The cost-effective allure of facial recognition technology using artificial intelligence by both government police agencies and private companies (with various applications, including prevention loss) appears to be far too great to resist.
Related: AI Firm Scrapes 30 Billion Social Media Photos, Hands Them to Law Enforcement
Given the record-breaking losses that retail outlets both large and small have suffered since the 2020 Summer of Love, the incentive is all the greater.
And if it catches actual criminals, that’s one thing. The argument from civil libertarians might be that the benefit of catching a few more thieves is not outweighed by the cost to privacy (an already all-too-scarce commodity in our Brave New World), but there’s at least a cost-benefits analysis to be had.
On the other hand, what about when the machines get it wrong, as happened to one man in the Land of the Free, Harvey Murphy, last year?
Via Vice (emphasis added):
In January of 2022, Harvey Murphy was arrested and thrown in jail while trying to get his driver’s license renewed at a local DMV. According to a $10 million lawsuit Murphy has since filed, a “loss prevention” agent working for a Sunglass Hut retail store used facial recognition software to accuse Murphy of perpetrating an armed robbery at a store in Houston, Texas. In reality, Murphy was more than 2,000 miles away at the time of the robbery.
According to a lawsuit 61-year-old Murphy has filed against Macy’s and Sunglass Hut, “he was arrested and put into an overcrowded maximum-security jail with violent criminals. While in jail trying to prove his innocence, he was beaten, gang-raped, and left with permanent and awful life-long injuries. Hours after being beaten and gang-raped, the charges against him were dropped and he was released.”
One of the many problems, it seems to me, that we’ll face once the digital police state is handed over entirely to the machines is: who will people like this guy sue when they are erroneously identified, arrested, beaten, and gang-raped because of artificial intelligence? Once AI begins to manage its own affairs fully autonomously, any human operators will be so far removed from the process as to make holding them legally liable for these kinds of mishaps impossible.
Continuing:
Over the past ten years, retail stores began to hook up [surveillance] cameras to facial recognition software systems. The idea is a computer could automatically identify known criminals when they enter a retail location and alert law enforcement or loss prevention agents to track the person’s movements.
But facial recognition technology is infamously unreliable. All-too-human biases are embedded in the systems, and they often do a terrible job of IDing people. There have been many cases of false arrests based on bad facial recognition technology…
“A few hours before Murphy was to be released from jail, he was followed into the bathroom by three violent criminals,” the lawsuit said. “He was beaten, forced on the ground, and brutally gang raped. After this violent attack, one of the criminals held a shank against his neck and told him that if he reported the rape to anyone, he would be murdered. Murphy crawled to his bunk and faced the wall praying these men would not attack him again.”
George Orwell did a bang-up job prophesizing the dystopian future back in the 1930s, but he simply could not have imagined the extent to, and manner in which, technology would be used to render injustice.
