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Microsoft Turned Down Facial-Recognition Sales On Human Rights Concerns (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Microsoft recently rejected a California law enforcement agency's request to install facial recognition technology in officers' cars and body cameras due to human rights concerns, company President Brad Smith said on Tuesday. Microsoft concluded it would lead to innocent women and minorities being disproportionately held for questioning because the artificial intelligence has been trained on mostly white and male pictures. AI has more cases of mistaken identity with women and minorities, multiple research projects have found.
On the other hand, Microsoft did agree to provide the technology to an American prison, after the company concluded that the environment would be limited and that it would improve safety inside the unnamed institution. Smith explained the decisions as part of a commitment to human rights that he said was increasingly critical as rapid technological advances empower governments to conduct blanket surveillance, deploy autonomous weapons and take other steps that might prove impossible to reverse. Smith also said at a Stanford University conference that Microsoft had declined a deal to install facial recognition on cameras blanketing the capital city of an unnamed country that the nonprofit Freedom House had deemed not free. Smith said it would have suppressed freedom of assembly there.
On the other hand, Microsoft did agree to provide the technology to an American prison, after the company concluded that the environment would be limited and that it would improve safety inside the unnamed institution. Smith explained the decisions as part of a commitment to human rights that he said was increasingly critical as rapid technological advances empower governments to conduct blanket surveillance, deploy autonomous weapons and take other steps that might prove impossible to reverse. Smith also said at a Stanford University conference that Microsoft had declined a deal to install facial recognition on cameras blanketing the capital city of an unnamed country that the nonprofit Freedom House had deemed not free. Smith said it would have suppressed freedom of assembly there.
"Smith explained the decisions as part of a commitment to human rights that he said was increasingly critical as rapid technological advances empower governments to conduct blanket surveillance, deploy autonomous weapons and take other steps that might prove impossible to reverse."
NOBODY is concerned about there being freedoms in China, BECAUSE THERE AREN'T. Protecting the US public from these things is all this does, and you think Microsoft is helping the Chinese military prepare to fight a war, lol?
You are retarded.
I don't have a lot of positive things to say about Microsoft but this is something they correctly evaluated. It may have been purely because they foresaw the awful PR they would get as a result in the future but it was still a good call.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
On PR Concerns.
FTFY.
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Seriously, this is funny. MS and Google pretend to care about human rights here, but then in China, they will happily help Chinese gov murder their own.../quote> How, where and when?
Turning down a sale because they are concerned about the technology's accuracy is not turning it down based on a human rights concern. If it was a human rights concern, they'd have turned down the sale because they were concerned it would be misused by law enforcement.
Microsoft concluded it would lead to innocent women and minorities being disproportionately held for questioning because the artificial intelligence has been trained on mostly white and male pictures.
So that naturally leads to the question, why the heck are they training these things with mostly white and male pictures? Couldn't find any pictures of women on the internet?
Well, it's a California law enforcement contract, and, ahem, clearly, those damn white males are the target market in a round up the usual suspects.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
You are 100% correct, except for MS. FTFA:
I mean, Cuba, Iran and NK aren't even options due to sanctions, so that pretty much means China.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Zuck will do anything to make a buck. Especially if it involves exploiting others.
Corporatism != Free Market
This is still a violation of human rights and privacy rights.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Look, when you identify the source of a problem, you don't ignore it, you don't cease using the technology, you FIX IT.
This is not a new issue. Ten years ago, this issue was so widely known, a TV show made fun of it ( Better Off Ted,Season 1, episode 4, Racial Sensitivity,).
So if we have not sufficiently trained AI to detect people of color and women, then start TRAINING them to do it.
Or you could just stop trying to track everyone without a warrant.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
1. Get funds. A lot of money.
2. Talk to police, mil, property owners, and governments in Africa, Asia, South America about the advanced tech they can get for "free".
3. Install the hardware like with the Domain Awareness System in Lower Manhattan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
4. Work as a private, public, gov partnership in Africa, Asia, South America.
5. Gather the global math needed to detect all the variation in the human face globally.
6. At an airport, port, bus station, rail and on every car driver and passenger. Do passports match the face? Did the person return to their own nation after a set time?
7. Return to the USA with the wisdom and advance math to do really great facial recognition on all sections of the US community.
8 Support police in inner city areas with the new advanced math that now works perfectly.
9. Reduce crime and find illegal migrants all over the USA.
10. Gentrification slowly sets in as crime and illegal immigration is reduced.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I understand Bezos and Amazon are hard at work.
1. According to the original article, "AI has more cases of mistaken identity with women and minorities, multiple research projects have found." So yes, they do have some evidence for it.
2. The Officers in the field would be likely to arrest and/or detain and/or question anyone that the system flagged, yes.
3. It is highly probable that the users (read: Police Officers) would be incapable of evaluating the effectiveness/correctness of the system. The agency involved was asking for installation in the real world, not in evaluation considerations. They'd already made up their mind that they wanted it and wanted to use it.
4. Fixing the system after abuses caused by blindly taking actions based on the flawed output of the system is too late. Those abuses would have already happened.
MS is, for a rare time in their history, taking the appropriate course here. They're saying, "we choose not to take this contract because we are aware the system, in its current form, has flaws, and flaws that can lead to abuse. We don't want a part of that."
When a major corporation cares more about civil rights than law enforcement, that points to serious problems.
I tend to assume that "bad cops" are just isolated incidents that get a lot of attention, but this may force me to reconsider my assumptions.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Bake the cake. There's no lawful reason, I am ASSURED by progressives, to refuse to bake the cake based on what the customer intends to do with it. And in this case the product is not even custom-made. The AI is the AI is the AI. The fact that the customer intends to use it as designed to be used, but which would bring to light a defect in the product, is double plus good hypocrisy. If the product is for sale, and a non-prohibited buyer (munitions, etc) is lining up to purchase it, you must sell it to them. Bake. The. Cake.