Latest / Stuff You Should Know / How AI Facial Recognition Works
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Hey everybody, it's me Josh, and I'm here to tell
- 0:03Speaker 1: you it's official. We're going to be in Vancouver, b C.
- 0:06Speaker 1: And Portland, Oregon this March. On March twenty nine, will
- 0:10Speaker 1: be at the Chance Center in Vancouver and on March
- 0:13Speaker 1: will be at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland.
- 0:17Speaker 1: So come see us. Tickets go on sale this Friday.
- 0:21Speaker 1: Go to s Y s K live dot com for
- 0:24Speaker 1: ticket links and info and everything you need and we'll
- 0:26Speaker 1: see you guys in March. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
- 0:30Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
- 0:39Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Scooter,
- 0:45Speaker 1: Computer Bryant and Jerry Um Matthew Broderick in War Games
- 0:52Speaker 1: Rolling and this is Should Know. That's good. Thanks. What's
- 0:58Speaker 1: your name, Josh m hmm? Okay, Josh, Ali Shedy in
- 1:04Speaker 1: More Games Okay Clark, I know Aaron Cooper is doing
- 1:08Speaker 1: right now? Man? How cute was she in that movie? Like?
- 1:11Speaker 1: I think they designed that movie for like every thirteen
- 1:15Speaker 1: year old boy in America's fall in love with Ali
- 1:16Speaker 1: shed I think you're talking about um short Circuit. I
- 1:21Speaker 1: never saw that, believe that what with Johnny five. I mean,
- 1:25Speaker 1: I know the movie. You gotta see it. Really, it's
- 1:27Speaker 1: pretty awful, especially with um oh, what's his name? Who
- 1:35Speaker 1: is the sleeves ball from Fast Times at Ridgemont High?
- 1:38Speaker 1: Who is the ticket scalper? Yes, he plays a Indian
- 1:45Speaker 1: like Asian Indian character, like full on brown face and everything.
- 1:53Speaker 1: It's really bad. The movie is bad enough, but then
- 1:57Speaker 1: now when you go back and see that, to your like,
- 1:59Speaker 1: I can't believe this. I can't believe it. I think
- 2:02Speaker 1: he's Italian, oh easily, maybe Jewish or maybe just a
- 2:06Speaker 1: straight up white guy. He's definitely not Asian Indian. No,
- 2:09Speaker 1: he's not. But anyway, go see Short Circuit. Okay, see
- 2:12Speaker 1: what you think Ali shed He just keeps looking at
- 2:14Speaker 1: the camera going, I'm so sorry that was a big
- 2:18Speaker 1: hit though she didn't have anything be sorry about. Um So.
- 2:20Speaker 1: I guess War Games is kind of in your your wheelhouse. Yeah,
- 2:25Speaker 1: it was a little old for me. Yeah, because I
- 2:28Speaker 1: saw that when I was like twelve, bish uh, and
- 2:32Speaker 1: you would have been I don't know how how much
- 2:35Speaker 1: younger are you. I would have been seven seven. Yeah,
- 2:38Speaker 1: that's a little young for War Games, I would think.
- 2:40Speaker 1: I mean, I still watched your wherever, but I was like, yeah,
- 2:42Speaker 1: that's hilarious. The computer is called Whopper. Yeah, I mean
- 2:45Speaker 1: it was right in my wheelhouse, right. I remember at
- 2:47Speaker 1: the end of war Games, Uh, they lock in, you know,
- 2:51Speaker 1: they're decoding the the code one number and letter at
- 2:55Speaker 1: a time. Very suspenseful and yeah, very suspenseful. And it
- 2:58Speaker 1: finally locks in and me and my friends memerized it
- 3:01Speaker 1: so we could go home and plug it into an
- 3:03Speaker 1: Apple too to see what happened. Nothing, Okay, how do
- 3:08Speaker 1: you plug in a number anyway? What does that even mean? Oh? Yeah,
- 3:11Speaker 1: that's true, you know. Yeah. I remember a very rudimentary
- 3:16Speaker 1: program you could run where you could type in like
- 3:21Speaker 1: four lines of whatever I don't even know if you
- 3:24Speaker 1: call it code with a phrase, and it would run
- 3:27Speaker 1: the phrase like a thousand times all over your screen
- 3:30Speaker 1: and a big scroll. And then that just thought that
- 3:33Speaker 1: was the coolest thing ever. I feel like, I remember
- 3:36Speaker 1: what you're talking just like five lines was like the
- 3:39Speaker 1: only part I remember is twenty go to ten and
- 3:42Speaker 1: ten was the phrase I think something like I don't remember.
- 3:47Speaker 1: Then I was like, man, let's just play Castle Wolfenstein.
- 3:49Speaker 1: That was a good one. I remember, did Oregon Trail.
- 3:52Speaker 1: I never did as well. I was Castle Wolfenstein, but
- 3:55Speaker 1: like wolf and signed on the PC. Oh yeah, like
- 3:57Speaker 1: move left arrow, right arrow, shoot uh shoot dash, which
- 4:02Speaker 1: is some sort of a bullet. Yeah. It was fun.
- 4:04Speaker 1: That was fun, and I thought it was just like
- 4:06Speaker 1: the height of technological gaming. It was it was at
- 4:10Speaker 1: the time. But now, Chuck, we've reached the height of
- 4:13Speaker 1: technology which is being tracked everywhere you go, look at
- 4:17Speaker 1: you all the time by whoever wants to do that.
- 4:20Speaker 1: I'm gonna change your name to Josh smooth up a
- 4:23Speaker 1: Raider Clark for that transition. Very nice. Yeah, Like I
- 4:27Speaker 1: like Ali Shedy Clark, Josh, Ali Shedy and Clark. Yeah,
- 4:31Speaker 1: this is a good one. Uh did you put this together?
- 4:35Speaker 1: It was this you and this is Dave. Dave Brews
- 4:37Speaker 1: good stuff in high Dave. We finally got to meet
- 4:40Speaker 1: Dave and his family, lovely family that we cursed awfully
- 4:45Speaker 1: in front of in Seattle. I felt terrible, thanks for
- 4:48Speaker 1: adding yourself to the max and he was like, you
- 4:51Speaker 1: know whatever, he was fine. His kids were adorable, they
- 4:55Speaker 1: were they were great. They couldn't look at me though
- 4:58Speaker 1: that really they were probably just him did by your present,
- 5:00Speaker 1: No No, it was because I cursed so badly. So
- 5:03Speaker 1: this is good stuff. Though. Facial recognition technology that they've
- 5:08Speaker 1: been kind of at since the nineteen fifties, which they
- 5:12Speaker 1: rolled out as a test in two thousand two at
- 5:15Speaker 1: the Super Bowl in New Orleans, did not go that well. No,
- 5:19Speaker 1: it was a little clunky back then, but it's gotten
- 5:21Speaker 1: a lot better since then. Let me explain why. For
- 5:24Speaker 1: anyone who's listened to the End of the World with
- 5:25Speaker 1: Josh Clark the AI episode in particular, everything associated with
- 5:31Speaker 1: artificial intelligence got way better starting around two thousand seven,
- 5:36Speaker 1: when neural nets became a viable form of machine learning.
- 5:41Speaker 1: Because you don't have to train a computer what constitutes
- 5:46Speaker 1: a human face and what to look for. You just
- 5:49Speaker 1: feeded a bunch of pictures of faces and say these
- 5:51Speaker 1: are human faces, learn what a human faces and they
- 5:54Speaker 1: trained themselves. And so around about two thousand seven, two
- 5:57Speaker 1: thousand eight, two thousand nine, everything had to do with
- 6:00Speaker 1: machine learning got way smarter because we started using neural
- 6:04Speaker 1: nets and facial recognition software is no exception. Yeah, and
- 6:08Speaker 1: there were a few things that kind of converged all
- 6:10Speaker 1: at the same time or around the same time. Uh,
- 6:14Speaker 1: social meds kind of coming on the scene right in
- 6:17Speaker 1: that wheelhouse was a big deal. Um, Facebook, this is staggering.
- 6:22Speaker 1: Facebook just by itself processes three hundred and fifty million
- 6:29Speaker 1: new photos through its uh facial recognition software every day,
- 6:34Speaker 1: and every time one comes through. Mark Zuckerberg goes like,
- 6:39Speaker 1: you think it's neat when you go when you put
- 6:41Speaker 1: a picture up and it says like would you like
- 6:43Speaker 1: to tag Emily your wife because that's her? And you think, oh, well,
- 6:46Speaker 1: that's super easy, thanks Facebook. But then you don't think, like,
- 6:49Speaker 1: wait a minute, all right, how do they know that's
- 6:51Speaker 1: my wife? And you know, it's like with everything else, Uh,
- 6:56Speaker 1: there's privacy people that were like, whoa do you guys
- 6:59Speaker 1: realize what's going on? And then of the sheep they're
- 7:03Speaker 1: like huh no, no, they're like no, it's great, Like
- 7:05Speaker 1: I don't have to go in and like make click
- 7:08Speaker 1: two links or two buttons to take the way easier.
