Matt Bigelow Blog: Your Face is a War Bond for the Facial Recognition Panopticon

I worked at a major Japanese telecom for about 5 years, and my students were engineers and they wanted to know about IoT, AI, and tech markets. So for that duration, that's what I did everyday. Finding tech, how telecoms are changing through the use of smartphones, and how emerging countries were taking advantage of smartphone tech and networks to make new and incredible things happen. 

Here are some common themes:

• Facial recognition ATMs in China -- just look at an ATM and money comes out of it.

• Smart Contactless Cash Registers -- just scan your baked goods and pay with a QR code.

• AI cameras that scan train tracks for preemptive maintenance -- smoother tracks mean more carriages which translates into more dollars

• IoT Go-Round Sushi -- keeps sushi fresh and shops can automatically order stocks when low

Incredible tech using incredible wireless telecom networks.

And incredible doesn't always mean positive.

Nuclear bombs are incredible

And so is facial recognition, an incredible tool doing incredible things.

It is time for everyone to consider their role in the upcoming network and tech world. Data is expected to be the fuel that powers the next century. Whoever gets that data gets the fuel to power their AI systems that rely on telecommunications networks. As Adam Curry likes to say, “Data is the new bacon.”
While facial recognition is only a tool, how it is used by the telecom or operator will determine if the tool will benefit or harm not only the user, but their society at large. So who do you trust with your biometric data?

Biometric war bonds.

A Facial Recognition Ticket Gate is tested in Osaka

A drone with a facial recognition and a thermal camera can help find a lost child in the woods. It can also be used to ethnically cleanse a rival group of people with enough weaponized drones equipped with ethnic readers.

Where you point your face will determine how that tech is applied in future after iterations backed with values.

China is probably the world's leader in the physical implementation of AI products and services being used by daily people on a daily basis in the 3D world. And the complete lack of privacy laws in China combined with its rapid acceleration to the world's number 2 GDP is really giving a fuck ton of governments, corporations, and telecoms pause. And by pause I mean shitting their pants. Why? Because the Chinese wireless AI technology tends to work really well, while at the same time totally disregarding the individual's concern for privacy, because in China privacy is not even an afterthought.
For the past few years, some schools in China have been using AI cameras to evaluate a student's in-class performance. The student's results are sent to the parent's smartphone in the form of a report. But the parent does not only receive their child's scores -- the parent receives the scores for the entire class with names included. Your phone goes beep and you now know how your student compares to all of the other students with cute photos of your child smiling in the class at 3:33 p.m. or whenever the timestamp is. Other Chinese applications monitor women and determine how "birth ready" they are and whether or not they are single or married. This data is collected in the open and is constantly being stored on open servers with no passwords.

Pushing further into China, we can look at the genetic monitoring of ethnic minorities, where their medical data is taken then stored as a QR Code. Combined with AI surveillance systems, these minorities can be tracked in real time and if their genetics are required by the state, then it’s essentially on-demand. Get the picture?
Group think is also established by algorithmically notifying the gen pop what to think and when to think it with state-sponsored news sent to everyone’s phones.
Furthermore Chinese nationals use their phones’ Chinese commerce apps outside of China which gives the CCP insight into how their citizens behave when out of earshot, and which also weirdly acts as a way to keep Chinese spending inside China through the use of Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Finally the name and shame approaches by the CCP also involves tracking J-walkers, and fining them in real time, and the infamous facial recognition toilet paper dispenser that allows you 70cm of toilet paper every 10 minutes through a face scan, so you don’t selfishly use too many shit-tickets.
But the list of these applications goes on and on and on, with little to no concern for individual privacy.

So what happens in the future if your country does not develop this technology? Will your leaders "Just import it from China. It's cheap, and it works!" That’s what Europe is doing. German trains using Huawei IoT networks and Swiss elevator companies equipping all of their elevators with hundreds of sensors connected to Huawei.

Or will your country develop facial recognition technology and limit its AI parameters, limit the data it collects, and store the info within encrypted in-country data centers? Considering the current batch of sketchy incompetent leaders across the Western world, they will just “import it and make it cheap!” and then go back to talking about global warming.

A facial recognition vending machine on display in Japan

But I’m in Japan! As facial recognition becomes more of a common sight in Japan, it's important to use it. Japan has very strict privacy laws and while violations occur, violators are subject to punishment by law as well as public scrutiny. In my time in the Japanese telecom, maintaining privacy of user data was a constant top topic, because if personal data is leaked in Japan, trust is immediately eroded and customers will choose another option. In America, you are rewarded for your successes, in Japan, they punish you for failure. Japan is a high trust society and the Japanese don’t like it when public trust is compromised as a general rule of thumb.

In order to provision Japanese companies with the data they need to offset Chinese Communist Party technological influences, consider using Japanese homegrown facial recognition technology. NEC and Panasonic are good places to start. I HOPE!
It's possible to exist anonymously in a facial recognition camera world. For example: Your face is not recorded. Your face's biometric data is recorded and anonymized into a code. When you are walking about the town, your face passes through the cameras without the cameras registering your data (in the present tense — your face could be searched super easily after the fact). If the police are looking for a dangerous criminal, they can release that criminal's biometric code into the telecom-network-supported AI camera systems, which will scan public spaces for the individual’s biometric code. Once that code is spotted, a redbox appears around his or her face in the camera, and now that suspect can be tracked in real time by the coppers while the innocent go about their day. Send in the drones!

What would you have this drone do?

