Ethically viable? That threshold has been crossed a long time ago when any of these related sets of technocratic tyranny enabling abilities were developed.
There are now cameras everywhere and now facial recognition is being integrated into everything, on top of all the other ways of essentially harvesting human rights and dignity for profit and oppressive purposes.
Your mention of ethical viability seems rather late to the situation, a bit of a feel of closing the barn door after the horses have bolted.
What humanity is creating here is more akin to the Matrix than people are able or willing to even acknowledge, even if it is many years out and turns out even worse than the limited imagination of people from the past. Maybe Her and The Terminator are more immediate phases of human development, but the trajectory is clearly there when you simply look at humanity’s tendencies over history and even now. Just as an example, did you ever think you would see something so nakedly and blatantly homicidal and evil as what the Israelis have done and are even still doing in Gaza? Does any of that indicate that humanity is going to do anything responsible and ethical?
The only purpose of appeals to ethics and morality appear to have been to disarm the dominant power by the subordinate power that aspires to become the dominant power in the world, an amoral, unethical, nakedly narcissistic and psychopathic power.
Quite curious how no one ever talks about “responsible use of facial recognition” or policies to control the use of facial recognition, as it totally pervades and destroys the ability of a person to remain anonymous, at all.
It’s always curious to me how the peasants always seem eager to facilitate the interests of the monarchs to oppress them rather than their own interests to remain free from control by the narcissistic psychopathy of the ruling class prone to tyranny. What do you do as a peasant once you’ve closed the trap you created and led yourself into? I guess maybe more accurately would be to say that it is the aspirational minor nobility that facilitates the creation of the structure that serves the creation of oppressive, top down structures. It’s an odd human characteristic.
Your criticism seems somewhat misplaced. An open-source facial recognition library enables the peasants to wield the same tools that the monarchs already have at their disposal. The cat is out of the bag, and there’s no putting it back.
We can ban the stuff until such time when we truly need it.
Doesn’t help with the climate crisis? No. Does it help with any of the ongoing health threats? No. Does it help hungry people finding food and healthcare or somehow advancing science or any cultural benefits? No.
Does it consume vast amounts of water and electricity to facilitate “bad example of humanity” use cases? Oh yes.
Just feel our priorities are not where they should be.
So we as humanity should stop all actions that are not directly solving the worlds largest problems (at least if there might be slightly negative side effects)?
And what’s up with the energy and water consumption argument. I accept this for LLMs maybe, but not for a local python script that runs on consumer hardware. Should we stop playing video games, too?
Respectfully, I think it's more likely that you're just not personally plugged into and/or have your awareness tuned to them but those conversations are definitely happening. There's not a single consensus (at least in the U.S.), but discussion definitely occurs and in many cases has led to concrete action.
There is the EU AI Act which heavily regulates the use of facial recognition, but I feel that we as “the people in tech who makes these things” should be a lot more conservative in creating frameworks, abstractions and generally advancing/facilitating facial rec use.
It’s even more shocking as this library also incorporates a great deal of cultural bias. e.g. gender, emotion are attributes which vary a lot more than what the models allow for.
Can I ask you to explain how and why it is acceptable to you that people in Canada would be opposed to having foreigners imposed upon them against their will and then you just dismiss their wishes and justified anger about such abuses by using a preprinted trigger command that justifies abusing them further by uttering the letters/sound of “racism”?
Is it racism if all Canadians en masse, just up and moved to, e.g., El Salvador and totally swamped their culture and wrecked their identify and then started abusing them in their own homes?
Why is it always only the trigger word “racism” when people complain about abuses, but it’s not “racism” when the abusers abuse the victims, the local indigenous population that is being assaulted and abused?
Counterexample is Israel. Also Singapore I suppose but you don't hear many opinions about their founding. It's not a choice between immigrants and locals but between powerful and weak ethnic groups. Leftists side with the weak by default.
I am sure it’s tough for you, but imagine being someone looking for work when you probably don’t even realize the massive amounts of noise on the employee side. I get friends asking me for input on whether I think that a job listing may be a fraudulent or scammy listing, and that’s from the top job board sites. People have zero trust in the system because the corporations have created this toxic hell of commoditized humans where you are now all the sudden competing with the whole rest of the world in this poss as t-American transitional hell we are currently in.
There have been posts here on HN about people applying to 500 jobs in 8 months and not even getting so much as a human reply, let alone a job. There are other posts proving that companies are posting false job openings to give the impression of growth to Wall Street or also just to argue that more immigration is needed.
You may complain about it, but just be happy you haven’t been replaced by AI application reviewers, because that is coming. I suggest you start thinking about pairing down expenses and increasing savings. No, seriously. Worst case, you have more savings.