- 7:12Speaker 1: So that was one thing. There's way more photos out
- 7:15Speaker 1: there for those machines to learn one like good high
- 7:19Speaker 1: quality photos right uty million a day just on Facebook alone, um,
- 7:25Speaker 1: which means the machines were getting smarter, They were getting
- 7:27Speaker 1: better and better at at training themselves. And then lastly, um,
- 7:32Speaker 1: that has led to a ubiquity in in facial recognition.
- 7:37Speaker 1: That the better the machines have gotten, the easier it
- 7:41Speaker 1: has been to put together data sets for them to
- 7:43Speaker 1: train on, which is lots and lots of pictures of people. Um,
- 7:46Speaker 1: the cheaper the technology has gotten, which means the more
- 7:49Speaker 1: people that are now using facial recognition than ever. Yeah.
- 7:54Speaker 1: Amazon has a service called Recognition with a K, which
- 7:59Speaker 1: is not a good look. No, it looks very German.
- 8:02Speaker 1: There's something about replacing at sea with the K. It
- 8:06Speaker 1: just looks creepy, Like when you spell America with a K,
- 8:10Speaker 1: it means something. It means like bad America. Yet they
- 8:15Speaker 1: went right full steam ahead and called it recognition. You
- 8:20Speaker 1: have to say it like that, you do, I think,
- 8:21Speaker 1: and you have to be like squeezing the air out
- 8:24Speaker 1: of a syringe while you're saying it too. Um, so
- 8:27Speaker 1: they have this. I didn't even know about this, but
- 8:30Speaker 1: it's ubiquitous and it's not super expensive, and that means
- 8:34Speaker 1: that the law enforcement agencies agencies they don't have to
- 8:39Speaker 1: like create their own they can just say, well, just
- 8:41Speaker 1: to sign up for a recognition right exactly. Because it's there,
- 8:45Speaker 1: and because it's it's relatively cheap, you can just get
- 8:48Speaker 1: a subscription, not just law enforcement agencies. If you have
- 8:52Speaker 1: a photo sharing app or whatever and you want some
- 8:56Speaker 1: facial recognition technology, you just contract with with Amazon, and
- 9:00Speaker 1: Amazon goes here, you go, here's our data, and you
- 9:04Speaker 1: can or um like our code, and you can put
- 9:06Speaker 1: it onto your platform. Anybody can use it. Um. So
- 9:10Speaker 1: it is kind of everywhere, and that makes a lot
- 9:12Speaker 1: of people, including me, very very nervous because as this
- 9:18Speaker 1: guy wood Row hurt Zog, if he's not Werner hurt Zog, brother,
- 9:23Speaker 1: I'll be disappointed. But but a wood Row and a
- 9:28Speaker 1: Werner come on, you know anyway. Um. Wood Row hurt
- 9:31Speaker 1: Zog as a professor of computer science, and I believe privacy,
- 9:38Speaker 1: civil liberty. Um. He basically says, Look, there is no
- 9:44Speaker 1: way we're going to reap the benefits of facial recognition
- 9:48Speaker 1: without ultimately sliding irreversibly into a dystopian surveillance state where
- 9:55Speaker 1: it's happening right now, and if we don't do something
- 9:58Speaker 1: about it, it's never going to change back. We're about
- 10:01Speaker 1: to fully give up our privacy because it's one thing
- 10:04Speaker 1: to have your phone tracked you can give up your phone,
- 10:07Speaker 1: get yourself a burner phone, like you're Jesse Pinkman or
- 10:10Speaker 1: something like that, and then you just throw that phone away.
- 10:13Speaker 1: You can't be tracked anymore. You can't get a burner face.
- 10:16Speaker 1: And if that does become a thing down the line,
- 10:19Speaker 1: it'll be very, very expensive. So the average person can't
- 10:22Speaker 1: get a burner face. Will be tracked by our face
- 10:26Speaker 1: everywhere we go. And as we add more and more
- 10:29Speaker 1: cameras and this technology becomes cheaper and cheaper, it's we
- 10:34Speaker 1: will be living in a world where there will be
- 10:36Speaker 1: zero privacy and will be monitored and tracked because it
- 10:39Speaker 1: will be so easy, and it will be sold to
- 10:42Speaker 1: us like it's being sold to us now that it's
- 10:45Speaker 1: a law enforcement tool to get the bad guys. But
- 10:48Speaker 1: it's eventually going to extend to include everybody. But what
- 10:51Speaker 1: do you have to worry about. You're an upstanding citizen.
- 10:54Speaker 1: It doesn't matter if you're tracked. That's not true. That's
- 10:57Speaker 1: just not the case, everybody, It's not case. All right,
- 11:00Speaker 1: we're gonna call that soap soapbox soliloquy number one of
- 11:06Speaker 1: what I guarantee will be probably three or four. Uh,
- 11:10Speaker 1: let's talk of a little bit about how it works.
- 11:12Speaker 1: It is biometric authentication. Um. It's like a fingerprint or
- 11:16Speaker 1: a retina scan. And basically what it does is, uh,
- 11:20Speaker 1: it is precise measurements of a face to calculate every
- 11:25Speaker 1: person's very unique visual geometry, like how far apart your
- 11:29Speaker 1: eyes are, how how far apart your pupils are from
- 11:32Speaker 1: your nostrils. Yeah, your facial geometry, how your face is
- 11:36Speaker 1: all set up? I think. Yeah, it's even gotten into
- 11:38Speaker 1: things like facial hair, skin tone, um, skin texture. Yeah,
- 11:43Speaker 1: I'm sure it'll get just more and more specific. Yeah.
- 11:45Speaker 1: And then you know, because they're getting the machines are
- 11:48Speaker 1: getting better and better and easier and easier to train
- 11:50Speaker 1: on this stuff, you can just add more and more
- 11:52Speaker 1: data to it, and the the the recognition will just
- 11:56Speaker 1: become increasingly um um good. Yeah. And if you want
- 12:02Speaker 1: to throw off facial recognition software and freak out every
- 12:06Speaker 1: human you meet to shave your eyebrows, oh yeah, that
- 12:10Speaker 1: would be a little freaky. Have you ever seen that.
- 12:13Speaker 1: You've seen it before, I'm sure in movies and stuff.
- 12:15Speaker 1: It's an interesting thing. I remember a kid in industrial
- 12:17Speaker 1: arts class did that one year. He was like a
- 12:19Speaker 1: little you know, kind of a ninth grade burnout, and
- 12:21Speaker 1: he just showed up one day with no eyebrows, like
- 12:24Speaker 1: you would I think like not having a nose would
- 12:27Speaker 1: be more easily accepted. There's something just uncanny when someone
- 12:32Speaker 1: shaves their eyebrows, Like one day they have them, the
- 12:34Speaker 1: next day they don't. Was it like immediately recognizable what
- 12:39Speaker 1: the thing was, or was it like that's the thing
- 12:42Speaker 1: off today? Whereas if you, you know, you came in
- 12:46Speaker 1: the next day without a nose, the first thing you
- 12:48Speaker 1: would say is what happened to your nose? What happened
- 12:49Speaker 1: to your nose? Todd? Yeah, and Todd would be like,
- 12:52Speaker 1: I can't rent of it. I fell off. So those
- 12:56Speaker 1: measurements we were talking about. What happens then is they
- 12:58Speaker 1: compare that just like a fingerprint, with a database of images.
- 13:05Speaker 1: And depending on what this is for, it could be
- 13:08Speaker 1: like just within your company, or it could be the
- 13:11Speaker 1: FBI's database of mugshots, or it could be the d
- 13:14Speaker 1: m VS database of driver's license photos yeh, which we'll
- 13:17Speaker 1: get into. Yeah. What's interesting is each stage of the way,
- 13:21Speaker 1: there's a different algorithm that does you know, each increasingly
- 13:24Speaker 1: sophisticated step, until you finally have basically like all of
- 13:29Speaker 1: the different data points for that, you know, what makes
- 13:32Speaker 1: up that facial geometry, and then you can compare it
- 13:35Speaker 1: to all the other data points. We think of like
- 13:38Speaker 1: a computer running like a you know, a picture, You've
- 13:43Speaker 1: got your input picture and then running you know, all
- 13:46Speaker 1: the pictures next to it. That's not what it's doing.
- 13:48Speaker 1: It's it's running the numbers. Basically, it's doing computer stuff. Yeah.
