The inevitability narrative
"We could create a new blueprint," Woody Hartzog said in a rare moment of hope on Wednesday at this year's Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection in a panel on facial recognition. He went on stress the need to move outside of the model of privacy for the last two decades: get consent, roll out technology. Not necessarily in that order.
A few minutes earlier, he had said, "I think facial recognition is the most dangerous surveillance technology ever invented - so attractive to governments and industry to deploy in many ways and so ripe for abuse, and the mechanisms we have so weak to confront the harms it poses that the only way to mitigate the harms is to ban it."
This week, a leaked draft white paper revealed that the EU is considering, as one of five options, banning the use of facial recognition in public places. In general, the EU has been pouring money into AI research, largely in pursuit of economic opportunity: if the EU doesn't develop its own AI technologies, the argument goes, Europe will have to buy it from China or the United States. Who wants to be sandwiched between those two?
This level of investment is not available to most of the world's countries, as Julia Powles elsewhere pointed out with respect to AI more generally. Her country, Australia, is destined to be a "technology importer and data exporter", no matter how the three-pronged race comes out. "The promises of AI are unproven, and the risks are clear," she said. "The real reason we need to regulate is that it imposes a dramatic acceleration on the conditions of the unrestrained digital extractive economy." In other words, the companies behind AI will have even greater capacity to grind us up as dinosaur bones and use the results to manipulate us to their advantage.
At this event last year there was a general recognition that, less than a year after the passage of the general data protection regulation, it wasn't going to be an adequate approach to the growth of tracking through the physical world. This year, the conference is awash in AI to a truly extraordinary extent. Literally dozens of sessions: if it's not AI in policing it's AI and data protection, ethics, human rights, algorithmic fairness, or embedded in autonomous vehicles, Hartzog's panel was one of at least half a dozen on facial recognition, which is AI plus biometrics plus CCTV and other cameras. As interesting are the omissions: in two full days I have yet to hear anything about smart speakers or Amazon Ring doorbells, both proliferating wildly in the soon-to-be non-EU UK.
These technologies are landing on us shockingly fast. This time last year, automated facial recognition wasn't even on the map. It blew up just last May, when Big Brother Watch pushed the issue into everyone's consciousness by launching a campaign to stop the police from using what is still a highly flawed technology. But we can't lean too heavily on the ridiculous - 98%! - inaccuracy of its real-world trials, because as it becomes more accurate it will become even more dangerous to anyone on the wrong list. Here, it has become clear that it's being rapidly followed by "emotional recognition", a build-out of technology pioneered 25 years ago at MIT by Rosalind Picard under the rubric "affective computing".
"Is it enough to ban facial recognition?" a questioner asked. "Or should we ban cameras?"
Probably everyone here is carrying at least two camera (pause to count: two on phone, one on laptop).
Everyone here is also conscious that last week, Kashmir Hill broke the story that the previously unknown, Peter Thiel-backed company Clearview AI had scraped 3 billion facial images off social media and other sites to create a database that enables its law enforcement cutomers to grab a single photo and get back matches from dozens of online sites. As Hill reminds, companies like Facebook have been able to do this since 2011, though at the time - just eight and a half years ago! - this was technology that Google (though not Facebook) thought was "too creepy" to implement.
In the 2013 paper A Theory of Creepy, Omer Tene and Jules Polonetsky. cite three kinds of "creepy" that apply to new technologies or new uses: it breaks traditional social norms; it shows the disconnect between the norms of engineers and those of the rest of society; or applicable norms don't exist yet. AI often breaks all three. Automated, pervasive facial recognition certainly does.
And so it seems legitimate to ask: do we really want to live in a world where it's impossible to go anywhere without being followed? "We didn't ban dangerous drugs or cars," has been a recurrent rebuttal. No, but as various speakers reminded, we did constrain them to become much safer. (And we did ban some drugs.) We should resist, Hartzog suggested, "the inevitability narrative".
Instead, the reality is that, as Lokke Moerel put it, "We have this kind of AI because this is the technology and expertise we have."
One panel pointed us at the AI universal guidelines, and encouraged us to sign. We need that - and so much more.
Illustrations: Orwell's house at 22 Portobello Road, London, complete with CCTV camera.
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.