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The Shape of Faces to Come (Facial Recognition and Political Orientation)

Image recognition is a set of technologies where we’ve seen great progress recently. Some applications help us gain advantages of efficiency, for example identifying items that may be debris, for removal from an agricultural field. There’s also accuracy, for example identifying tumors in cancer screens at a better rate than human experts. And some applications are for convenience, for example enabling users to unlock their devices with their faces rather than passwords.

These applications can lead to good outcomes just as they can also have unintended consequences.

Related to that, at the start of the recent wave of protests in Hong Kong, a journalist opened an article with a beautiful summary of how important facial recognition had become.

“The police officers wrestled with Colin Cheung in an unmarked car. They needed his face.

“They grabbed his jaw to force his head in front of his iPhone. They slapped his face. They shouted, ‘Wake up!’ They pried open his eyes. It all failed: Mr. Cheung had disabled his phone’s facial-recognition login with a quick button mash as soon as they grabbed him.”

It seems legitimate that we fear misuse of facial recognition. It’s a question of suddenly being able to do something at a scale that would be difficult or costly earlier.

But what about subtler abuses?

That brings me to a new report, titled Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images.

From the report: Continue reading “The Shape of Faces to Come (Facial Recognition and Political Orientation)”

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A Question of Timing (Erasing History)

It’s may be a bit overused, but I’m going to start this essay with a Kundera quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

“In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on to the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was the great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium.

“Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close by him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.

“The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.

“Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history, and of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on that balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.”

There are numerous examples of removing someone from history, mostly from national leaders who didn’t need subtlety in their actions.

Some of the most obvious examples come from authoritarians and apart from Gottwald, include Stalin’s historical removal of Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Yezhov, or Mao’s removal of Bo Gu. But how else do we remove people from history? Does the inability to ever truly erase something online change this?

 

Let’s look at ways we choose to eliminate history and when we do it. Continue reading “A Question of Timing (Erasing History)”

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Inevitable Surveillance?

What is the purpose of surveilling a domestic population? Is it inevitable?

Surveillance and spying are a little different but the benefits of each have long been understood. The purposes of spying are to know when an enemy is going to attack, their capabilities, the potential to attack them first, or what one might gain in making an attack, state to state or tribe to tribe. Learn plans, intentionally mislead, survive.

Domestic surveillance is different or at least thought of as being different. For some types of domestic surveillance the purpose seems to be that the population harbors enemies (overlapping with spying above), whether this means enemies of the state itself or those harmful to the rest of the population.

A version of that is that if there are people who have “wrong thinking,” then their “wrong thinking” can infect their neighbors, and eventually lead to violence or chaos. Continue reading “Inevitable Surveillance?”

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Pandemic Protests

As with other sudden, widespread changes, there are many second-order effects from coronavirus. I’ve been slowly chronicling them on this blog. Today, let’s look at the impact on protest movements and tactics.

Over the past few months people around the world lost their ability to protest. Or, they lost the type of protest that had worked for them — the mass gatherings to show dissatisfaction and force government response.

In locations including Algeria, Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Haiti, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Russia, Spain, Netherlands, Peru, Syria, and the US, protests have declined or have taken a different turn — due to COVID-19. What systems are changing and what is likely to remain changed after a vaccine?

Continue reading “Pandemic Protests”

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Coronavirus Consequences (Part 2)

While I tend not to write about current events, in the last article I introduced a set of worldwide consequences from the spread of the novel Wuhan coronavirus. We are still learning a lot about this disease, its origins and how it spreads. But with another week of information, here are additions to the consequences that may come from this disease and the reaction to it.

What scares some people about the novel coronavirus is not only the mortality rate of 2% to 3% — or 20 – 50 times that of the influenza in a typical year. Rather, it’s that the systems for spreading this coronavirus are different, that the animal origination of the disease is another sign that species crossover may become more common in the future, and that there are other technological changes that we may also see.

On species crossover, we have this quote from a NY Times opinion piece by David Quammen, titled We Made the Coronavirus Epidemic: Continue reading “Coronavirus Consequences (Part 2)”

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The Owl’s Right Eye (Protest Symbols)



Let’s come back, more directly, to a theme in my writing — what happens when something small becomes a tipping point for change. When the seemingly innocuous becomes unpredictable.

If you’ve only casually followed the Hong Kong protests and reaction from the Chinese mainland and overseas Chinese communities, you might wonder about the importance and meaning of the covered eye. Specifically, the right eye.

Hong Kong protesters found one of their many symbols (and there are many) when police shot and injured the right eye of a protesting woman in August. The injured eye is a more powerful symbol than even that of the man police shot on October 1 (Chinese National Day) in the chest (that is, the heart).

But since the now famous protester’s eye injury we’ve seen company ad campaign apologies and even an individual arrest all because of missing eyes.

But the eye I was reminded of was none of these. It was a different eye — also a right eye and in China — that over 40 years ago had results reminiscent to those eyes of today.

Continue reading “The Owl’s Right Eye (Protest Symbols)”

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The 70th anniversary of the PRC

“So it’s his fault?!”

That was what I heard a Taiwanese visitor say years ago in front of the statue of Koxinga, located in Tainan, Taiwan.

Koxinga was a Ming dynasty general who fled to Taiwan and established an Ming outpost there from 1662 to 1683. The Qing dynasty (which defeated the Ming) later defeated Koxinga’s new kingdom and wrapped Taiwan into the Qing dynasty.

The visitor’s complaint: that without Koxinga there would not be a struggle, going on even today, over the future of Taiwan.

This is a post about founding ceremonies. And today is the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Continue reading “The 70th anniversary of the PRC”