AI May Be Familiar With All Our Ways, but God Created Our Face for Much More by Douglas Estes
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I love my wife's elbows. And my kids’ little toes. But when I have been away on travel for a week and return home, it is not their elbows and toes that makes me feel at home. It is their happy, smiling faces that I connect with when I see them waiting for me to come in the door.
When we meet people on the street, it is not their elbows or little toes that we use to identify them. It is their faces that tell us who they are. We are so used to looking at faces—happy faces, sad faces, faces we know, and faces we don’t—that it is easy to forget the significance of the face as a person’s greatest indicator of personal identity. The human face is immensely practical as a form of recognition but also incredibly intimate as the way we know and understand each other—and the Bible says one day we’ll intimately know God this way.
Our faces, our identity
Facial recognition is no longer limited to people but is coming into its own in the world of technology and artificial intelligence. Last year, I typed in a password to log in to my computer; today, I use my fingerprint. But tomorrow the mere presence of my face will alert my computer I am ready to work. According to Counterpoint Research, thanks to Apple’s Face ID, facial recognition will be the primary biometric for smartphone unlocks by 2020.
Smartphone unlocks and computer logins are nothing compared to where we are headed once facial recognition integrates with artificial intelligence. Taking a cue from Robocopand other sci-fi dystopian stories, Chinese authorities earlier this year unveiled new sunglasses that utilize facial recognition software connected to a Chinese database. In one train station in Zhengzhou, these sunglasses positively identified 7 criminal suspects and 26 individuals traveling with fake documents. The test was so successful China has begun a slow rollout of the new tech. This follows a growing trend in China toward surveillance technology where authorities use facial biometrics everywhere from airports to public restrooms.
Facial recognition coupled with artificial intelligence will make it easier to catch the bad guys—creating smart, safe cities, but its potential for oppression and misuse is substantial. Already, Chinese authorities use facial recognition and CCTV technology to monitor ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. We can easily extrapolate other dangers. If a country like China can use AI to catch criminals and monitor minorities, such a country could also easily use it to monitor members of religious groups, especially leaders, missionaries or aid workers.
For those of us living in Western democracies, this heavy-handed use of technology feels a little foreign. But what happens when facial recognition-equipped sunglasses start to pop up on eBay with the ability to scan publicly available Facebook photos, granting users the ability to ID people as they pass by? It will be a marketer’s paradise to know the name and likes of a person they see walking past their mall kiosk. Perhaps a stalker’s paradise, also, revealing to a casual observer personal information such as our credit scores or our political party affiliations.
These examples point to growing ethical concerns about the use of facial recognition. For example, unlike fingerprints, which a person must submit to in order for others to obtain, facial recognition may take place without the person’s permission.
Yet, facial recognition, at least currently, suffers from a few inherent weaknesses such as the need for high-resolution image capture and access to the right databases. And then there is the question of accuracy: While there are studies that support a sense of overwhelming precision in the technology, others suggest that it is not always accurate across the gender and racial spectrum. Yet, it may prove in the long run to be the most effective biometric to identify people.
Click here to read more. Source: Christianity Today