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Law enforcement and security forces around the world, as well as operators of airports and commercial buildings, are racing headlong for bragging rights for having deployed facial recognition technology to try to spot bad guys and confirm IDs in all kinds of situations. From the FBI to ICE to several big-city PDs, agents have been caught trolling through drivers-licence files with software designed to identify illegal immigrants, wanted criminals, and other miscreants.
It’s another huge and successful con, perpetrated by marketers of cameras and software on an endlessly gullible audience who want desperately to believe that artificial intelligence is not artificial, that machine learning is real learning, that robots can do everything humans can do only better. The inconvenient truth is that facial recognition does not work.
London’s Metropolitan Police have been conducting trials of facial recognition software to see if it can identify people on their watch list in shopping-center crowds. In six of the trials studied by the University of Essex, only 20% of the people flagged by the software could be confirmed to be the people being sought. (The researchers also discovered that the watch list itself was seriously flawed by outdated information, but that was an old-fashioned screwup, not involving artificial intelligence.) The researchers hair caught fire, and they proclaimed that the 80% failure rate dictated that all use of the facial recognition software was illegal and must stop immediately. Metro Police declared themselves quite satisfied with the trial results and carried on.
South Wales Police admitted that in ten months of use, their facial recognition software had flagged 2,685 individuals as suspects. Of those, 2,451 were false alarms. An advocacy group called Big Brother Watch found the new police toy to be what it called “staggeringly inaccurate.” South Wales Police said they’re getting better at it, and are slogging on.
Despite its sorry record, “facial recognition” has joined words such as “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning,” and “driverless cars” in the pantheon of words guaranteed to induce hysteria among “wealth managers,” “job creators,” “opinion leaders” and other oxymoronic denizens of the upper one percent.
They have proved themselves pathetically unable to come up with any products that are useful, and that people would want to buy with little persuasion. They’ve been fiddling with smart phones and self driving cars and the Internet of Things and smart watches and robot waiters. But the only markets that are responding to their blandishments — as buyers, now, setting aside the investors and promoters — are governments hard at work to extend their military power externally and their police powers internally.
And the thing about the purveyors of stuff to the military, or to the militarized police: It doesn’t have to work. Check out the F-35 fighter jet that can’t fight, the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford that can’t carry aircraft, or the ultra modern destroyer USS Zumwalt, which may not be able to stay afloat in following seas. In financial terms, compared to these gargantuan quagmires, facial recognition is a minor blip, yet it perfectly illustrates the fact that fanciful promises about what a thing might, one day, accomplish can and do totally obscure that fact that the thing does not work. At all.
It’s not hard to find the upside when weapons of war don’t work, because they can’t kill people if they don’t work. But what is the upside of deploying a technology that is already causing hundreds and hundreds of people to be snatched out of shopping centers and off the streets and denied access to airplanes because they vaguely resemble some bad actor in a blurry photo?
This search for an upside is going to be really hard. Sounds like a job for artificial intelligence.
Good stuff Mr. Lewis.
We have reached and surpassed the point of diminishing returns on technologies, and more broadly on complexity. “Opinion Leaders” et al will not withdraw from this as the only solution they can imagine to any problem is more technology, more complexity. Each of us though can personally make a different choice.
Yes, we can. Unless, of course, we are among those who, while going about our private business and making our private choices, are caught on candid camera looking like a presumed malefactor and are swept up by a brutal and relentless system that assumes everyone guilty until proven innocent, a system we have allowed to get out of control. That toothpaste is hard to get back in the tube.
There are people who profess indifference to the surveillance and the monitoring and the tracking and the hoarding of data because, they say, they haven’t done anything wrong. Such people (I don’t for a minute think you are one) are ignorant of the inner workings of many police departments and security agencies, and — especially — of history.
All most but not quite to the point that if you have done nothing wrong you are more likely a target. Nothing to control you with….
The USA is and always has been a nation of ruthless colonial settlers. Its power and wealth depends upon maintaining just enough people in middle-class contentment at the expense of others both within its borders and elsewhere in the world. What we are witnessing right now is the steady erosion of the exceptionalist facade.
