[salamanderss]

My objection is the criteria is likely arbitrary and capricious and have more to do with ideologies of the sorts of people designing and executing this than public safety.

Maybe the AI is better, maybe it is worse. On some occasions CBP just takes a good look at you for whiteness or whatever and just waives you through without even opening the passport; other days you end up with your car in 1500 pieces. It's mostly voodoo.

[anonporridge]

I see it more as an effort to discriminate more based on ideology and less on phenotype, and that's a great thing assuming it can be implemented well (dubious).

We want to live in a world with no discrimination of people's rights based on their hardware, because that's generally not changeable. But we will absolutely still continue to discriminate on the software running in your brain, because not only is that changeable, but certain software is incompatible with the social order that gives us the privilege to rise above our baser nature.

[dragonwriter]

> We want to live in a world with no discrimination of people's rights based on their hardware, because that's generally not changeable.

Why is not changeable relevant?

> But we will absolutely still continue to discriminate on the software running in your brain.

The First Amendment is rather exactly about not doing that.

[anonporridge]

> Why is not changeable relevant?

Because I at least hold the ideal that we should judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. No individual gets to choose the genes they inherit, but they do have some level of agency over how they choose to operate in the world.

> The First Amendment is rather exactly about not doing that.

True, but the system in place that enforces the first amendment and the entire Constitution ultimately depends on the vast majority of people to agree and comply with that base ideology. The system of governance isn't omnipotent or omnipresent enough to defend against a large enough minority of the population becoming hostile to these ideals.

This is the big reason why Trump's violation of the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power is so horrific, because it threatened the foundation of consensus that lets our system operate as a democracy that non destructively lets the best ideas and leaders rise to the top.

[dragonwriter]

> Because I at least hold the ideal that we should judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character

Sure, we shouldn't judge people by their skin color. That isn’t what I asked.

Lots of important elements of character are pretty immutable, too.

[salamanderss]

There are various cultural traits that are effectively as solidified as phenotype by the time you're old enough to be considered acting independently of your parent/guardian. Lots of these traits are also used as backdoor phenotype profiling.

[anonporridge]

I don't agree with this at all.

There is massive variety of culture and ideology between people that share the same phenotypes. And some of that culture and ideology is incompatible with the preservation of our democratic norm of peaceful competition of ideas and peaceful transfer of power.

This is also why racial profiling is not only morally wrong, but practically problematic. It's lazy and sloppy guardianship that's targeting a perceived proxy for the threat rather than the actual threat.

The threat is not the genes, it's the memes. And if our societal defense system is targeting genes, then the memes will eventually figure out how to find different hosts that can bypass those defenses.

[salamanderss]

Genes can definitely be a threat factor. For instance it is nearly certain males are genetically more prone to violence than females.

> There is massive variety of culture and ideology between people that share the same phenotypes

The missing note here is that some phenotype cluster near areas with proximate similar culture. If I ban anyone speaking Mandarin or with Chinese accent I'm not really banning a phenotype but everyone knows what this actually does. I think you very much understand how solidified cultural traits are used as backdoor to profile phenotype.