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Tech reporter Kashmir Hill has written about the intersection of privacy and technology for more than a decade, but even she was stunned when she came across a legal memo in 2019 describing a facial recognition app that could identify anyone based on a picture. She immediately saw the potential this technology had to become the stuff of dystopian nightmare, the “ultimate surveillance tool,” posing immense risks to privacy and civil liberties.

Hill recalled this incident to Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law and Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society director, as part of a conversation Wednesday at Harvard Law School about her new book, “Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It.”

Amazon has faced public outrage for providing cloud services to the U.S. government, including law enforcement agencies that conduct mass-raids and separate families at the southern border. Now, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has rolled out more terrifying features for its cloud-based facial recognition system—including, it claims, the ability to detect fear.

“Amazon Rekognition provides a comprehensive set of face detection, analysis, and recognition features for image and video analysis,” a blog post announcing the new features reads. “Face analysis generates metadata about detected faces in the form of gender, age range, emotions,” and other attributes such as whether the subject is smiling.

The Detroit Police Department revised its policies on how it uses facial recognition software to solve crimes as part of a federal settlement with a man who was wrongfully arrested for theft in 2020 based on the technology, authorities said Friday.

Robert Williams was falsely identified as the shoplifter at a Shinola store in October 2018. Fifteen months later, he was arrested in front of his family in his driveway, booked in jail and held for 30 hours before he was released on a personal bond, according to his lawsuit.

In March 2022, the New Jersey Attorney General asked the public an important question: how should law enforcement use of facial recognition technology be regulated? In response, the ACLU of New Jersey urged the Attorney General to address a more fundamental concern: should law enforcement be allowed to use facial recognition at all? Our answer is a resounding no, and we called for a total ban on the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement.

The reasons for that go to the heart of why we started our Automated Injustice project. Facial recognition technology, like many kinds of artificial intelligence or automated decision systems used by the government, can worsen racial inequity, limit our civil rights and liberties – like the right to privacy and freedom of speech – and deprive people of fundamental fairness. If we want to combat those harms in the Garden State, facial recognition cannot escape our scrutiny, especially as New Jersey law enforcement continue to use the technology despite its dangers.

We are at a fork in the road regarding states’ approaches to facial recognition surveillance. On the one hand, governments in places like Israel and the United Kingdom are progressing plans to roll out widespread use of this powerful biometric technology. On the other hand, the latest draft of the European Union’s AI Act reveals an increased commitment to banning its use in public spaces.

This week, Human Rights Watch joined 180 rights groups and other experts calling on governments and companies to stop using facial recognition surveillance technology in public spaces and in migration and asylum contexts, as it is simply too dangerous and powerful to be used without negative consequences for human rights.

Behind closed doors, the companies have fiercely lobbied the European Union to leave advanced artificial-intelligence systems unregulated.

As artificial-intelligence models are increasingly applied across society, it is becoming clear that these systems carry risks and can harm fundamental rights. Yet Big Tech—driving the AI revolution—is lobbying to stop regulation that could defend the public.

AI godfather Yoshua Bengio says the risks of AI should not be underplayed.

In an interview with Insider, Bengio criticized peers dismissing AI's threat to humanity.

It must be said that Big Tech is piling on the pressure: Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have all pleaded for generative AI to benefit from a regulatory exception in future EU rules. European startups also argue that this AI Act should be careful not to nip European technological sovereignty in the bud... For their part, European parliamentarians argue that excluding generative AI from the regulation would amount to making the Act obsolete before it even sees the light of day. They’re gambling on the “Brussels effect”: the process by which the EU’s strict legislative apparatus ends up being adopted worldwide, because it’s often cheaper to align with the most restrictive standard than to develop different products. This is what led Apple to bring its iPhone chargers in line with the rest of the market, for example.

“Licensing requirements” means any provisions of law, rule, regulation, or formal order of the department which apply to facilities with respect to initial or continued authority to operate.

