The Cost of Efficiency Over Ethics
After reading peer reviewed sources, doing research, and watching a documentary called, Coded Bias, it has made me aware of added systemic racism and overwhelming progression of surveillance and algorithms used throughout the world.
The Coded Bias documentary follows a woman by the name of, Joy Buolamwini as she expalins her research and findings that she has unfolded surrounding facial recognition systems. In college she was working on a project and found that the facial recognition system would not recognize her face unless she put on a white mask. She continues to reaserch this flaw in facial recognition systems, and finds out there is a much deeper issue at hand. Before watching this documentary, I knew that facial recognition systems were biased and detected white males face much more accuratley than women and people of different races. I did not realize how deep this issue runs within our system and watching this documentary was eyeopening at how at risk people in our country are because of these technologies.
Data that is collected on people is constant, wether that be throguh security cameras, what youre looking at on your phone, or what youre watching on Netflix. There is apartment buildings in New York that have implemented facial recognition systems that watch your every move and will notify you if you are doing something that they don’t want you to be doing. They made a point in the documentary that in many cases, a lot of technology gets to be tested by the wealthy first and will slowly make it’s way to the lower economic class, but in this case, they are testing it on the lower economic class because they have less power to stop it.
Through these facial recognition systems, becomes algorithims that can place people into categories which can deem them as high, medium, or low risk. I found this point in the documentary to be most compelling because algorithims such as this are set up in place of people evaluting others. Not just in their risk asseement, but in many aspects of life such as job performance, and how much you will pay for a certain product. While these set algorithims take place of human intelligence and create fast and efficent systems of analysis, they can be incredibly wrong. A teacher who won many awards over the years for being an amazing teacher suddenly was getting bad scores because of new algorithm that the school district had set in place. It caused him to second guess himself as a teacher before he realized it wasnt his mistakes, it was the algorithims. This is just one example of how we use technology to create efficiency, but in the end is biased and not always accurate.
As our world moves into a technology based system, it is extremely important to understand the risks human surveillance and facial recogntion. There have been steps that have been taken to keep these technologies from gaining to much power over our human rights, but there is still more to be done. In the film, they talk about how there needs to be an administration such as the FDA, that regulates what facial recofnition systems and algorithims can be used. They need to be tested and approved upon before they are used to ensure they are not biased and are used in a positive and ethical manner. I totally agree with this idea becuase I feel as though there is too much power that companies such as Amazon hold with these facial recognition technologies and law enforecment. All over the United States, breaking down systemic systems that cause racism within our country have been trying to be broken down and fixed to create equality. I think it is extremely important that we ensure to vote for people who will fight for equality and regulation on who can use these technologies and how they use these technologies in the future.
