He said: "I stopped doing CV research because I saw the impact my work was having. I loved the work but the military applications and privacy concerns eventually became impossible to ignore."
Initial good results on CV doesn't mean that you realize all the ways it'll start to be used and the implications thereof.
IMO this is ethically more simple than many like to believe.
There are existing power structures (planned ones and emerged ones) in this world and the technology we create can either be used to reinforce them or to question them. Sometimes it is both and things cancel each other out and move on a sideways trajectory – but in the case of CV, it is quite clear who will benefit: those in power, those who need to quantify, control and punish the human element, but don't have the manpower (=legitimacy?) or funds (=priority?) to do so manually.
I get that working in CV is interesting and cool stuff, but the collective suffering it might help creating and keeping is something one should seriously think about as well.
Exactly. CV is interesting and can be completely harmless. But the benefits of the technology for the average person are extremely small relatively to the benefits it brings to any potential oppressive power. Mass surveillance tech can be convenient but it's a deal with the devil and I think we sometimes willfully ignore that under the guise of a perceived amorality of progress. "it's just science, it's neutral and you can also use it for good" can sound like a good argument that I usually even agree with.
But in this case it's very simple:
"Good guys" using of CV gets them things like good auto sorting in Google photos
"Bad guys" using CV can reduce the complexity of creating a fully Orwellian, big brother like surveillance state from "absurdly complex to implement and impossible to maintain" to "we can already put in place a solid implementation today and it will get better by the day".
Now I used to work in CV and as you said,I get how great and exciting the underlying tech is. But I definitely lean more towards fear than excitement these days. I also realize that it's already everywhere, with heavy research efforts and that you can't ever stop it at this point. But that really goes to show that the Yolo creator was right.
Think about it, what does the chinese people gain from CV or face recognitio right now? Maybe cool filters. The chinese government? Unimaginable levels of surveillance and control over it's entire population and it's just getting started.
Just like nuclear energy or genetic engineering, once the technology is there you can't put it back. The problem the chinese people have is not with CV, it's with their government. The way to go is having strong regulations a la GDPR, otherwise a black technology market will appear is there is enough incentive.
>it is quite clear who will benefit: those in power
I think it's more likely that you want to detect a person so you don't hit them with a car than trying to hit them with a drone missile. Detecting cancer with CV, and other improvements to diagnostics also save lives. If you could be working on these technologies and stop, your decision could cost lives.
>but in the case of CV, it is quite clear who will benefit: those in power, those who need to quantify, control and punish the human element, but don't have the manpower (=legitimacy?) or funds (=priority?) to do so manually.
Technology that exists for surveillance can also be turned on the surveillants. The most relevant case probably being police abuse being caught on smartphone cameras. These tools don't just discipline citizens, they also discipline the police. If I'm in a room with someone in a position of authority far above me, I'd rather have the camera on both of us than none of us.
So it's not actually that simple, and I don't see opting out as realistic or helpful, because other benefits these technologies bring, for example security, will always convince the population to drive adoption forward.
I work in FR, at a leading company. I do not write any ML code, I'm an applications developer with a background in visual effects.
My attitude is being there in the developer group influencing how the applications behave, interfacing with our management, sales and clients and being a voice unafraid to raise ethics questions within these groups is my method of knowing what is the state of this dangerous technology. I'd rather be there influencing its development and use than on the outside, frankly blind to what it's in-deployment capabilities are.
I mostly agree on your thinking but I think it is not so simple to decide.
If we focus on reinforce vs question part. It is kind of prisoners dilemma. If we assume governments(reinforcers) will anyway work on this technology, and lets assume they will end up with some lower quality version (lets say 50/100) . Questioners have 2 options:
- dont work on this, accept 50/0
- or work and improve both sides, 70/20
Without deeper context hard to decide which will be better for questioners.
Would you prefer to have a gun against rifle, or no weapon vs gun?
The question is, if we are so aware of the dangers posed by these power structures, agreeing that the technology itself is "apolitical", then why have we allowed power to be concentrated so highly in a given institution or individual? It seems that, if we are concerned with ethics, we should be pushing much more for the dilution of power back to the people, rather than "taking sides" in terms of who to work with or what to work on.
Just trying to provoke an answer with a little humour ...
It is obvious to anyone that one of the primary uses of computer vision is to watch other humans at scale. This cannot be surprising to anyone in the field yet now there are ethical concerns mixed with politics through the roof.
Maybe we can be more precise about this?
The work here is a technical achievement but there are some weird comments here which I think has something to do with the author being Chinese.
Is that pjreddie used horses, dogs, and bicycles as training data? Not realising that his technology could also be used on human faces?