects. Google, which has not opened its facial recognition technology to public use, was working on gathering vast sums of data to improve reliability, Ms Greene said. However, she refused to discuss the company's controversial work with the military. "Bad things happen when I talk about Maven," Ms Greene said, referring to a soon-to-be abandoned project with the US military to develop artificial intelligence technology for drones. After considerable employee pressure, including resignations, Google said it would not renew its contract with the Pentagon after it lapses some time in 2019. The firm has not commented on the deal since, only to release a set of "AI principles" that stated it would not use artificial intelligence or machine learning to create weapons.
"There is no native criminal class except Congress." -- Mark Twain
But they'll happily allow it to be used to subjugate and oppress civilians.
If those employees were so concerned about rights and liberties they'd have blocked the tech altogether.
The technology behind FaceID has no bias. It works really well - if given the right training data. Now it could easily be that the training data you are feeding it is biased in some way, but that is why extensive testing of the resulting recognition engine you have built is key, so you can go back and correct training data...
Because training neural networks is kind of a blackbox, it's sometimes hard to say what kind of bias you may have built in. the Amazon system recognizing a set of politicians as criminal might be down to the lighting used in the picture being a lot like mug shot lighting!
Or who knows, maybe it's latched onto specific micro-expressions of criminals and the politicians it identified really are criminals, we just don't know it yet... :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's harder to see the contours of a dark-colored shape (ie a face) than a white one.
Seriously, people, how are we going to get around that?
-Styopa