Safety through technology is certainly not a bad thing. But the need for safety can become pathological. Friedrich Nietzsche’s basic premise is that failure is an option. It is woven tightly into a life worth living. It is time for a personal inventory: Which of our devices and practices enable a life that experiences the world in ways and places not always engineered for our comfort?
https://bigthink.com/thinking/nietzsche-failure-comfort/
Category Archives: facial recognition
Building a more inclusive way to search
Detecting a skin tone in an image is a challenging problem, because it depends a lot on lighting, shadows, how prominent a face is, blurriness, and many other factors. The most accurate way to detect a skin tone in a Pin’s image would be to have a human label every single Pin image according to a scientific skin tone palette. But with billions of unique images, and many more created each day, that’s an expensive approach that would be hard to scale.
https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/building-a-more-inclusive-way-to-search-789f4c92fd73
What Is the Uncanny Valley?
The uncanny valley phenomenon can be described as an eerie or unsettling feeling that some people experience in response to not-quite-human figures like humanoid robots and lifelike computer-generated characters.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/what-is-the-uncanny-valley
The Case of the Creepy Algorithm That ‘Predicted’ Teen Pregnancy
PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: SAM WHITNEY; GETTY IMAGES
The system was based on data—including age, ethnicity, country of origin, disability, and whether the subject’s home had hot water in the bathroom—from 200,000 residents in the city of Salta, including 12,000 women and girls between the ages of 10 and 19. Though there is no official documentation, from reviewing media articles and two technical reviews, we know that “territorial agents” visited the houses of the girls and women in question, asked survey questions, took photos, and recorded GPS locations. What did those subjected to this intimate surveillance have in common? They were poor, some were migrants from Bolivia and other countries in South America, and others were from Indigenous Wichí, Qulla, and Guaraní communities.
https://www.wired.com/story/argentina-algorithms-pregnancy-prediction/
While Salta’s AI system to “predict pregnancy” was hailed as futuristic, it can only be understood in light of this long history, particularly, in Miranda’s words, the persistent eugenic impulse that always “contains a reference to the future” and assumes that reproduction “should be managed by the powerful.”
Fake faces created by AI look more trustworthy than real people
“We need stricter ethical guidelines and more legal frameworks in place because, inevitably, there are going to be people out there who want to use [these images] to do harm, and that’s worrying,” – Dr. Sophie Nightingale, Lancaster University
AI Creates Photorealistic Portraits of Cartoon Characters
https://kottke.org/22/02/ai-creates-photorealistic-portraits-of-cartoon-characters
Clearview AI is pushing toward 100 billion images in its ‘index of faces,’ even as lawmakers worry the company poses a dangerous threat to Americans’ privacy rights
Emotion recognition: can AI detect human feelings from a face?
Deepfakes and the future they can distort
This is how we lost control of our faces
A new study shows just how much this enterprise has eroded our privacy. It hasn’t just fueled an increasingly powerful tool of surveillance. The latest generation of deep-learning-based facial recognition has completely disrupted our norms of consent. Read more (Technology Review)
China is home to a growing market for dubious “emotion recognition” technology
Emotion recognition technology is based upon a fundamentally flawed idea: that an algorithm can analyze a person’s facial expressions and accurately infer their inner state or mood. In reality, when a person experiences emotions like joy, worry, or disgust, studies have found that they don’t necessarily respond by reacting in consistent, universal ways. While many people may frown if they feel sad, that reaction is also dependent on factors such as culture and the situation and moment. Read more (restofworld.org)
Analyzing Trends with Tim Stock 