svanstrom

avon b7 said:

svanstrom said:

avon b7 said:

Facial recognition has always had ethical issues. ALWAYS and EVERYWHERE. This is just one more and the facial recognition software in question was not even created by Huawei! It was tested on their platforms and ethnicity was just ONE of many parameters.

That is at best a very naive thing to say in this context; and actively defending Huawei with how it was only tested on their platform, and how ethnicity was only one parameter, imo pretty much takes away the naiveté defence.

It's like playing the "would you kill baby Hitler if you went back in time?" philosophical discussion with someone that instantly, and with way too much passion, turn the whole thing around to being about defending the freedom of speech of Mr. H.

I am not defending anyone nor am I attacking anyone.

I have given some factual information. 

You will find similar (or dare I say identical) ethical debates playing out across the world. 

In this case China, for better or worse, is proving to be the main testbed for the technology and Chinese companies are leading the field. There is no getting away from that. 

From a research perspective the parameters are what they are. How and why the resulting technologies are employed and monitored is another story. 

Ethnicity is an issue in facial recognition. There are many other issues of course. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48222017

https://onezero.medium.com/exclusive-this-is-how-the-u-s-militarys-massive-facial-recognition-system-works-bb764291b96d

Technology is never developed in a vacuum where everyone involved can just claim innocence all while knowing the pain that their work causes.

You ARE defending helping implement and improve technology used to target ethnic minorities.

loopless said:

Please Apple, no. Making cars is absurdly complex and very difficult to be profitable. Finding a location, building a plant to make the cars, crushing workers rights to make it profitable. Tesla lucked out getting an old Toyota plant for basically free.  I just hope they have developed a platform that then a large OEM like Ford might pick up to use.

Damn, I hope they didn't invest too much into this before you could share your expertise with them. Have you informed Tim Cook yet? It sounds super important that he finds out before Apple wastes too much money in this.

So… yeah… I can just imagine the awkward "we've realised that people don't care about us"-meeting where some executive came up with the "can't we get some of those influencers the kids like nowadays?"-idea. 

Because Epic and Samsung are down with the kids, and know what's hip.

thrang said:

Apple should never get into the social media business, even adhering to its strict privacy rules. There is too much involved in policing what users post to be worth it IMO

That still assumes a technology that functions much like a traditional internet social network does today; i.e. one that's completely under the control of a corporate entity (well-meaning, or not).

Compare that with a technology that either practically or in spirit comes from the 80s open systems way of thinking; like email, the web, and jabber.

There's simply no direct policing of content involved in solutions like those, because there's no central authority in perfect control of them. Yes, websites can get kicked off hosting services, and emails can get caught reciever-side in spamfilters; but there will never be a situation where some corporate spokesperson is interviewed about why a certain individual or organisation has been kicked out of the email and or web platform totally, because there's simply no centralised platform like that.

So by your second sentence there you've added a premiss that simply isn't necessarily true, but which your conclusion is completely relying on.

dewme said:

No amount of technology or engineering prowess is going to solve the problems related to social media. Likewise, no corporate entity is going to solve the problems created by its social media platforms when doing so is not in the best interest of their bottom line and profitability. It’s like asking firearms manufacturers to solve illegal firearms use. 

Here I'm going to have to disagree; but I'd need a proper lecture hall, a couple of whiteboards, and a couple of weeks, to go through it all. 

Long story short; I've done some interdisciplinary work where I've taken aspects of (among other things) game theory, value theory, business development, and the history of (the protocols/standards of) the internet, to look at the underlying requirements of a self-sustaining open solution to what we use social networks/media for.

And the short answer is that I think it's possible to build a commercially sound series of products and services, which then evolves into a complete solution that practically acts like how we use social networking today. Without it devolving into a ssdd type of a situation (ie one where we end up with a new corporate overlord similar to today's FB).

So I do think that there is an amount of tech/prowess that could solve this; and I do think that a corporate entity that sees such a solution would find it in their best commercial interest to be the first to implement it.