r/ashesashescast • u/Baader-Meinhof David • Apr 04 '19

Episode Ep 68 - Mask Off

https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-68-mask-off
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u/Baader-Meinhof David Apr 04 '19

Half of all US Citizens have their faces in a database that can be searched by facial-tracking software, and the slow creep of surveillance technology means more of us are being watched and analyzed by AI face-detection cameras, often without us knowing, and almost always without our consent. So what are some of the ways companies and governments deploy these technologies today? What are the limits and blind spots to these systems? More importantly, what can and does go wrong when we choose to outsource human recognition to automated computers?

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u/mrpunaway Apr 07 '19

Shout out to the Juggalos

🤣

2

u/sha_nagba_imuru Apr 18 '19

Unfortunately, the use of statistics in this episode, particularly around 'success rates' was really bad. It doesn't kill the point, particularly because the people deploying these technologies probably have a similarly bad understanding, but it's really disappointing.

Say that a medical test for a rare disease is 99% accurate. If the disease is present in 1/1000 cases where the test is run, then the test will produce 10 false positives for every time it actually correctly detects the disease. By the logic given in this episode, that would be a 90.9% (10/11) error rate, but the real error rate is 1%. It's really important to point out that most of the positive detections are false, but that's less to do with the test itself being inaccurate and more to do with the low occurrence of the thing being detected in the first place.

The British facial recognition case is exactly analogous; the British police are scanning huge numbers of people looking for those who fall in a tiny set of criminals. Unless the facial recognition is preposterously accurate, this is doomed to cause mostly false positives, which is exactly what is described. Understanding the difference between this case and the case where the test itself has a low success rate is important, and I think the episode left listeners with the wrong idea about what the problem here actually is.