{"id":83191,"date":"2016-11-21T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=83191"},"modified":"2016-11-19T17:47:58","modified_gmt":"2016-11-19T17:47:58","slug":"troubling-study-says-artificial-intelligence-can-predict-who-will-be-criminals-based-on-facial-features","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/11\/troubling-study-says-artificial-intelligence-can-predict-who-will-be-criminals-based-on-facial-features\/","title":{"rendered":"Troubling Study Says Artificial Intelligence Can Predict Who Will Be Criminals Based on Facial Features"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Leia em portugu\u00eas \u27f6<\/a><\/p>\n

18 Nov 2016 – <\/em>The fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning are moving so quickly that any notion of ethics is lagging decades behind, or left to works of science fiction.\u00a0This might explain a new study out of\u00a0Shanghai Jiao Tong University<\/a>, which says computers can tell whether you\u00a0will be<\/em> a criminal based on nothing more than your facial features.<\/p>\n

The bankrupt attempt to infer moral qualities from physiology was a popular pursuit for millennia, particularly among those who wanted to justify the supremacy of one racial group over another. But phrenology, which involved studying the cranium to determine someone\u2019s character and intelligence, was debunked around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and few\u00a0outside of the pseudo-scientific fringe would still claim that the shape of your mouth or size of your eyelids might predict whether you\u2019ll become a rapist or thief.<\/p>\n

Not so in the modern age of Artificial Intelligence, apparently: In a paper titled \u201cAutomated Inference on Criminality using Face Images,\u201d two Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers say they fed\u00a0\u201cfacial images of 1,856 real persons\u201d into computers and found \u201csome discriminating structural features for predicting criminality, such as lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the so-called nose-mouth angle.\u201d They conclude that \u201call four classifiers perform consistently well and produce evidence for the validity of automated face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding the topic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though long ago rejected\u00a0by the scientific community, phrenology and other forms of physiognomy have\u00a0reappeared throughout dark chapters of history.\u00a0A 2009 article in Pacific Standard<\/a> on the racial horrors of colonial Rwanda might\u2019ve been good background material for the pair:<\/p>\n

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Belgians, in their role as occupying power, put together a national program to try to identify individuals\u2019 ethnic identity through phrenology, an abortive attempt to create an ethnicity scale based on measurable physical features such as height, nose width and weight, with the hope that colonial administrators would not have to rely on identity cards.<\/p>\n

This can\u2019t be overstated: The authors of this paper \u2014 in 2016 \u2014\u00a0believe computers are capable of scanning images of your lips, eyes, and nose to detect future criminality. It\u2019s enough to make phrenology seem quaint.<\/p>\n

\"facial-features-criminal-behavior2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"facial-features-criminal-behavior4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The study contains virtually no discussion of\u00a0why<\/em>\u00a0there is a \u201chistorical controversy\u201d over this kind of analysis \u2014 namely, that it was debunked hundreds of years ago. Rather, the authors trot out another discredited argument to support their main claims:, that computers can\u2019t be racist, because they\u2019re computers:<\/p>\n

Unlike a human examiner\/judge, a computer vision algorithm or classifier has absolutely no subjective baggages, having no emotions, no biases whatsoever due to past experience, race, religion, political doctrine, gender, age, etc., no mental fatigue, no preconditioning of a bad sleep or meal. The automated inference on criminality eliminates the variable of meta-accuracy (the competence of the human judge\/examiner) all together. Besides the advantage of objectivity, sophisticated algorithms based on machine learning may discover very delicate and elusive nuances in facial characteristics and structures that correlate to innate personal traits and yet hide below the cognitive threshold of most untrained nonexperts.<\/p>\n

This misses the fact that no computer or software is created in a vacuum. Software is designed by people, and people who set out to infer criminality from facial features are not free from inherent bias.<\/p>\n

Absent, too, is any discussion of the incredible potential for abuse of this software by law enforcement. Kate Crawford, an AI researcher with Microsoft Research New York, MIT, and NYU, told The Intercept, \u201cI\u2018d call this paper literal phrenology, it\u2019s just using modern tools of supervised machine learning instead of calipers. It\u2019s dangerous pseudoscience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crawford cautioned that\u00a0\u201cas we move further into an era of police body cameras and predictive policing, it\u2019s important to critically assess the problematic and unethical uses of machine learning to make spurious correlations,\u201d adding that it\u2019s clear the authors \u201cknow it\u2019s ethically and scientifically problematic, but their \u2018curiosity\u2019 was more important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the explosive, excited growth of AI as a field of study and a hot commodity, don\u2019t be surprised if this curiosity is contagious.<\/p>\n

____________________________________<\/p>\n

Sam Biddle<\/a> – \u2709sam.biddle@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

18 Nov 2016 – The fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning are moving so quickly that any notion of ethics is lagging decades behind, or left to works of science fiction. This might explain a new study out of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which says computers can tell whether you will be a criminal based on nothing more than your facial features.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}