The risk of abuse of this technology is obvious. I researched this “Over the Horizon Future” tech for 5 years and I disliked more than liked the overall use of its applications due to the possible rampant abuses by the main players. For example, I wonder about Israel and China teaming up to create an international AI spy-grid under our noses under the guise of "Mutual Cooperative Strategy in the Middle East" (my wording). I also worry about Facebook and Twitter establishing a defacto social credit score and punishing people for thought crimes. Facebook banned me from its advertising platform and I don’t know why but I suspect some of the crazy Marxists in the Tokyo music scene reported me for Wrongthink.
The more the CCP iterates this technology to monitor it's 1.4 billion civilians, the stronger their AI technology will become and it may become less and less feasible for your country to develop its own practical facial recognition technology.

So you might want to use your face as a war bond to bolster the AI technology in your own country before another country with closed and shady morals implements it for you. Remember: Data is a power source. The cleaner it is, the more valuable it is. It’s going to be scanned in public. One of the few options you have is who do you provision your biometric data to.

We live in incredible times. It's time to do incredible things with your face, oddly enough.

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Automated Thought Erasure for Cash

AI Engineers come from all walks of life, and the good ones are very skilled at coding, training, and iterating their AI. It's very impressive work to see computer vision and self-driving cars develop so quickly at companies such as Face Plus Plus and NVIDIA.

The people designing the algorithms are just like you and me -- they don't know much outside of their area of expertise, except for maybe a hobby or two and some activism. They spend their time with people that are very much like themselves — they might be from diverse walks of life but they are numbers and code people. And if you haven't debated using Python vs PyTorch, then you ain't in their club.

I have listened to over 100 AI engineers give talks in webinars, do presentations at events online and in the 3D world, as well as respond to aspects of AI research outside of their preferred areas. It was a part of my job between 2015-2020. I got paid to do that. My takeaway is that while the AI community is very good at making cars stop, they aren't very good at understanding how people from other backgrounds think, especially in understanding what people mean when they say something mean. 

Most of the AI censors are probably just in it for the job and a chance to get paid to pursue their interest -- AI. However the odds of how interested their coding skills will affect the lives of others who live in different communities with different values is rather low. General platitudes such as "make the world a better place" and "international community is good for the international community" might make it seem the interest is high, but the vast majority probably don't spend a lot of their free time engaging facetime-to-facetime with communities from places they’ve never been to nor heard of. When it's time to punch-out of their AI Censor jobs, it's just like you and me -- off the pub, or go home and take care of the fam. Netflix and Chill. Trump this or Trump that. TACO TUESDAYS!

What could possibly go wrong?

That's where 3rd parties come in. Major SNS companies will sign major deals with groups that claim to have a lot of information on people from different communities. They're Verified Groups! Yay! A recent example is the rise of alternative theories on the COVID-19. Despite being headed by a communist revolutionary who is not a physician and who may have covered up cholera outbreaks in his homeland of Ethiopia/Eritrea, YouTube decided that the World Health Organization would be the end-all-and-be-all for its AI censorship. As a result, if highly trained doctors wanted to tell people about possible alternative treatments on YouTube, they would be shut down. Preventing false information is crucial, but in an outbreak where not much is known about COVID-19, surely having some dissent and discussion in the medical community would be a jolly good scientific way to figure out a variety of possible treatments. 

YouTube are not doctors, but they are using WHO’s expert guidelines to help train their AI censorship algorithms which are then turned on to real doctors and eventually silences a bunch of them.

Algorithmically On-Demand Censorship.

Good ol' memory hole. Works every time.

There are other examples I have seen.

Israel is a world leader in AI, and one AI researcher was looking to create an AI Camera program that could spot terrorists by analyzing facial expressions in airports. The idea is that perhaps a person makes certain facial expressions before carrying out a suicide bombing. If these facial expressions could be recognized by an AI camera and processed with a percentage of probability, then it would give airport security advanced time to prevent a suicide bomb from going off. The trade off would be targeted screening by security, but in exchange fewer bombs going off. I can see discussing the issue on both sides.

When this idea was presented to a liberal feminist AI researcher in America, her eyes widened as if triggered by something more than a micro-aggression. "That's racist!" She said. 

Why would it be racist? No mention of race was made. But to her, "Israeli AI Suicide Bomber Detector" probably translated to Muslim. And targeting Muslims to her is racist, despite Islam not being race-specific. After hearing about this program, I doubt that the USA AI researcher went and researched suicide bombings and facial expressions and the types of different ethnicities carrying out suicides strikes in and around Israel (I didn't). She most likely walked away thinking of racism from the POV of herself in her own community (like me), not what's going on in Israel. Why? Because she is a busy human who went back to work and then went home to Netflix and Chill. 

I hate Netflix. Love Chill.

I am a Canadian living in Tokyo, so I don't know who is right in this situation but what I do know is that these two people — the Israeli Anti-terror AI coder and the US Liberal Feminist AI Coder — are both coding algorithms that may impact our lives. They don't know about each other, and they don't know about you or me but their algos will be flying around the earth's atmosphere, in some sort of cloud wirelessly beaming 1s&0s into connected devices placed somewhere you would never think to look.

I don't trust the experts much because they are so frequently wrong and get promoted afterwards. I do trust my own intuition and can admit to being wrong and consider the internet a place to get information on pretty much anything and accept the risks involved. While the SNS companies continue to employ people who know little outside their tiny bubbles of expertise, expect the random ideas you want to talk about disappear into the memory hole. Why? Because millions of dollars are on the table and if your thought can be eliminated, someone can get paid. 

Automated Thought Erasure for Cash!

In a way, it's a way to reinforce everyone into acting the boring normie so that we all just publish photos of pets and food, making the SNS companies corporate friendly for their advertisers to invest in without having to worry about a critical public thinking for themselves.