- 13:51Speaker 1: I love that first step, which is you have to
- 13:55Speaker 1: teach the computer what a face is. So, I mean,
- 14:00Speaker 1: seems silly, but of course that's what it is. Well, yeah,
- 14:02Speaker 1: because I mean if you show it a picture of
- 14:04Speaker 1: a person standing next to a fire hydra shaming on
- 14:07Speaker 1: the fire Hydran, Yeah, and say hello, handsome, So this
- 14:10Speaker 1: is what a human face looks like. Yeah, or no,
- 14:13Speaker 1: that's a butt, And then it starts, you know, closer, closer.
- 14:16Speaker 1: All right, now that's a face. You know what a
- 14:18Speaker 1: face is. Now move on to step two, which is
- 14:21Speaker 1: stop screwing around. Yeah, so now you know what a
- 14:24Speaker 1: face is. You've got to normalize it for the photo,
- 14:26Speaker 1: which means there are not that many. Well, let's you
- 14:29Speaker 1: have to put it in the dockers. That normalizes, Um,
- 14:34Speaker 1: you isolate that face, and then you have to make
- 14:37Speaker 1: sure that it's normalized as far as looking at the camera.
- 14:42Speaker 1: So if it's a if you get a photo of
- 14:44Speaker 1: someone from a CCTV, let's say, and it's sort of
- 14:47Speaker 1: a three quarter, they have the ability to make it
- 14:50Speaker 1: as if it is looking straight at you. Yeah, the
- 14:52Speaker 1: computer can pretty accurately predict what the rest of the
- 14:56Speaker 1: face looks like face you know it on, I guess
- 15:00Speaker 1: face on um. And when it normalizes it like that,
- 15:05Speaker 1: it makes it much easier to compare to other pictures because,
- 15:09Speaker 1: as we'll see, most of the pictures or most of
- 15:11Speaker 1: the data points that it's comparing it to, are taken
- 15:14Speaker 1: from databases of pictures that have been taking of people
- 15:17Speaker 1: face on. Right. So that's why it wants to go
- 15:20Speaker 1: to driver's license. Yeah, well just spoiled it. But yes,
- 15:24Speaker 1: we already said that. Oh we did, Yeah, I did, Okay,
- 15:27Speaker 1: I missed it, I know. So uh from there, do
- 15:32Speaker 1: you have more algorithms still that isolate parts of the face. Um.
- 15:38Speaker 1: And this is where my old theory that like, there
- 15:40Speaker 1: are only so many sort of facial combinations, so that's
- 15:43Speaker 1: why you have doppelgangers. We got to do an episode
- 15:45Speaker 1: on doppel Gan. There's only so many things you can
- 15:47Speaker 1: do with two eyes to eyebrows and nose in a
- 15:49Speaker 1: mouth and cheekbones and in chin. Well, okay, what else?
- 15:54Speaker 1: I mean, there's not a whole lot. There's lips, lips, sure,
- 15:57Speaker 1: what about um uh uh uh, that's about it. These
- 16:01Speaker 1: are called elevens, the ridges between your eyebrows. Well, if
- 16:04Speaker 1: you want to get super specific, but that's what I'm saying.
- 16:07Speaker 1: I think they're getting more and more specific. Oh yeah, yeah.
- 16:09Speaker 1: But my whole point is, and we'll learn and here
- 16:12Speaker 1: and facial recognition. They do use Apple gangers, but put
- 16:16Speaker 1: a pin in that so they recognize all these features
- 16:20Speaker 1: and then each feature becomes what's called a nodal point
- 16:24Speaker 1: or no Dowell point. I think, nodal nodal, I think.
- 16:28Speaker 1: And this is where you're gonna get your super exact
- 16:32Speaker 1: uh angles and distances between all these parts as a
- 16:36Speaker 1: flat two dimensional thing. Which my question was because below here,
- 16:41Speaker 1: you know, it talks about Apple and their iPhone have
- 16:43Speaker 1: a three D facial recognition. Is that is two dimensional
- 16:47Speaker 1: superior to three D? I don't know, or is it
- 16:50Speaker 1: just because that's what all the pictures are in the databasis,
- 16:53Speaker 1: so that's what they do. I don't know. All I
- 16:55Speaker 1: know is my phone usually unlocks when I look at it.
- 16:59Speaker 1: You know what? I Hey, that's having to take off
- 17:01Speaker 1: my sunglasses. Worst so I found I've got some wayfarers
- 17:06Speaker 1: that I don't have to take, but my aviators I
- 17:09Speaker 1: do have to take off. Interesting do they keep trying
- 17:11Speaker 1: to make you into mav when you have on the
- 17:16Speaker 1: the go ahead? What is that? That was Tom Cruise
- 17:20Speaker 1: laughing and chewing gum. Okay, wow thanks, I feel like okay,
- 17:26Speaker 1: um we we we gotta keep going because I was
- 17:29Speaker 1: about to take a break unnecessarily. So um when the
- 17:34Speaker 1: when the computer is running through the pictures, it just
- 17:36Speaker 1: sis soon goes like no, no, no, no, no, millions
- 17:40Speaker 1: and millions of times and then finally goes yes. But
- 17:42Speaker 1: when it says yes and it spits out another picture,
- 17:46Speaker 1: it's not like this is that person? No you want
- 17:49Speaker 1: it to be. Because we all watch n c I S,
- 17:51Speaker 1: we all watch c S I, we all watch um
- 17:55Speaker 1: Law and Order, we all watch um uh party down
- 18:00Speaker 1: uh Andy Griffith, that Mattlock, the whole CHAMAI um, so
- 18:07Speaker 1: we wanted to just spit out and be like, here's
- 18:09Speaker 1: your here's your your person of interest, right. But what
- 18:12Speaker 1: it's really doing is it's it's producing a similarity score
- 18:17Speaker 1: that is probabilistic. It's saying this is there's this percent
- 18:21Speaker 1: chance that this is the same person as the picture
- 18:25Speaker 1: or the person in the picture that you uploaded. It's
- 18:27Speaker 1: a bit of a guess. It is, so a sophisticated
- 18:30Speaker 1: guess it is, and the better computers get at this,
- 18:35Speaker 1: the likelier it is that if they say this is
- 18:38Speaker 1: a there's a chances the same person that it's the
- 18:41Speaker 1: same person. But it's as we'll see, it's up to
- 18:45Speaker 1: the human user to determine what is an acceptable threshold
- 18:50Speaker 1: of a confidence Is it no? Is it no? Frankly,
- 18:55Speaker 1: it really should be about or higher should be the
- 18:58Speaker 1: confidence setting for the confidence level. Didn't that what Amazon's
- 19:02Speaker 1: recognition says the threshold should be. I'm glad you said that, man,
- 19:07Speaker 1: because it really is creepy and I couldn't put my
- 19:10Speaker 1: finger on it. And it's exactly I mean, I knew
- 19:13Speaker 1: the k looked weird or whatever, but it hadn't hit
- 19:15Speaker 1: me that just how creepy it is and just how
- 19:18Speaker 1: off the mark or potentially on the mark that name is. Like, Oh, like,
- 19:23Speaker 1: if my name was spelled c h u K, I'm
- 19:26Speaker 1: sinister a little bit, you'd be more sinister. Yeah, I
- 19:29Speaker 1: don't think you could ever be truly sinister. I appreciate that. Alright,
- 19:32Speaker 1: let's take a break. I'm gonna go work on sinistering
- 19:35Speaker 1: up a bit, and we'll talk a little bit more
- 19:37Speaker 1: about some of the uses of f R right after this. So,
- 20:04Speaker 1: as with all technology, it has to be abbreviated into
- 20:07Speaker 1: two letters, the second of which is are do they
- 20:10Speaker 1: call it f R? I've seen it, Yes, I was
- 20:14Speaker 1: just silly, but it doesn't surprise me. Nope. So in
- 20:17Speaker 1: f R facial recognition technology, there are there are some
- 20:22Speaker 1: some beneficial uses for it. Yeah, Like we said, you
- 20:25Speaker 1: got to tag people is chief among them. The for
- 20:30Speaker 1: people like you and me, that's the pinnacle as it stands.
- 20:34Speaker 1: You don't have to tag people yourself. Facebook does it
- 20:37Speaker 1: for you. That's what we're trading everything for. I gotta
- 20:40Speaker 1: calm down. Okay. There are some other, like genuinely beneficial
- 20:45Speaker 1: uses too. There's a nonprofit company called Thorn that scans
- 20:50Speaker 1: missing person's pictures against um pictures of children in child
- 20:56Speaker 1: porn videos, um or suspected human and trafficking to to
- 21:02Speaker 1: get matches, and apparently they've rescued a hundred kids so
- 21:04Speaker 1: far from using that technology. There's a pretty beneficial use
- 21:08Speaker 1: of facial recognition software. Uh dating apps. Let's say you
- 21:13Speaker 1: want to you can get pretty specific on what kind
- 21:16Speaker 1: of face you find attractive, which is interesting. But you
- 21:20Speaker 1: can say I really think, um, I like guys with
- 21:24Speaker 1: high cheekbones, and but no, you would go find mall lips.
