The AI Industry’s Year of Ethical Reckoning
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Ever since deep neural networks won the world’s most important image-recognition competition in 2012, everyone has been excited about what artificial intelligence could unleash. But in the race to develop new AI techniques and applications, the possible negative impacts took a backseat.
We’re now seeing a shift toward more awareness about AI ethics. In 2018, AI developers became more conscious of the possible ramifications of their creations. Many engineers, researchers, and developers made it clear that they would not build technologies that harm or cause damage to the lives of innocent people, and they held their companies.
In the past, creating facial-recognition applications was arduous, resource-intensive, and error-prone. But with advances in computer vision—the subset of AI that allows computers to recognize the content of images and video—creating facial-recognition applications became much easier and within everyone’s reach.
Large tech companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM started providing cloud-based services that enabled any developer to integrate facial-recognition technology into their software. This unlocked many new use cases and applications in different domains, such as identity protection and authentication, smart home security, and retail. But privacy rights activists voiced concern about the potential for misuse.
In May 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that Amazon was marketing Rekognition, a real-time video-analytics technology, to law enforcement and government agencies. According to the ACLU, police in at least three states were using Rekognition for facial recognition on surveillance video feeds.
“With Rekognition, a government can now build a system to automate the identification and tracking of anyone. If police body cameras, for example, were outfitted with facial recognition, devices intended for officer transparency and accountability would further transform into surveillance machines aimed at the public,” ACLU warned. “By automating mass surveillance, facial-recognition systems like Rekognition threaten this freedom, posing a particular threat to communities already unjustly targeted in the current political climate. Once powerful surveillance systems like these are built and deployed, the harm will be extremely difficult to undo.”
The ACLU’s concerns were echoed by Amazon employees, who in June wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos, the company’s CEO, and demanded that he stop selling Rekognition to law enforcement. “Our company should not be in the surveillance business; we should not be in the policing business; we should not be in the business of supporting those who monitor and oppress marginalized populations,” the letter read.
In October, an anonymous Amazon staffer disclosed that at least 450 employees had signed another letter that called on Bezos and other executives to stop selling Rekognition to police. “We cannot profit from a subset of powerful customers at the expense of our communities; we cannot avert our eyes from the human cost of our business. We will not silently build technology to oppress and kill people, whether in our country or in others,” it said.
While Amazon was dealing with this internal backlash, Google was experiencing similar struggles over a contract to develop AI for the US military, dubbed Project Maven.
Google was reportedly helping the Defense Department develop computer-vision technology that would process drone video footage. The amount of video footage recorded by drones every day was too much for human analysts to review, and the Pentagon wanted to automate part of the process.
