Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

2020-05-31 12:44:00

The full text has a total of 2037 words and is expected to last 7 minutes.

Image source: wsj

A recent report by OneZero showed that Damian Barton, the founder and CEO of surveillance company Banjo, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan Southern Knight, who was charged with a hate crime for shooting in a synagogue in 1990.

As soon as the news was released, the Utah Attorney General's Office terminated a contract with the company worth at least $750000. The report also said that the company's $20.8 million contract with the state's public safety department was also annulled.

Just a few weeks ago, Huffington Post reporter Luke O'Brien reported that Clearview AI founder Cam-HoanTon-That had ties to far-right extremists, including former editor Chuck Johnson of Breitbart News, pizza gate conspiracy theorist Mike Selnovich and neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Weff Oneheimer.

The evidence suggests that Ton-That cooperated with Johnson and others in the process of developing ClearviewAI software.

The news that the heads of these two famous AI companies are in contact with far-right organizations has attracted a lot of attention and is shocking. It reveals deep contacts and extensive cooperation between the far right and AI-driven monitoring companies, which are signing up with law enforcement agencies and municipal and state governments.

It also raises some important questions that need to be discussed: how is this continued pressure from right-wing and reactionary politics now reflected in the technology industry? What is the attitude of these AI founders to the technology being built and promoted? The most important thing is-what should we do about it?

Image source: resonate

These companies have access to a large amount of public event data. Utah, for example, allows Banjo access to its traffic surveillance videos, closed-circuit television (CCTV) and real-time data streams from its 911 system, which the company combines with social media and other sensitive data sources. As the company describes it, it combs the sources of this information to "monitor anomalies" in the real world.

Many AI systems recreate racially biased social inequalities. Many early warning systems use "dirty" data: my colleagues at AI NowInstitute have demonstrated that in many jurisdictions, law enforcement agencies are using data generated during flawed, racially biased and sometimes illegal policing practices to train the system.

There is no doubt that racial prejudice is a common fault of the crime prevention analysis system: scholar Sarah Blaine's research on predictive policing shows that these data practices recreate existing patterns of inequality. it exacerbates the over-governance and regulation of communities of color.

But the situation is even worse in this case. ClearviewAI seems to be clearly designed with racist use cases in mind: Chuck Johnson posted in January 2017, according to the Huffington Post, that he was involved in "building algorithms for eviction teams to identify all illegal immigrants" and bragged about the functionality of his facial recognition software being developed.

Image source: artificialintelligence-news

Clearview AI has signed a paid contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use predictive analysis and facial recognition software to accelerate the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants in the United States, even during an epidemic.

They will soon be able to learn more intimate details of the daily lives of millions of people: the company is pushing ahead with contracts with state and federal agencies to provide facial recognition tools for tracking coronavirus contacts.

It's hard to imagine how much protection is needed to help their contact tracking efforts not be affected by ICE. Thanks to news reports, we knew that ClearviewAI's activities were full of violence even before the news that they had helped the "eviction team" got out.

The more photographable fact is that the problems with ClearviewAI and Banjo are just the tip of the iceberg. We need to observe for a long time the obsession of those in the technology industry with the far right, and put the politics and networks of those who created and profited from AI at the core of the analysis. We have to be prepared. You won't like what they dig up.

William Shockley, the founder of Silicon Valley, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956 for inventing transistors, but his greatest enthusiasm was not in building semiconductors, but in eugenics. He spent decades promoting racist theories of IQ differences and supporting white supremacism.

Shockley led a failed campaign that tried to persuade Stanford professors to join him, including John McCarthy, one of the founders of the AI field. Shockley is not alone. Years later, Jeffrey Epstein, a proponent of eugenics research, became the main sponsor of the MIT Media Lab, providing $100000 for the work of AI researcher Marvin Minsky.

McCarthy asserted in a 2004 article that from a physiological point of view, men are better at science and math than women. Only through technological enhancement can women be on an equal footing with men. His views coincide with those of James Damore.

An anti-diversity memo issued by Damore at Google was supported by alternative right-wing members, which summarized: "for physical reasons, the preferences and abilities of women and men are different."... these differences may explain why there are so few women in technology and among leaders. " Not a few people support these views.

Image source: Sexism

Although the two situations are different, it is increasingly clear that there are persistent right-wing forces and obvious racial and sexist politics among those who have a say in artificial intelligence.

Although these "historical problems" have long been ignored, the scope of their impact is growing: today's industry diversity is not as diverse as it was in the 1860s, and technology encodes racist and biased hypotheses. While making them more difficult to identify and mitigate, it exacerbates existing forms of discrimination.

What is even more unacceptable is that it is the technology created by these companies that support racism that is slowly permeating every detail of our lives: health, safety, security, entertainment. Before we know it, discrimination has taken place and is still eroding us. This is worthy of vigilance!

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