- 21:28Speaker 1: It would be more like, um, somebody could be like, oh,
- 21:32Speaker 1: I really find Christian Bale attractive, and they get a
- 21:34Speaker 1: picture of Christian Bale into this dating app and I
- 21:37Speaker 1: would come up. But I wouldn't because I wouldn't be
- 21:39Speaker 1: in the dating app because I'm happily married. Do you
- 21:41Speaker 1: think you look like Christian Bale? I'm told that a lot. Really, Yeah,
- 21:45Speaker 1: that's weird. Don't think you look anything like it. I
- 21:46Speaker 1: don't either, but people say interesting. I'm I don't know
- 21:51Speaker 1: what I would do if I was dating now. I
- 21:52Speaker 1: guess I would just go to a service and say
- 21:54Speaker 1: and aliety type sure for more games era, But they'd
- 21:57Speaker 1: be like, okay, sir, you would just upload the picture.
- 22:00Speaker 1: You don't have to come into the office, which is
- 22:02Speaker 1: really not even open to the public, and just tell
- 22:05Speaker 1: us you're interested in Ali sheety type like a weirdo.
- 22:08Speaker 1: You mean, dating apps don't have offices where they just
- 22:10Speaker 1: feel complaints and interested parties. You sit down and they
- 22:13Speaker 1: they videotape you with the VHS camera, put you on
- 22:17Speaker 1: with some other guys on the tape. That's how they
- 22:19Speaker 1: used to do it. Oh yeah, that was one of
- 22:21Speaker 1: the subplots of Singles, the Cameron Crow movie. Oh yeah,
- 22:26Speaker 1: it was Expect the Best was the name of the
- 22:29Speaker 1: dating service, and you would make a videotape and like
- 22:32Speaker 1: a watch video tapes of people you know, saying who
- 22:35Speaker 1: they are. How do you remember that? I was a
- 22:37Speaker 1: big singles fan. That's not a bunch I got you. Yeah,
- 22:40Speaker 1: Expect the Best. You me pack of cigarettes and some coffee.
- 22:45Speaker 1: We don't need anything else becausezoom tight. So what else here?
- 22:49Speaker 1: This was? UM Taylor Swift and and her security team
- 22:53Speaker 1: on tour used it to scan the audience to see
- 22:56Speaker 1: if any of the creeps who have harassed and doctor
- 23:00Speaker 1: were in the audience. That's super beneficial. No one should
- 23:03Speaker 1: have to go through that. UM also, cops use it
- 23:06Speaker 1: in myriad ways, but in particular especially beneficial or um
- 23:11Speaker 1: when they use facial recognition to identify people who can't
- 23:14Speaker 1: identify themselves. Somebody in the midst of a psychotic break,
- 23:18Speaker 1: perhaps somebody wasted on troom's um, somebody you're not Jesus Christ,
- 23:25Speaker 1: who who has uh amnesia, Our friend Benjamin Kyle, who
- 23:31Speaker 1: apparently knows who he is now but he's decided not
- 23:34Speaker 1: to disclose it publicly. Remember the guy he was found
- 23:37Speaker 1: behind a burger king near a dumpster, had zero recollection
- 23:41Speaker 1: of who he was or how he got there, and
- 23:43Speaker 1: like there was this international publicity publicizing like who he
- 23:49Speaker 1: wasn't that he couldn't remember who he was, and somebody
- 23:52Speaker 1: finally came forward and identified him. So now he knows
- 23:55Speaker 1: who he was, but he went like a decade without knowing.
- 23:59Speaker 1: By the way, when I said, sorry, you're not Jesus Christ,
- 24:01Speaker 1: I was making fun of the guy on mushrooms, not
- 24:03Speaker 1: someone in the midst of a psychotic break. I just
- 24:06Speaker 1: want to be very specific. I think that was very
- 24:08Speaker 1: clear a right to make sure everybody knows that. So uh.
- 24:13Speaker 1: Those are some of the good ways that it can
- 24:15Speaker 1: be used UM. Now let's talk about all the bad ways. Yeah,
- 24:19Speaker 1: I mean when you're talking about the government, you're talking
- 24:21Speaker 1: about law enforcement, when you're talking about things like what's
- 24:27Speaker 1: going on allegedly in China with CCTVs everywhere trained to
- 24:32Speaker 1: UM to single out ethnic minorities and religious groups just
- 24:39Speaker 1: walking down the street going about their day. Yeah, that's
- 24:43Speaker 1: it gets into much different territory than tagging people in
- 24:47Speaker 1: dating apps. Yeah, it's pretty difficult to attend your religious
- 24:50Speaker 1: service if you're not allowed to attend your religious service
- 24:53Speaker 1: and you're being tracked everywhere you go. Yeah, that's why
- 24:56Speaker 1: places like and this is the most predictable thing in
- 25:00Speaker 1: the world San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley and then Somerville, Maine.
- 25:05Speaker 1: I knew the Manners would be in there. They're not
- 25:08Speaker 1: into this, that's right. They have banned law enforcement UM
- 25:13Speaker 1: from using facial recognition altogether in California UM as a state,
- 25:19Speaker 1: and the ACE has put a three or moratorium on
- 25:21Speaker 1: the use of it UM body cams, which and the
- 25:24Speaker 1: a c l U is basically I know this is
- 25:26Speaker 1: jumping ahead, but they're at the point where they're like,
- 25:28Speaker 1: we need to tap the brakes here for a few
- 25:31Speaker 1: years and like because there's no legislation about this yet
- 25:35Speaker 1: and it's just going full steam ahead. Yeah, I really
- 25:38Speaker 1: I don't want to like like run past that there
- 25:41Speaker 1: is aside from Berkeley, San Francisco, who's the other one,
- 25:46Speaker 1: Oakland and Somerville, Maine. UM, there are no laws, state, local,
- 25:53Speaker 1: or federal governing the use of facial recognition technology by
- 25:57Speaker 1: law enforcement. It's just happening very fast. Whatever they want
- 26:00Speaker 1: to do, they can do UM and in some cases
- 26:04Speaker 1: they do all sorts of stuff with it. They will
- 26:08Speaker 1: use it, like the NYPD very famously used UM what
- 26:12Speaker 1: you were talking about with doppelgangers. There was a guy
- 26:14Speaker 1: who was caught stealing beer at a CVS. Not even
- 26:18Speaker 1: a duane read a CVS. UM, and they said, but
- 26:22Speaker 1: this guy looks a lot like Woody Harrelson. We don't
- 26:24Speaker 1: have a good we don't have a good shot of
- 26:26Speaker 1: him to use in official recognitions. So they went and
- 26:32Speaker 1: got a pick of Woody Harrelson, and there they came
- 26:35Speaker 1: up with a match, and they think it was the
- 26:37Speaker 1: guy on video and CVS and so UM. The Georgetown
- 26:42Speaker 1: School of Law UH produced a study called Garbage in,
- 26:46Speaker 1: Garbage Out, and they were basically like, that's not okay,
- 26:49Speaker 1: you really shouldn't be doing that. But that's the level
- 26:52Speaker 1: of legality as it stands right now. There's it's just
- 26:55Speaker 1: open season, um, and uh, it's just basically whatever you
- 27:00Speaker 1: want to do, you can do as far as facial
- 27:02Speaker 1: recognition is concerned. In that story in particular, it's like
- 27:05Speaker 1: some people are like, awesome, the system works. Sure. Other
- 27:07Speaker 1: people are like, what about poor Woody Harrelson. He was
- 27:10Speaker 1: really in danger right then of being implicated in this
- 27:13Speaker 1: beer stealing scheme from CVS and what he said? What dude,
- 27:18Speaker 1: I love that guy man. True Detective the first season, Yeah,
- 27:23Speaker 1: first four episodes just amazing. That's called using a probe
- 27:27Speaker 1: photo when you use when you say, hey, that looks
- 27:30Speaker 1: like someone. They also did the same with one of
- 27:32Speaker 1: the New York Knicks. Apparently I could not, for the
- 27:35Speaker 1: life of me find out who. Yeah, it's like he's
- 27:38Speaker 1: being protected or something that maybe no one said who
- 27:41Speaker 1: it was. Um, a couple of numbers for you, though. Uh.
- 27:44Speaker 1: The FBI receives about fifty thousand facial recognition search submissions
- 27:49Speaker 1: a month for their database. So that's the other thing.