"licensing requirements" means substantive requirements, other than qualification requirements, with which a natural or a juridical person is required to comply in order to obtain, amend or renew an authorisation;

To ban something means to state officially that it must not be done, shown, or used. [...]

Regulations are rules made by a government or other authority in order to control the way something is done or the way people behave. [...]

This week, Human Rights Watch joined 180 rights groups and other experts calling on governments and companies to stop using facial recognition surveillance technology in public spaces and in migration and asylum contexts, as it is simply too dangerous and powerful to be used without negative consequences for human rights.

Facial recognition surveillance technology – the kind that scans, identifies, and profiles people in masse – is not compatible with international human rights law, as it amounts to mass surveillance. As well as undermining privacy rights, the technology threatens our rights to equality and nondiscrimination, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are a prime example. Deep inside their cloud networks, they’re free to develop solutions to the problems they’re fed in every which way these DNNs see fit. They do sometimes come up with ingenious solutions, even if nobody—including the DNNs themselves—knows how they reached them. One might call them ‘idiot savants in a back box’. In such circumstances it’s not unimaginable that a DNN AI could develop sentience, or even a form of (self-)consciousness, by accident.

Subsequently, the legal wheels are already grinding:

As a step toward improving our ability to identify and manage the harmful effects of bias in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommend widening the scope of where we look for the source of these biases — beyond the machine learning processes and data used to train AI software to the broader societal factors that influence how technology is developed.

The recommendation is a core message of a revised NIST publication, Towards a Standard for Identifying and Managing Bias in Artificial Intelligence (NIST Special Publication 1270), which reflects public comments the agency received on its draft version released last summer. As part of a larger effort to support the development of trustworthy and responsible AI, the document offers guidance connected to the AI Risk Management Framework that NIST is developing.

There’s no hiding that Artificial Intelligence has infested itself in every nook and cranny of the modern world. Al algorithms force what entertainment you see, which news is exposed to you, and what you should feel about depending on which “sector” of the internet you’re on.

E.g “conservative-tok”, “liberal-tok”, and “Andrew Tate-tok”.

A new report commissioned by the US State Department paints an alarming picture of the “catastrophic” national security risks posed by rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, warning that time is running out for the federal government to avert disaster.

The findings were based on interviews with more than 200 people over more than a year – including top executives from leading AI companies, cybersecurity researchers, weapons of mass destruction experts and national security officials inside the government.

A group of industry leaders warned on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they were building might one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on a par with pandemics and nuclear wars.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. The open letter was signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in A.I.

Trying to regulate AI is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. It will never work. The attempt to direct this fast-changing category of mathematical tools through legislation or traditional regulatory mechanisms, no matter how well-intentioned, is unlikely to be successful and is much more likely to have negative unanticipated consequences, including delaying and misdirecting technical development. AI is the application of a set of mathematical algorithms, and you can’t regulate math.

If the commission of a crime is facilitated using an automobile, a telephone, a hammer, or a knife, the appropriate response is to focus on the criminal and the criminal act itself. Except for guns, the tools used in a crime are not generally the subject of regulation.

More than a quarter (27%) of organizations have banned the use of generative AI among their workforce over privacy and data security risks, at least temporarily, according to the Cisco 2024 Data Privacy Benchmark Study.

Most organizations have also instituted controls on these tools. Nearly two-thirds (63%) have established limitations on what data can be entered and 61% have limits on which Gen AI tools can be used by employees.

American Department of Defense policy already bans artificial intelligence from autonomously launching nuclear weapons. But amid rising fears of AI spurred by a plethora of potential threats, a bipartisan group of lawmakers has decided to make extra-double-sure it can’t.

As announced earlier this week, Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) and Representatives Ted Lieu (D-CA), Don Beyer (D-VA), and Ken Buck (R-CO) have introduced the Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous AI Act, which would “prohibit the use of Federal funds to launch a nuclear weapon using an autonomous weapons system that is not subject to meaningful human control.” The act would codify existing Pentagon rules for nuclear weapons, which, as of 2022, read thusly: