14 out of 15 requests were of black people. Facial recognition is notoriously bad with darker skin tones.
Racial Discrimination in Face Recognition Technology https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-recognition-technology/
Who remembers the HP computer that was unable to identify black people? One of my favorite “oooph, that’s not a good look” tech fails of all time. At least the people in that video were having a good laugh about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM
Holy hell, that was 13 years ago.
I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark that all the false positives were black men.
For the same reason that my Echo dot (aka Spotify Bitch) will ignore my wife but cheerfully respond to my mumbled requests from three rooms away. If you make all this shit in Silicon Valley, it will work best for people of a similar demographic to those that work there.
The white liberals building this technology say they’re all progressive yet only surround themselves with people like them and only build products for people like them. A lack of diversity in tech like this is a lack of good testing.
They’re more libertarian than liberal. Anti worker rights, anti consumer rights, and anti taxation.
The only government spending they’re in favour of is government spending and subsidies on tech e.g. Tesla, space X, and the entire military complex.
You haven’t read much about Libertarian policy I see. They are very pro-rights, in fact that is the core of the party platform. Individual liberty is their chief concern, and I applaud their efforts in fighting for our rights and freedom.
Also AI is taught by its creator. Tech has some of it’s most well hidden, bigotted, mid-level white people refusing to critically question their own bias and privilege. There’s a shit tone of that fragile masculinity in the tech industry just hard coding it into it.
There was a guy fired from google for writing a manifesto about how women aren’t ‘wired’ for tech. And that’s just the one that waved his crazy flag out in the open so no one in upper management could easily keep on ignoring it.
While I agree with you 100% that programming can be affected by the programmers biases, there’s a much simpler problem that face recognition was having a hard time overcoming. At least when it was a main topic about a decade ago, sensors were having a lot of problems with the low contrast of some black people’s faces. Anyone who’s had a black friend and was a shutter bug will know what kind of problems you can run into when trying to get a proper exposure and not make a black person disappear completely from a photograph. It was just an inherent limitation of the technology they were using. The last statistics I read was something like between 20 to 30% positive matches, which we know damn well is too low for it to be a workable technology. The success rate on Caucasian and lighter skin tones weren’t even that great. There was still something like a 60% false positive match rate. The software may have gotten better over the past decade but we all know that whether it did or not, they’re still going to use it.
Tbf, NOPD don’t arrest many people anyway. There’s a massive cop shortage, only 944 officers for a city of 364,000 with skyrocketing crime rates. Moreover, they’ve been operating under a consent decree by the DOJ since 2012. They’re overworked, underpaid and under the thumb of the feds so in response they simply don’t do shit.
Serious question, what is the right number of officers for a city that size? 1 officer per 400 people or so doesn’t sound very low to me.
NOPD’s stated goal is 1600, a ratio of 1:227 persons.
The actual ratio is 1:385
Cleveland, similar in size to New Orleans, has a ratio 1:310. They also state that they are suffering from a serious police shortage.
By comparison:
NYC has a ratio of 1:166
Chicago 1:180
I mean, law enforcement occasionally uses polygraph tests in their investigations even though that type of “evidence” isn’t admissible in court and, to be honest, what kind of scientific credibility does a piece of technology like a polygraph even have? They’ll use whatever they can get their hands on even if it’s questionable. Some police forces probably even have a psychic consultant or something. It scares me.
They’ll use it especially if it’s questionable, like handwriting analysis, because the goal is arrests not correct arrests. Trumped up, flimsy, circumstantial “evidence” is the best kind when you don’t actually want to do your job.
And this is lemmy, a propaganda platform. That site cited as news. First source, no link. 2nd source, another “news website.” 3rd source, Twitter. Half the article, opinion. OK. I’ll see myself out, thank you very much.