- 27:52Speaker 1: If you don't have even the money for a subscription
- 27:55Speaker 1: to Amazon Recognition, or you don't have an I T
- 27:58Speaker 1: person who's capable of assembling and putting it, you know,
- 28:02Speaker 1: using it UM. You can just submit these requests to
- 28:05Speaker 1: the FBI. So there's a lot of different avenues you
- 28:08Speaker 1: could take his law enforcement to to UM to use
- 28:12Speaker 1: facial recognition technology to catch suspected criminals. Yeah. I was
- 28:16Speaker 1: about to say bad guys, but who knows. We'll see
- 28:19Speaker 1: it's not always the case. So here's some more numbers though,
- 28:23Speaker 1: because you know it needs to be regulated. But when
- 28:28Speaker 1: it works, it really works. Yeah, it really does though.
- 28:30Speaker 1: It is the thing. Yeah, there was one department where
- 28:32Speaker 1: they said it lowered the average time required for an
- 28:34Speaker 1: officer to identify a subject from an image from thirty
- 28:38Speaker 1: days to three minutes, which kind of brings home the
- 28:41Speaker 1: point there's another number in here. This interesting, but uh,
- 28:48Speaker 1: it brings on the point that like, this is something
- 28:50Speaker 1: that human policemen were doing. Officers were doing with their
- 28:54Speaker 1: eyeballs by flipping through books, yes, for thirty days straight,
- 28:59Speaker 1: saying like it doesn't look like this person. This is
- 29:02Speaker 1: like a chance to really speed up that process and
- 29:04Speaker 1: to spend more time in theory catching bad guys. Yes,
- 29:09Speaker 1: I'm not arguing for it. I'm just saying they were
- 29:12Speaker 1: doing this anyway, just through manpower. Right. I think the
- 29:16Speaker 1: thing is is anytime you add artificial intelligence automatically makes
- 29:22Speaker 1: the user of the artificial intelligence aside unfair unfairly advantaged.
- 29:27Speaker 1: It's not like the criminals are able to use AI
- 29:30Speaker 1: to steal beer from cvs more effectively, but the cops
- 29:34Speaker 1: are using AI to catch them stealing beer more effectively.
- 29:37Speaker 1: And it's kind of like, yes, it makes sense to
- 29:40Speaker 1: catch like child pornographers and um human traffickers and rapists
- 29:45Speaker 1: and murderers and violent criminals with this stuff, but using
- 29:49Speaker 1: that kind of technology catch somebody who stole beer from
- 29:51Speaker 1: a CVS. If that's when it starts to feel like
- 29:54Speaker 1: what kind of society are we moving towards? You know? Well,
- 29:58Speaker 1: I think someone not. And let me keep going here
- 30:00Speaker 1: for a second, because I don't want people be like,
- 30:02Speaker 1: what do you in favor of the guy stealing beer
- 30:04Speaker 1: from CVS? No, I'm not. I think you're a scumbag
- 30:06Speaker 1: if you steal beer from CVS. But I also think
- 30:10Speaker 1: that it's overkilled to use facial recognition technology to catch
- 30:13Speaker 1: that person. Use old fashioned police tactics or don't catch them. Yes,
- 30:19Speaker 1: it's just kind of the fairness of the old western
- 30:21Speaker 1: New York City. I think I might be on the
- 30:23Speaker 1: other side because I don't think we need to set
- 30:26Speaker 1: a fair playing ground between criminals and cops and saying
- 30:31Speaker 1: like it's unfair that cops can use this stuff and
- 30:34Speaker 1: criminals are just out there not able to use these
- 30:37Speaker 1: same techniques. Okay, So my the fairness thing doesn't just
- 30:41Speaker 1: end at the law and order thing, right like, Like,
- 30:44Speaker 1: it's not just with cops using it. They they have
- 30:47Speaker 1: this huge advantage. I totally get how people would be like, no,
- 30:50Speaker 1: give the cops that huge advantage. I don't have an
- 30:53Speaker 1: issue with that in and of itself. I think my
- 30:57Speaker 1: issue comes a step or two down the road, sure,
- 31:00Speaker 1: where the government or the cops, acting on behalf of
- 31:05Speaker 1: the government, use that against everyday citizens who have no
- 31:09Speaker 1: recourse whatsoever. That that that that lopsidedness that's so evident
- 31:15Speaker 1: when you're using AI to catch somebody's stealing beer from
- 31:18Speaker 1: the CBS. It's really easy to kind of follow that
- 31:22Speaker 1: a little further across to the horizon and see just
- 31:25Speaker 1: how unfair life could be and how oppressive that could
- 31:28Speaker 1: be using that technology. I think that's ultimately what I'm saying.
- 31:32Speaker 1: I hopefully dug myself out of that hole by now so.
- 31:36Speaker 1: Uh And and this gets into some of the controversies
- 31:40Speaker 1: and the arguments if you're if you're scanning mug shots
- 31:44Speaker 1: uh for rapists and arsonists and murderers and violent criminals,
- 31:50Speaker 1: and you're catching people, You're not gonna find a lot
- 31:53Speaker 1: of people that say, well, that's not fair, go back
- 31:56Speaker 1: and use take a month to look through a mug
- 31:58Speaker 1: shot book instead, and waste a bunch of time and
- 32:02Speaker 1: don't be efficient. So I think most people would say
- 32:06Speaker 1: if you're looking at mug shots, although we should point
- 32:07Speaker 1: out that a mug shot doesn't mean that just means
- 32:10Speaker 1: you're arrested. That doesn't mean you were guilty of anything.
- 32:13Speaker 1: Um So, there are plenty of opportunities for false positives
- 32:17Speaker 1: and people being put in jail that shouldn't be. But
- 32:21Speaker 1: but there's not a lot of people who are like, no,
- 32:23Speaker 1: not use mugshot databases right Exactly, If you're scanning driver's
- 32:27Speaker 1: license databases or other just general public databases, that's when
- 32:31Speaker 1: it gets super tricky because we can't avoid the fact
- 32:35Speaker 1: that what that means is in in the Center on
- 32:37Speaker 1: Privacy and Technology, Um kind of stated very plainly what
- 32:42Speaker 1: that means is everyone is in a perpetual lineup. Essentially,
- 32:47Speaker 1: if you have a driver's license, you're part of a
- 32:49Speaker 1: police lineup. Yeah, whether you like it or not, whether
- 32:52Speaker 1: you know it or not. And if that computer says
- 32:55Speaker 1: here's the guy, it's Chuck Bryant, Uh, they will say, oh,
- 32:58Speaker 1: he doesn't strike me as very sinister, or in the
- 33:00Speaker 1: computer would be like, trust me, this is the guy. Uh,
- 33:03Speaker 1: with like an eighty something percent confidence interval. Um, Chuck,
- 33:07Speaker 1: Suddenly you're going to get visited by the cops and
- 33:10Speaker 1: maybe you'll even get arrested because you were a little
- 33:12Speaker 1: KG when they talked to you and you set off
- 33:14Speaker 1: their cop radar or whatever. And then the next thing
- 33:17Speaker 1: you know, you're in court being charged with the crime
- 33:20Speaker 1: that you didn't commit because the computer implicated you and
- 33:23Speaker 1: the cops thought that you were acting KG. And let's
- 33:26Speaker 1: say that you were a very very poor person and
- 33:29Speaker 1: you don't have any money to mount a decent defense.
- 33:31Speaker 1: The best you can afford is a free public defender
- 33:34Speaker 1: who has fifty other cases is not really paying very
- 33:37Speaker 1: much attention to you and you're in jail now because
- 33:40Speaker 1: you got convicted wrongly because you were putting a lineup
- 33:44Speaker 1: just because you had a driver's license. Yeah. I think
- 33:47Speaker 1: for me, um, and this is total my privilege coming
- 33:51Speaker 1: through as well, Like I'd want to see some numbers
- 33:54Speaker 1: and if one of every ten thousand arrest and conviction
- 33:58Speaker 1: of a real criminal or an a rapist and a murderer,
- 34:01Speaker 1: and there's three people that get falsely identified and have
- 34:05Speaker 1: to go through the system and may or it may
- 34:07Speaker 1: not be acquitted, I'd want to see those numbers. But
- 34:10Speaker 1: again that's coming from a privileged position as someone who
- 34:13Speaker 1: could afford a legal defense who uh white, Yeah exactly.
- 34:18Speaker 1: That's another one too, is that people of color uh
- 34:22Speaker 1: bear a inordinate burden, disproportionate burden when it comes to
- 34:26Speaker 1: facial recognition technologies. We'll see well, I mean you might
- 34:29Speaker 1: as well go ahead and talk about that. It's um.
