I would like to start this post with a disclosure. USV portfolio company Clarifai has one of the best facial recognition models on the market and is very active in the facial recognition market. Now that I have disclosed that, we can move on.
Facial recognition has come of age. Machines can figure out who we are and more.
One of the most popular booths with students at The Annual CS Fair this year was the Microsoft booth where they were showing some of their facial recognition technology.
The delight and amazement on the students’ faces was infectious.
But of course, not everyone is excited about facial recognition technology being deployed in the market.
woooooow pic.twitter.com/qWvGQeSjLb
— Laurie Charles (@TheStuffOfMemes) April 20, 2019
I particularly like that question in the embedded image in that tweet:
How does Jet Blue know what I look like?
The answer turns out that there are many ways to know what we look like and you can start with the federal government and go from there.
Like all technologies, facial recognition can be used for good and bad. And it will be.
I like what my partner Albert wrote on this topic recently:
And then some things are incredibly hard. Such as face and object recognition. There are tons of amazing positive applications for such technology. And yet they could also be used to bring about a dystopian future of autonomous killer weapons chasing citizens in the streets. Does that mean we should not develop these capabilities? Should we restrict who has access to them? Is it OK for corporations to have them but not the military? What about the police? What about citizens themselves? Those are hard questions and anyone who thinks they have obvious answers I submit hasn’t thought long enough about them.
So what is to be done? A good start is personal responsibility.
We used to have to stop at toll booths and wait in long lines to get across bridges and tunnels. Now we drive past the tolls at 60mph and the machines detect our license plates and debit our accounts.
The same is going to happen with our faces and that will be great for many things. But, of course, it will also freak us out on a regular basis and add to the “technology is turning everything into a surveillance state” narrative that has more truth than we would like to admit.
So what is my point? Well for one, the technology is here and we had better get used to finding it deployed in the wild. And second, that it will bring a lot of good. So we should not over react. But we should be mindful of the downsides and those of us who are working on this technology, those of us who are financing the development of it, and those of us who are deploying it, need to take great care with it.
