It was confusing the other day when the Toronto Star ran an opinion piece about artificial intelligence being discriminatory for black people. It was not until you read some of the story that it was clear that the article was about computer programs for facial recognition. This is not as much about artificial intelligence as it is about the world’s peoples, their languages and their facial characteristics.
Back in the 1970s there were many serious programs going on at universities aided by computer companies to facilitate language translation. The computer company I worked for in Mississauga at the time, became something of a clearing house for exchanging thoughts and solutions on many of these problems. In many ways the work played into your sense of humour. To make a correct translation required that you not only programmed in the meanings of words but how they were expressed in the other language’s cultural and logical thought process.
This thinking came in handy when two of my brothers and I started up a company to combine our computer-related experience. As I was the least technical of the brothers, I got the job of running the company.
One of our first projects was to work with the Metropolitan Toronto Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to find a way to computerize the millions of photographs of people who had been photographed by one of our police forces. We quickly found that developing the programs necessary would require millions of dollars. Not having that kind of funding, we moved on to other projects.
One of the realities of facial recognition is the same as in language translation. Different racial characteristics are more complicated than the world’s languages. And people of mixed racial background are sometimes in a class by themselves. You actually need to determine the predominant racial characteristics before allocating the individual to a particular database.
I can well appreciate the problems with the black racial characteristics but the range of characteristics is as broad for the Asiatic.
The only places I know that are trying to upgrade their facial recognition are Ontario’s casinos. Back during the pandemic when the casinos were still open, you were smart to wear a mask. They asked you to stop on the way in and lower your mask so they could get a clear picture. They have some shots of me with my bare face and a middle finger raised. Who do they think they are kidding?
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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