- 34:31Speaker 1: I think from the beginning, even with social media, there
- 34:35Speaker 1: were certain facial recognition, early facial recognition technologies that admitted like,
- 34:41Speaker 1: we're not as good as uh seeing or recognizing faces
- 34:46Speaker 1: with darker skin. It's just not that good. Yeah, I
- 34:49Speaker 1: think something like darker skinned men and women were recognized,
- 34:52Speaker 1: twelve and thirty were misidentified, compared to one percent and
- 34:57Speaker 1: seven percent of light skinned men and him in And
- 35:00Speaker 1: they say it's because of the data sets that these
- 35:04Speaker 1: machines have been trained on, which is not it's not purposefully,
- 35:08Speaker 1: but it makes sense if you live in like a
- 35:10Speaker 1: generally like like the white people are in power, and
- 35:14Speaker 1: it's like whiteness is the most celebrated part of the
- 35:18Speaker 1: society or whatever. That's why you're going to have more
- 35:20Speaker 1: pictures of And when you feed just a bunch of
- 35:24Speaker 1: pictures from your society into a machine and say, learn
- 35:27Speaker 1: what faces are, it's going to go, oh, white men,
- 35:29Speaker 1: I got you. Well, they just are more white people.
- 35:32Speaker 1: Numbers wise, probably has something to do with it, right, Um, Yes,
- 35:36Speaker 1: that's a really that is an excellent point as well,
- 35:38Speaker 1: for sure. But the fact of the matter is the
- 35:41Speaker 1: data sets that the machines are learning on are largely
- 35:46Speaker 1: white and largely male, and so they're just not as
- 35:50Speaker 1: good at recognizing the differences in faces among um people
- 35:55Speaker 1: who aren't white males. Uh, let's read these quotes. There's
- 35:59Speaker 1: a couple of good quotes here. The first one is
- 36:02Speaker 1: from Woodrow Heart sog. I was going to read it
- 36:07Speaker 1: as wurner. I don't know if I can. I should
- 36:10Speaker 1: get Nolan here. He does a good burner. The most
- 36:12Speaker 1: uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever intended. It's an irresistible tool
- 36:18Speaker 1: for oppression that's perfectly suited for governments to display unprecedented
- 36:23Speaker 1: authoritary tane I'm sorry, authoritarian control and an all out
- 36:29Speaker 1: privacy eviscerating machine. I just realized it's heart sog, so
- 36:36Speaker 1: it's it's spelled differently. It's a j r T hert
- 36:39Speaker 1: sog is just h g r z o G. I'm
- 36:42Speaker 1: glad that we didn't figure that out beforehand, though. You
- 36:45Speaker 1: want to take the other one though. I also I
- 36:47Speaker 1: have to say I detected a hint of Michael Caine
- 36:50Speaker 1: in there too. There might have been a little bit.
- 36:52Speaker 1: It's hard to get Michael Caine out of my system.
- 36:55Speaker 1: What's the other one? Oh? From Microsoft president Brad Smith? Yeah. So.
- 36:58Speaker 1: Brad Smith says that when combined with ubiquitous cameras and
- 37:02Speaker 1: massive computing power and storage in the cloud, a government
- 37:05Speaker 1: could use facial recognition technology to enable continuous surveillance of
- 37:10Speaker 1: specific individuals like they're supposedly doing in China as an aside,
- 37:14Speaker 1: it could follow anyone anywhere, or for that matter, everyone everywhere,
- 37:18Speaker 1: at any time, or even all the time. And he
- 37:21Speaker 1: wasn't this wasn't a sales pitch. He was speaking out
- 37:23Speaker 1: against this to Congress, saying like, guys, we gotta we
- 37:26Speaker 1: have to do something about this, because this is the
- 37:29Speaker 1: path we're heading down. And that's why uh Seth abrama
- 37:34Speaker 1: Witz changed his name to Brad Smith. It sounds like
- 37:38Speaker 1: a total like like I just want to blend in. UM.
- 37:43Speaker 1: So you've got scanning against mug shots, scanning against driver's licenses,
- 37:47Speaker 1: and then um, there's a new one that just came out.
- 37:49Speaker 1: The New York Times just released this expose on January eighteenth,
- 37:53Speaker 1: just a few days ago, UM on a company called
- 37:56Speaker 1: clear View AI. And apparently even among um Silicon Valley
- 38:02Speaker 1: there has been this longstanding kind of unspoken thing where
- 38:06Speaker 1: let's steer clear of this facial recognition technology because it's
- 38:10Speaker 1: such a tool of oppression potentially. And clear View AI said, hey,
- 38:14Speaker 1: we're not from Silicon Valley. Well, we're just going to
- 38:16Speaker 1: do our own thing. So now there's this, there's this
- 38:20Speaker 1: tool that's available to law enforcement agencies that they're using.
- 38:23Speaker 1: Remember that one that one guy who had a quote
- 38:26Speaker 1: saying that, um, it went from thirty days to three minutes.
- 38:29Speaker 1: They were almost certainly using clear View AI. And the
- 38:33Speaker 1: reason clear View AI has such an advantage because they've
- 38:36Speaker 1: gone to this place where everyone else said was off limits,
- 38:39Speaker 1: which is scraping social media. So rather than the forty
- 38:43Speaker 1: one million driver's license and mug shot pictures that is
- 38:47Speaker 1: available in the FBI's database, clear View AI is this
- 38:52Speaker 1: app that you can subscribe to for a year for
- 38:54Speaker 1: like two thousand and ten thousand dollars, and they have
- 38:57Speaker 1: three billion pictures, including links to the social accounts of
- 39:02Speaker 1: the people whose pictures come up, so that you can
- 39:04Speaker 1: not only see who it is, you can find out
- 39:07Speaker 1: where they're at right then. And it's a hugely invasive thing.
- 39:11Speaker 1: And there's no legislation on this whatsoever. And it's only
- 39:16Speaker 1: just recently come out that this this company even exists,
- 39:18Speaker 1: or that this app exists, and that law enforcement is
- 39:21Speaker 1: using this stuff because again there's basically no laws saying
- 39:24Speaker 1: you can do this, you can't do that. Um And
- 39:27Speaker 1: again Woodrow Herzog has basically said, there's no way we're
- 39:31Speaker 1: going to realize the benefits of this without the incredibly
- 39:35Speaker 1: disproportionate drawbacks, and um, he just calls for an all
- 39:40Speaker 1: outband of the technology. He's basically saying it's not worth it.
- 39:42Speaker 1: All right, let's take another break. Oh my gosh, we
- 39:45Speaker 1: haven't taken our second break yet. Uh, and we'll be
- 39:48Speaker 1: right back to talk about the rest of this stuff
- 39:52Speaker 1: right after this. I think we should talk a little bit,
- 40:18Speaker 1: like we've talked about the false positives, UM, and I
- 40:22Speaker 1: think within Amazon, their contention is that what you're talking
- 40:27Speaker 1: about with like the studies out of m I T
- 40:29Speaker 1: that said, UM, that there are too many false positive
- 40:33Speaker 1: is he's they're saying, wait a minute, you're talking about
- 40:35Speaker 1: facial analysis, not facial recognition, and those are two different things.
- 40:40Speaker 1: I did not understand this at all. I went and
- 40:41Speaker 1: looked it up and I just fully get it. Either
- 40:43Speaker 1: there's it sounds like some tap dancing to me. I
- 40:46Speaker 1: looked at and there's like not a distinction between those
- 40:49Speaker 1: two aside from this quote. Yeah, it's basically the same thing.
- 40:53Speaker 1: And also it doesn't even make sense as a defense.
- 40:56Speaker 1: So basically what they're saying is that um, that they
- 41:00Speaker 1: were being called out by M I. T. S. Media Lab.
- 41:03Speaker 1: They did a two thousand eighteen study. That's the one
- 41:06Speaker 1: that found that there's like a twelve and thirty five
- 41:08Speaker 1: misidentification among darker skinned men and women women. I think yeah, um,
- 41:16Speaker 1: and Amazon said no, no, no, uh, you guys are
- 41:19Speaker 1: using facial analysis, not facial recognition. It's like, no, that's
- 41:23Speaker 1: that's not the case at all. They're doing facial recognition.
- 41:26Speaker 1: All right. I'm glad it wouldn't just me, because you
- 41:27Speaker 1: see I wrote I don't get it next to this.
