Any of you familiar with the book 1984 know about the concept of Big Brother always watching over you. So I'll spare you the details.
Skip this section if you watched the video~
Private chinese researchers have developed facial recognition technology that can recognize a person with 95% confidence (5% incorrect IDs) and can also identify what you are doing and if it is good or bad. The researchers have identified no concern with how this technology will be used. The chinese government decided to use it for creating a 1984 type modern society: they are going to implement a social credit score that rates how good of a person you are based on your actions. There are already millions of cameras they have put up around Hong Kong, and 4 billion expected across china by 2020. If you have a bad social credit score, you will be restricted from certain liberties and freedoms: your kids' freedom to go to certain schools, jobs are unavailable to you, no plane tickets. AKA you are made unable to live.
This has begun to sneak into the US. Don't think it's limited to non-freedom oriented governments. Amazon sold police departments facial recognition, despite concerns of its degree of inaccuracy. It's also in offices, airports and concerts: often without our knowledge of it.
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The social environment needed to make this possible:
I see China as the only place where this could happen. They have a strong enough economy to justify an investment of this nature. They have a social structure that is known to be very restricting of what is acceptable: asian. Lastly, they have a government that does not care about privacy, basic "god-given" rights or free speech (they dont even have enough ethics to recognize copying US copyrighted products as theft).
In the US this will only be able to happen under our noses because our government is sustained by public approval, and often its also unethically sustained by ignorance of a situation's existence.
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Who decides what actions are good or bad?
In this case, it would be the chinese government. There are some obvious and major bias related issues with this. (Everyone has bias, its only significant when its extreme bias) Like with the proposed hate speech laws in the US, that are always justly shot down, it is incredibly difficult to come up with a set of actions that should be illegal once they enter the twilight zone realm of "Does it offend people." Both hate speech and this tech is meant to criminalize actions that arent illegal. Should offending people be illegal? Absolutely not. You can't do anything without having someone being offended by it. This is an extremely slippery slope; validating the notion that you must live an unoffending lifestyle. Not only is it unrealistic but it's impossible. Not to mention, it opens the door for tyranny in your country. Have fun slowly watching your freedoms disappear once it is accepted that trivial matters such as using incorrect pronouns is a jailable offence. You will grow nearer to a dictatorship by the day.
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An inventor's responsibility for how an invention is used
Everyone knows about seemingly harmless inventions that can be used for evil but were intended for human progress: like nuclear fission and the atomic bomb, who could've predicted that?
The facial recognition technology that these researchers are developing is not innocent in the same way. Yes it has obvious security uses to give much wanted solutions to problems like school shootings, as well as airports, terrorism watch and more.
You have to be oblivious to not understand that a tech, that is capable of identifying emotions and knowing what your actions are, will be used for a suppressed dystopia. And a team that has the intelligence to program facial recognition so complex that it can recognize the seemingly infinite nuances of emotion and action surely has the intelligence to think about how it will be used and wonder its implications. If not, the they are not very reflective people and are examples of people that have certain intelligences but severely lack others (smart and socially inept for ex.)
This brings new meaning to the idea that an inventor is not responsible for the use of his inventions. It adds to a grey area. In a modern age where anything is possible and technologies are being developed that are capable of disrupting political and social stability, is it now an inventors responsibility to deeply consider the possible negative uses of his product? Ethically speaking, I think yes. We need to start being conditioned to think this way. But should we miss out on axiomatically life-altering technologies just because they are severely prone to abuse.
One thing is for sure. Is it responsible to not care at all about how your invention will be used? No. End of case. These tech researchers are incredibly dangerous in a rather nuanced way.
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Your actions have consequences for your kids
Should your bad actions be a consequence to your kids? i.e. their school choice limitations. No, other than in the abstract sense that your faults and immoralities can rub off on and become your kids' faults and immoralities.
This is a major human rights violation. You are not at fault for the actions of your ancestors. I find it disingenuous when people actively promote slavery reparations. Which people pay? Do only blacks with enslaved ancestors get paid? How do you accurately determine this information? I am not my relatives, I am fundamentally different than my dead ones and even the living ones. I can not speak to their immoral acts because I took no part in it. You cannot prove, within a reasonable doubt, that I have inherited any of their maladies.
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Science fiction is reality
This tech cant recognize faces that have had plastic surgery. Expect a future where criminals evade the law through underground facial reconstruction to become a reality. It will start off with people wearing obstructive things like glasses or fake moustaches/beards or getting tattoos.
If you're familiar with the science-fiction anime Psycho-Pass, you probably recognize the idea of this tech feels stolen straight out of the storyline. Its about a futuristic japan that uses a "network of psychometric scanners [that] actively measure the biometrics of its citizens' minds and mentalities using cameras with facial recognition and "cymatic scans" of the brain. The system gives individuals an assessment/score called a Psycho-Pass that has calculated the likelihood of an individual to commit a crime. If a Psycho-Pass exceeds an accepted threshold (100), he or she is pursued, apprehended, and either arrested or decomposed before they can actually commit a crime."
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Potential Abuse
Think about the adverse ramifications of severe dictatorships like North Korea getting their hands on something like this. Not only is it damaging but incredibly dangerous. It's akin to telling Stalin you have discovered a way to monitor everyone in the country and identify anyone and everyone that doesn't agree with him. It could lead to the deaths of many and permanent oppression of several countries. You can't enact political change if you aren't able to discuss it in public and especially if the common man's ability to protest is hindered by fear of being put on a watchlist.
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Adverse Change Permeates in Secret
When there is a new method for extending government power to a point where it limits basic rights, the nature of these changes is to spread by sneakily permeating outward from freedom-hating countries and into countries like the US in an under-the-radar fashion. Point being, if you live in the US, this tech will likely hit us without our knowledge of it whatsoever. It will remain little talked about by the common man and considered to be outlandish and conspiracy theorist by design, regardless of how possible it is, until it is too late to nip it in the bud.
This is how all invasive technologies have popped up in the US. Think about how hard it was for us to discover that our phones are sending a constantly updated log (to Google, Facebook, Amazon and 3rd party companies) that contain your exact location, date, time, what store you were at, how long you were there, what you bought and what the route you walked was. And that's not including the private internet search information they sell. That's just one type of log that required some random programmer to invoke a man-in-the-middle attack on their phone to intercept what the phone was sending and where to. That's because there are no regulations telling companies what they have to inform us about.
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Just another "welcome" to the modern age where everything is made public information. Security needs to take on new meanings that are fast evolving but it's difficult to keep track of them all.