A politics which is supposed to remain humane, moderate and respectful while preserving the intersecting structures of domination which rip resources from the earth and labor from the oppressed and pile up their fruits in the coffers of the elite was always deeply contradictory. In a world where depleting cheap resources are immiserating the US/Western labor aristocracy and spurring a panicked imperialism, those contradictions can no longer hold. Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon are ultimately just Buchanan and Buckley being thoroughly honest with themselves.
South Wales Police admitted that in ten months of use, their facial recognition software had flagged 2,685 individuals as suspects. Of those, 2,451 were false alarms.
For those who might be “mathematically challenged,” that equates to a 91.3% failure rate. While most “people” would suspect that only doing their job successfully LESS than 9% of the time would shorten their employment, I’ve observed the opposite over the years.
… “opinion leaders” and other oxymoronic denizens of the upper one percent.
Again, from my observations Mr. Lewis, you have 3 too-many letters in the word I’ve highlighted in bold. Nonetheless, as my father used to say, “A hundred years from now, you’ll never know the difference.” Of course, MOST (if not all) of the planet’s population won’t have to “wait” more than another decade or two, tops.
Y’all need to lighten up. We are the techno-critters; always have been. The weaponizing of rocks and pointy sticks, the taming of combustion, language – all techno-shit. That’s what we’re all about. It’s as natural for men to build skyscrapers and talking plastic boxes as it is for beavers to construct dams and birds to build nests.
Of course, technology will be the end of us – this too seems inevitable.
As far a ‘choice’ is concerned, I think freedom is largely delusional. In small personal matters…well, perhaps choice plays a part. But at the macro level, nature makes the grand decisions. I believe it’s called ‘Natural Selection’. Unfortunately, evolution only concerns itself with getting us to the next generation. It has no investment in our happiness or even in the long-term survival of our species…or any species for that matter.
As Bob Dylan sang, “are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”
QUOTE: ***It’s as natural for men to build skyscrapers and talking plastic boxes as it is for beavers to construct dams and birds to build nests.***
Homo Sapiens (?) has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, but it is only in the last hundred that he has started building skyscrapers and talking plastic boxes. And it’s only a fraction of humanity that has been doing that, mostly that part of humanity that either lived in the western extremities of the Eurasian continent or originated there. The rest of humanity didn’t want any of this stuff at first, but was eventually compelled to.
I beg to differ: the stone piles of ancient tribesmen indicating territorial dominion, the pyramids and obelisks of Egypt, the Mesopotamian ziggurats, the mountain monuments of Greece and Rome (Parthenon) the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals of the middle ages (gargantuan, considering the technology of the times) the castle towers of kings, the ostentatious domed capitols of nationalism’s heyday…and finally today’s
tall monstrosities announcing the glories of Corporatism for all to behold!
One can see that, in each era, the dominant institution within a given society sponsored the construction of oversized monuments; height was usually a primary consideration: the priestly and royal classes of the ancient middle east, the military-governmental regimes of the Greco-Roman era, the church of the middle ages…you get my drift. Whomever wielded the power, built the skyscrapers of their day – and ALWAYS to the limits of the technological and resource capabilities of their societies.
Why?…Power of course. “You see this huge temple (capitol, church, castle, corporate headquarters, etc.)? If we have the resources, technology and labor to construct such a monument, think of the short work we could make of your puny nation (tribe, cult, duchy, business, etc.)…Now, let’s talk about tribute.”
Hell, SIA, skyscrapers are old hat. Even talking boxes go back to the days of the telegraph. What is that? A hundred and sixty years ago or thereabouts.
The dominant reality in operation of all systems, natural or of civilization is that the flow of energy doing positive work is always accompanied by friction doing the negative work of producing waste. Artificial intelligence is well named as it is artificial and cannot cope with the dominant reality.
I believe they made a similar observation about the ‘horseless carriage’.
Hopefully the fact that facial recognition software does not work will mean that the sorry excuse for a government currently in power in mainland China (or anywhere else) will not be able to realize its perverted dream of bringing Orwell’s 1984 into reality, with its ‘social credit’ system and the rest of it.
Then again, maybe they won’t care much that the wrong people get caught all the time and will just carry on implementing the stupid system anyway…
” The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he’s got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again” Bob Dylan
Extremely high tech speed traps. Citizens in cars these days might be “packin heat”, much safer and comfortable watching monitors where only your buddies are armed. Every bit as bogus as a low tech speed trap though potentially more lucrative.