- 41:30Speaker 1: It was a it was a bad, a bad jam,
- 41:33Speaker 1: I guess. But I think their point was, well, you're
- 41:36Speaker 1: trying to tell the gender of somebody, and if you're
- 41:39Speaker 1: doing binary gender stuff, like you're trying to say this
- 41:43Speaker 1: as male or female, you can't really use facial recognition
- 41:47Speaker 1: for that, especially among darker skinned people. And they said
- 41:51Speaker 1: that you shouldn't use that, especially in cases of people's
- 41:54Speaker 1: civil liberties or whatever. But it still remains the case
- 41:58Speaker 1: that if you are a darker skinned person and you're
- 42:03Speaker 1: being looked at by a police department that has their
- 42:07Speaker 1: threshold for a confidence level set low, yeah, there's a
- 42:12Speaker 1: chance that a false positive is going to be put
- 42:14Speaker 1: out there, right, And that's that can be trouble for
- 42:17Speaker 1: you if you don't have the money to mount a defense.
- 42:19Speaker 1: And even if you do have the money, you shouldn't
- 42:21Speaker 1: have to mount a defense to spend money on that
- 42:23Speaker 1: to be equitted of a crime. Just because the computer
- 42:26Speaker 1: is not so good at a distinguishing Um black people
- 42:30Speaker 1: think it is among white people. Yeah, And what you
- 42:33Speaker 1: know when it comes to where this is going to
- 42:35Speaker 1: end up legally, Uh, you might want to look at
- 42:38Speaker 1: the Fourth Amendment. Um. It gets really dicey on how
- 42:41Speaker 1: you interpret the constitution when you talk about illegal search
- 42:45Speaker 1: and seizure? Is this a search or a seizure? Probably not, um,
- 42:50Speaker 1: because it depends on what we're talking about with the
- 42:53Speaker 1: Supreme Court. Um. You've probably been stopped h in a
- 42:58Speaker 1: at a d y checkpoint, and that's stopping everybody. That's
- 43:01Speaker 1: sort of the same thing. It's like, if you're in
- 43:03Speaker 1: a car, we're gonna stop you and check you out
- 43:05Speaker 1: because the couplet the public, the public his said, you know,
- 43:11Speaker 1: that's okay, it's reasonable, it's not super invasive. And if
- 43:14Speaker 1: you're stopping drunk drivers, it's just putting someone out for
- 43:17Speaker 1: a few minutes. Yeah, the court said, if it's minimally
- 43:19Speaker 1: invasive and the public good or the potential for public good,
- 43:23Speaker 1: which is in this case getting drunk drivers off the
- 43:26Speaker 1: road is high enough, then it's it's okay to basically
- 43:29Speaker 1: search everybody without probable cause. Yeah. Same with T s
- 43:32Speaker 1: A checkpoints when it comes to official rulings. Obviously we
- 43:36Speaker 1: don't have one in facial recognition yet. But if you
- 43:38Speaker 1: look at Carpenter v. United States, the court ruled five
- 43:42Speaker 1: four that police violated uh Fourth Amendment rights of a
- 43:45Speaker 1: man when they asked for his cell phone location data
- 43:48Speaker 1: without a warrant from T Mobile. Um. So hopefully this
- 43:53Speaker 1: nuance will prevail, and it just won't. It looks like
- 43:56Speaker 1: it probably won't be some blanket ruling that just says, yep,
- 43:59Speaker 1: you can use it for whatever you want, right if
- 44:01Speaker 1: it even gets to that point, and if the court
- 44:03Speaker 1: hears it, which probably would. So. The other thing that
- 44:06Speaker 1: um that is has become worrisome for people, though, is there.
- 44:11Speaker 1: It's becoming um our society is becoming increasingly surveiled. Right
- 44:17Speaker 1: like ring the ring doorbell. They market to law enforcement
- 44:22Speaker 1: basically saying like you can, you can, These people like
- 44:24Speaker 1: will pay to have video cameras put on their house
- 44:26Speaker 1: and you can go get these videos on neighborhood all
- 44:29Speaker 1: the time, people like my car got broken into, who
- 44:31Speaker 1: can help me out with their cameras. So it's being
- 44:33Speaker 1: marketed to law enforcement. Your TV has a camera and
- 44:36Speaker 1: your smart speaker has a microphone and it So the
- 44:38Speaker 1: more that we are um surveiled and the more ubiquitous
- 44:43Speaker 1: facial recognition technology gets, the easier will be to not
- 44:47Speaker 1: just scan a picture of somebody stealing beard of a
- 44:50Speaker 1: CVS against the mugshot database, or but to say this
- 44:58Speaker 1: person right here that you're you're looking at, that the
- 45:01Speaker 1: cameras following, that's this, that's that's um, that's uh, that's
- 45:05Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant right there. And everywhere you walk there's getting
- 45:09Speaker 1: a little icon next to your head Chuck Bryant. You know,
- 45:11Speaker 1: if you click it, it'll show you your Facebook page
- 45:14Speaker 1: or a map to your house or whatever. They want
- 45:16Speaker 1: to know, your police record, it doesn't matter. And that
- 45:18Speaker 1: this is what we're increasingly getting closer to. And some
- 45:23Speaker 1: people say this is what they're already doing in China. Yeah,
- 45:26Speaker 1: and London has has They were one of the first
- 45:28Speaker 1: on the CCTV train. Yes, but they use humans, which
- 45:32Speaker 1: is fair right for recognizing phases. Yeah, they have people
- 45:37Speaker 1: like actually looking at the at the individual monitors looking
- 45:40Speaker 1: for crime. This is this is the idea of this
- 45:43Speaker 1: is it's just tracking people who are just doing nothing wrong. Yeah,
- 45:46Speaker 1: but there are plenty of people on the other side
- 45:48Speaker 1: we should point out that are like, you know what,
- 45:51Speaker 1: if you're catching bad guys, that's great. If you're a
- 45:53Speaker 1: good guy, you've got nothing to hide, so you shouldn't
- 45:55Speaker 1: sweat it. Yeah. I can never remember the name of
- 45:57Speaker 1: the article. I'll try to find it, but there's a
- 46:01Speaker 1: man I wish I could remember off the top of
- 46:03Speaker 1: my head. But there's there's this amazing article from a
- 46:06Speaker 1: few years back, um that that basically says like that's
- 46:09Speaker 1: that's a terrible argument that that even if you have
- 46:13Speaker 1: nothing to hide, you still, um are a human being.
- 46:18Speaker 1: And if somebody wanted to put together and but if
- 46:21Speaker 1: somebody wanted to put together like a dossier on your
- 46:25Speaker 1: embarrassing things that you've done or said or thought or whatever,
- 46:29Speaker 1: um and and put it all together and condensed it,
- 46:32Speaker 1: you can make anybody look bad. No one should want
- 46:35Speaker 1: to live in a situation where like that could conceivably
- 46:38Speaker 1: happen in the police state. Yeah, police state, good stuff.
- 46:44Speaker 1: I guess we'll see how it pans out. I'm not
- 46:47Speaker 1: saying police state stuff. Police date. It's good stuff. Yeah,
- 46:51Speaker 1: we'll see what happens right in Woodrow, Hurtzog and let
- 46:55Speaker 1: us know what to do. If you want to know
- 46:57Speaker 1: more about facial recognition technology, you can go onto the
- 47:02Speaker 1: internet and start reading stuff about it. Definitely read the
- 47:05Speaker 1: New York Times expose about um clear view AI came
- 47:10Speaker 1: out January. Yes, okay, since I said that it's time
- 47:14Speaker 1: for a listener mitt all right, now it's not you
- 47:16Speaker 1: know what it's time for. Oh yeah, I know it's
- 47:18Speaker 1: time for you ready, Yeah, you say it. It's time
- 47:20Speaker 1: for administrative details. All right. This is part two. This
- 47:33Speaker 1: is where we thank people on the show that have
- 47:35Speaker 1: sent us kindness. Is via snail mail. Siggy s I
- 47:41Speaker 1: g D. I sent sent me some hand that it
- 47:44Speaker 1: sucks not you for some reason. I don't know why.
- 47:46Speaker 1: I got some socks too. Oh really yeah, I didn't
- 47:49Speaker 1: know who they were from, so they may be from Siggy.
- 47:51Speaker 1: I think probably what it was is you left him
- 47:54Speaker 1: with my desk and I thank you for it, CHUCKR
- 47:58Speaker 1: do another one while I'm pulling up my list acting.
- 48:01Speaker 1: Julie Shoop made us t shirts. Shoop, this is good stuff.
- 48:05Speaker 1: Faux band name tour shirts. Uh, super fun. Thanks a
- 48:09Speaker 1: lot of Julie. Very cool. Uh, you're still working, so
- 48:12Speaker 1: I'm gonna keep going. Thalia Dawes is our pal from Australia,
- 48:17Speaker 1: said my daughter a couple of books. She's a very
- 48:20Speaker 1: lovely lady who has a very adorable and whip smart
- 48:23Speaker 1: daughter about the same age, who listens to our show.
