AI Facial-Recognition Software in China: Ethical Implications beyond Political Economy

By the 2020s, the Chinese government had made significant advances in applying computer technology to garden-variety surveillance. To do so, that government relied to a significant extent on Chinese companies, and this in turn encouraged innovation at those companies even for non-governmental applications. I contend that treating this as a case study in business and government, without bringing in the ethical and political implications is a mistake. The ostensive “objectivity” of empirical social science may seem like an objective for scholars, but I submit that bringing in political and ethical theory renders the analysis superior to that which political economy alone can provide.

The full essay is at "On the Ethics of China's Use of AI Facial-Recognition."

The Conversation

Winner of the Palme d’Or (golden palm) prize in the Cannes Film Festival for 1974, The Conversation (1974) was written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola; it was a film that he really wanted to make, whereas he had made The Godfather (1972) to make money. In both films, business comes to be something more than business. In The Godfather, Sonny tells Michael not to take being hit in the jaw by the corrupt police captain McCluskey personally. That Sollozzo expects Tom Hagen to objectively present a business proposal to Sonny after Sollozzo has had the Godfather gunned down with five shots and still he survived just shows how ludicrous it is to suppose that the consequences of the murderous tactics of that business would not be taken personally. Even so, the moral dimension does not enter into the considerations. In contrast, Harry, who runs a small business recording third-party conversations for clients in The Conversation, gradually comes to take his work personally in a moral sense. Whereas the murders in The Godfather are personal in the sense vengeance being part of the motivations, those in The Conversation are personal in the sense of moral responsibility being increasingly felt by Harry. Accompanying this realization of guilt, however, is a recognition of the extent of surveillance on him, and this too changes him. If the problem were just being morally responsible for what clients do with his tapes, then he could solve the problem by doing something else for a living. Being a target of surveillance himself, however, is something that he cannot change. Even in tearing his apartment apart, he does not find the “bug,” or listening device that his client’s assistant is using. By implication, we can reflect on just how much we are watched in the modern world—that is to say, how much the world in which we live has come to be characterized by surveillance. I contend that we are largely oblivious to it because it has encroached so gradually that its incrementalism is difficult to detect.

The full essay is at "The Conversation."

Facebook: Holding User Accounts Hostage

A Facebook “challenge” asking users to post a current photo and one from a decade earlier went viral in early 2019. Even though it is unlikely that the company was behind the “challenge” going viral, that the company had been working on facial recognition technology had users being suspicious on the motive behind the “challenge.”[1] A writer for Wired wrote at the time, “Imagine that you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age-related characteristics and, more specifically, on age progression (e.g., how people are likely to look as they get older). Ideally, you’d want a broad and rigorous dataset with lots of people’s pictures. It would help if you knew they were taken a fixed number of years apart—say, 10 years.”[2] Why would Facebook want to track how a person is likely to look years later? Some users may put up an old picture of themselves or simply not update the existing photo, but why would Facebook want to know what those users are likely to look currently? Perhaps Facebook wanted to be able to identify those users in current pictures uploaded by others. So why did the company deny using the “challenge” for such a legitimate purpose as connecting people socially? Nonetheless, the company insisted that it had no benefit from the “challenge” going viral. This statement seems suspicious, especially given the company’s earlier lapses on user privacy. I contend that an even more toxic subterfuge existed at the time at Facebook—a cloak that held user accounts hostage until a clear facial picture could be supplied.

The full essay is at "Facebook: Holding User Accounts Hostage."

Snowden

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many words are moving pictures worth? Add in a script and you have actual words—potentially quite substantive words—grounding all that pictorial worth. Moving pictures, or movies for short, are capable of conveying substantial meaning to audiences. In the case of the film, Snowden (2016), the meaning is heavy in political theory. In particular, democratic theory. The film’s value lies in depicting how far short the U.S. Government has slipped from the theory, and, indeed, the People to which that government is in theory accountable.

The full essay is at "Snowden."