The A.I. “Gaydar” Study and the Real Dangers of Big Data | The New Yorker

Every face does not tell a story; it tells thousands of them. Over evolutionary time, the human brain has become an exceptional reader of the human face—computerlike, we like to think. A viewer instinctively knows the difference between a real smile and a fake one. In July, a Canadian study reported that college students can reliably tell if people are rocher or poorer than average simply by looking at their expressionless faces. Scotland Yard employs a team of “super-recognizers” who can, from a pixelated photo, identify a suspect they may have seen briefly years earlier or come across in a mug shot. But, being human, we are also inventing machines that read faces as well as or better than we can. In the twenty-first century, the face is a database, a dynamic bank of information points—muscle configurations, childhood scars, barely perceptible flares of the nostril—that together speak to what you feel and who you are. Facial-recognition technology is being tested in airports around the world, matching camera footage against visa photos. Churches use it to document worshipper attendance. China has gone all in on the technology, employing it to identify jaywalkers, offer menu suggestions at KFC, and prevent the theft of toilet paper from public restrooms.

Källa: The A.I. “Gaydar” Study and the Real Dangers of Big Data | The New Yorker