It’s funny how all the dystopian predictions of supposed “conspiracy theorists” (a term graciously coined by the ever helpful CIA, a bastion of freedom for all) seem to always come to fruition.
It basically is a prison planet already, the remaining aspects of the humanity of it are just being automated out slowly but surely. The worst tyrannical dictatorships in history could not have even dreamt of the current state of things in their wildest dreams, and we are all racing at breakneck speed towards a hell of total domination by sadistic tyrants.
I don’t even know, but it would not surprise me if whatever they spray on cotton clothing to make it feel new, which washes out with the first wash, is also some endocrine disrupter. It is insane to me that we have allowed our psychotic cooperations and the psychotic narcissistic people who run and are part of them to totally poison our whole world and lives. This is not even a new thing. I know for a fact that Nestle experimented with including these types of liquid plastics into baby food, testing the maximum amount of liquid plastic that could be added to baby jar food because it would result in babies not being able to take up nourishment, which would in turn cause parents to have to feed more and buy more. I don’t know to what level that was implemented, but I know of a scientist that was involved and asked to do thinks he could not reconcile with goods conscience, so he resigned. I’m sure they found someone else somewhere with less reservations of morals. Most likely most industrial baby food has immense amounts of liquid plastics in it.
No one that goes through the trouble of cooking their own baby food feeds their babies as much as when they feed jar food, that foes right through them.
I think both of you have a perspective that is well into a more advanced phase of a degenerative process than you or even most people realize, i.e., you describe a phase when the cancer had already been eating its way through the economy, as evident by the closing of local and legacy retail stores and collapse of community economies from early onset symptoms of cancer that were dismissed like saying “just feeling down” or “just a bit of a lump” or “I’m just tied”, or even worse, “it’s healthy capitalize competition to compete with the subsidized de facto slave love of China”.
What Walmart represented was really just a kind of acceleration of the cancerous growth and metastasis throughout the body of the economy, spreading to the bloodstream. The likes of Amazon only made things that much worse, a far more aggressive and parasitic malignant cancer, or maybe even HIV of humanity that spread even faster and harder, and was able to even overcome foreign immune systems that had previously been able to hold the Walmart cancer at bay.
I fully understand why people would see Walmart coming to a town that was likely also suffering as an early indicator and outlier to the de-industrialization /globalization that wouldn’t impact more consequential lower-middle class until a bit later and would largely be experienced as benefits by the upper middle class that you also likely occupy now and for a while now.
For context, this same process seems to be unfolding at an even more rapid pace in Germany right now as the industrial small business base is being massacred and that will have the same kind of devastating effects on the dependent small, family owned businesses and retail companies that have been a moat to the likes of Walmart, Amazon, and even by extension, the Ubers and Food delivery services and digital services that serve a deracinated and shattered population in the USA currently.
You're not wrong, but it's more complicated than that.
My town never recovered economically after the US Civil War. It was a fairly wealthy place before then because the main economy was tobacco plantations, which slave labor enabled. It literally had more residents in 1860 (including enslaved Americans) than at time since then.
A lot of the economic woes in the American South have very deep roots. A significant amount of wealth, pre-Civil War, was in the form of slaves. That was incredibly immoral, of course, but the economic effects of that "wealth" disappearing after the war was still a real thing. There were basically no large white landowners left, the farmers who remained were small landholders. And blacks ended up being a permanent underclass. They were also mostly farmers, but they were continuously undercut by de facto exclusion from the banking system. Also, public education as a whole was never great, even for whites, and for blacks it was pretty abysmal. The county next to mine actually closed its public school system for a generation instead of segregating, and the money that would have gone to the schools was instead embezzled by the county commissioners and funneled to a private white school instead.
Kneecapping your population like that has generational effects. The lack of investment in public infrastructure has two root causes: a significantly reduced tax base, and racism. Public services being available to everyone, that means you were taking money out of the hands of whites and using it to benefit blacks. And even though that is largely gone (imho), the effects of zero investment in public infrastructure isn't something that can be fixed quickly. We mostly missed out on the post-WWII economic boom for those reasons.
Even in the face of all of that, my county was doing okay up until the Carter-era agricultural reforms that incentivized large agricultural conglomerates and crippled family farmers. That, plus the interstate not going through town, pretty much doomed the place.
I think you’re right. I’m no economist, but all non-local companies are extractive in nature - i.e. more money flows to the corporate office (and out of the community) than would happen for a local company (though even local companies send money out to buy stock to sell). It’s easy to see why Amazon is so huge - streams of profit flowing to it from every corner of the country. Not much to do about it except to help small towns produce something of value so an equal amount is flowing back into town.
