Technophrenology woes

Anonymous Conservative
Amazon’s Facial Recognition Tool Is Laden With Bugs

Do you think the government has this problem with its top tier facial recognition?

And why is Amazon getting into facial recognition?

My own assumption is, facial recognition is too powerful to let the plebes have it. Imagine if you could identify anyone around you instantly by their face.

Now imagine if the entire social structure was laden with spies gathering information on everyone. A competent facial recognition program would allow you to turn it loose on the internet, scrubbing for any old breadcrumbs about the people you cross paths with. Maybe an ancient high school friend had up a picture from decades back with a real name. Maybe you can effortlessly locate names and IDs of everyone you cross paths with. That is the start of a database. That could all be trouble.

So Amazon announces it will use its billions to seize the marketplace on facial recognition programs, and then it fills the niche with a defective product.

Another possibility is that there are many fewer distinct physiognomic profiles, as measured by low-resolution facial landmark analysis, than there are people in the population. So maybe one in one thousand people looks enough like Bob Ross to a computer to be positively ID’d as Bob Ross.

To wit,

You gotta keep in mind, America doesn’t have the huge pool of high-end mathematical talent it used to, much less that available to the Chinese. The two best predictors of lifelong virginity in the US are math degrees and church attendance, so the selection pressure is pretty strong.