- 48:27Speaker 1: And um, I was just like, man, I wish she
- 48:30Speaker 1: lived here. We could go into play date. They both
- 48:32Speaker 1: seemed like lovely humans. There's such thing as plains. Yeah,
- 48:35Speaker 1: good Australia for a play date. Um. So at our
- 48:39Speaker 1: Portland's main show, Chuck, we had like a lot of um,
- 48:42Speaker 1: We've got a lot of neat gifts. Jim Diefenbacher made
- 48:46Speaker 1: us amazing cross hatch portraits of them. Yeah, those were
- 48:51Speaker 1: great of us, like of a photo we took I
- 48:54Speaker 1: think on like our West Coast tour from two. It
- 48:57Speaker 1: brought back some memories saw that. It's just really great stuff.
- 49:00Speaker 1: And you can see Jim's work at Jim Diefenbaker dot com,
- 49:03Speaker 1: j I M D I E F F E N
- 49:06Speaker 1: B A C H E R dot com and they
- 49:09Speaker 1: were framed in everything. Yeah, very sweet stuff, Jim. We
- 49:12Speaker 1: got some home tapped maple syrup from Andy Huntsberger from
- 49:19Speaker 1: Elgin I A, Okay, what's Iowa? Is that Iowa? Yeah? Yeah, okay, Yeah,
- 49:24Speaker 1: I was about to say the wrong state. What are
- 49:27Speaker 1: you gonna say? You know, I think I went to
- 49:29Speaker 1: say Illinoia. If you ever see Gary Gulman's bid on
- 49:32Speaker 1: Nate abbreviating the states, dude, just look it up. One
- 49:35Speaker 1: of the great comedy bits I've ever seen. It's hysterical.
- 49:39Speaker 1: Let's see. Uh oh. Another at the Portlands Show, we
- 49:43Speaker 1: got a letter from tog Braun from Downea's day Boat
- 49:47Speaker 1: from Lloyd Braun. Tog Braun Um and Downey's day Boats
- 49:53Speaker 1: mission is to bring sustainable, delicious scalops from Maine to
- 49:56Speaker 1: the world, and she said that scalops have varietals like
- 50:00Speaker 1: oysters and that main has the best. So check out
- 50:02Speaker 1: down East day Boat dot com. Coke Braun feel free
- 50:07Speaker 1: to send us some scallops as long as they've been
- 50:09Speaker 1: appropriately refrigerated. The entire time. I got another children's book,
- 50:14Speaker 1: Are You a Good Egg? And that was from Peter Deutschel,
- 50:18Speaker 1: along with some stuff you should know coasters. Yeah yeah,
- 50:21Speaker 1: thanks again Peter. I think we thanked him last episode
- 50:24Speaker 1: for the coasters too. I didn't know about the children's book.
- 50:27Speaker 1: Then Sarah Law who is an s y s k
- 50:31Speaker 1: Army member. Um, she came to the Toronto show and
- 50:34Speaker 1: she brought us a bunch of um Canadian goodies, everything
- 50:38Speaker 1: from Japanese cheesecakes and tarts from Uncle Tetsus. So good.
- 50:43Speaker 1: Um and uh. I think some other stuff too, like
- 50:46Speaker 1: coffee crisps, which are my favorite. Um. Yeah, so thanks
- 50:50Speaker 1: a lot. Sarah's always that is everything from Japan awesome.
- 50:54Speaker 1: They just it's really good. They don't necessarily invent much.
- 50:57Speaker 1: They just take other people's inventions and perfect them. And
- 51:00Speaker 1: it seems like they take a lot of pride in
- 51:01Speaker 1: like doing things right. I think that he could say that,
- 51:04Speaker 1: probably because we got from Matt an assortment of food
- 51:12Speaker 1: things from Japan and that came in today, including our
- 51:17Speaker 1: beloved QP Man's. I love that stuff. It's been too long, man,
- 51:22Speaker 1: God bless you. Let's see Leah Harrison gave us some
- 51:25Speaker 1: amazing goodies to including coffee Crisp and Canadian Smarties, which
- 51:30Speaker 1: are way better than American Smarties because they involved chocolate
- 51:33Speaker 1: and super smarties. A student named Maria Styling wrote us
- 51:37Speaker 1: a letter for an honors English project because she had
- 51:40Speaker 1: to write someone who inspired her, and she asked this.
- 51:43Speaker 1: I told her we to answer, how do we choose
- 51:45Speaker 1: a topic? Maria? We choose a topic. It's not it's
- 51:48Speaker 1: pretty low fih. We just send each other one each
- 51:52Speaker 1: week on whatever happens to grab our fancy. We're always
- 51:55Speaker 1: looking around our world, uh and thinking I wonder about that.
- 52:00Speaker 1: That's as that's as easy as it gets. And we'll
- 52:01Speaker 1: just send each other an email and times out of
- 52:04Speaker 1: a hundred will say great, let's do it. Yeah more ka,
- 52:09Speaker 1: let's see um oh. Michael C. Learner, who's an attorney
- 52:13Speaker 1: at Law and Reno, sent us a letter about getting
- 52:16Speaker 1: the word out about the National Consumer Law Center, for
- 52:20Speaker 1: which Learner does a lot of pro bono work for
- 52:22Speaker 1: people who are poor and getting screwed over because of debt.
- 52:25Speaker 1: As he put it so, he pointed to the National
- 52:28Speaker 1: Consumer Law Center and the Practicing law Institutes Consumer Financial Services.
- 52:32Speaker 1: Answer book. So if you are in debt and you're
- 52:36Speaker 1: getting pushed around, go check those things out, says Michael C. Learner.
- 52:39Speaker 1: Good stuff Van Ostro, and we gotta thank him again.
- 52:42Speaker 1: Our buddy from Washington sent us a book by his
- 52:45Speaker 1: friend Andy Robbins called Field Guide to the North American Jackalothes.
- 52:49Speaker 1: Pretty awesome, that's pretty fun. Paul Speth from Mars Community
- 52:53Speaker 1: Brewing Company in Chicago gives a bunch of beer at
- 52:56Speaker 1: the Chicago show. Thank you for that. Um, I got
- 52:59Speaker 1: one more. Okay, I'll go and finish up and then
- 53:01Speaker 1: you can round us out. Man, I have a whole page.
- 53:03Speaker 1: Laugh all right. Robert Highland from Wammo, this was just
- 53:06Speaker 1: came in today. Okay. He works for Wammo. He sent
- 53:09Speaker 1: us each their seventieth anniversary super book. Oh wow, thanks
- 53:13Speaker 1: a lot. Like you guys talk a lot about wammo products.
- 53:15Speaker 1: Does it bounce? I have not dropped it on the floor. YEA,
- 53:18Speaker 1: let's find out. Give it a try. I'm gonna do
- 53:21Speaker 1: a couple more and then well maybe we'll split these
- 53:23Speaker 1: up because there for both of us for another episode.
- 53:26Speaker 1: It's up to you. He can blaze through them too.
- 53:28Speaker 1: Now there's too many Um, so let's see the Crown
- 53:32Speaker 1: Royal people again for hooking us up. Very sweet. They've
- 53:37Speaker 1: hooked us up many, many times. Um. And they gave
- 53:40Speaker 1: us a nice congratulations because we've got the Best Curiosity
- 53:43Speaker 1: Award from the Heart Podcast Awards last year. Oh yeah,
- 53:47Speaker 1: that's how old this one is. Mick Sullivan gave us
- 53:49Speaker 1: a copy of his book The Meat Shower, which is
- 53:51Speaker 1: amazingly illustrated. You can check it out on the Past
- 53:54Speaker 1: and the Curious dot com. Yeah that just sounds really
- 53:58Speaker 1: greats it really does. Let's see, um and over round
- 54:02Speaker 1: everything out with Danielle Dixon, who is a real life
- 54:05Speaker 1: marine biologists chuck at the University of Delaware, and she
- 54:08Speaker 1: sent us a couple of copies of her kids books
- 54:11Speaker 1: See Stories, children's books based on real science. You can
- 54:15Speaker 1: check it out at s E A S T O
- 54:18Speaker 1: r Y books dot com. Alright, you're gonna save the rest.
- 54:22Speaker 1: I'm gonna save the restival splow up. All right. Thanks
- 54:25Speaker 1: everybody who sent us stuff, and and thank you also
- 54:28Speaker 1: just for saying hi to anyone who does. You can
- 54:30Speaker 1: say hi to us by sending us an email. Wrap
- 54:33Speaker 1: it up, spending on the bottom, send it off to
- 54:35Speaker 1: Stuff podcast at i heart radio dot com. Stuff you
- 54:43Speaker 1: Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
- 54:45Speaker 1: For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
- 54:48Speaker 1: radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
- 54:50Speaker 1: favorite shows.