Apparently, the varied systems in use to try to do facial recognition are ridden with gender and racial bias. This is perhaps something that we might want to do something about — luckily we’ve already got a system in place which does something about shoddy products: It’s called free market competition in a capitalist economy.
The particular complaint seems to be aimed at Amazon and their Rekognition service. The system works just fine at identifying white-bread men like me, but has a bit more problem with female faces and starts to go further haywire the darker the feminine visage, with entirely unacceptable portions being called out as male. Apparently, this is all so bad that Amazon should just stop selling the service to government or law enforcement — which is to horribly misunderstand how product development actually happens.
There is an amusement here in that the study design leading to this conclusion starts with a binary classification into simply male and female. Even an elderly Englishman like me is woke enough to know that’s not a reflection of our current world. There’s further fun in that, if we are to take the usual justification for government support of innovation seriously, then Amazon’s doing exactly the right thing here already. Innovation is difficult, it requires taxpayer aid to get it over the starting line. So, government’s buying this stuff, ain’t that great? It’ll get better and good enough for prime time as a result of that support. After all, as Mariana Mazzucato keeps telling us, that’s how the Pentagon supported the early days of Silicon Valley and the computer industry itself, by buying the output.
But there is that more basic problem with this analysis. It’s insisting that only a service, or a product, that actually properly works should be available for use. This isn’t at all how technologies develop. The motor car was pretty terrible for the first few decades of its existence — it wasn’t really until the Model T in 1908 that we had something more useful and also less costly than a horse. The Benz car, arguably the first, was put on the market in 1886. It’s rich people buying toys that provide the funding for the first iterations to be refined, developed, and so turned into something that we all want.
The thing being, as the original paper here points out, we’ve already got a system which does this: “The unbiased involvement of multiple companies may have served to put capitalist pressure on each corporation to address model limitations as not to be left behind or called out.”
The capitalist lusts for profits, lucre that can only be pocketed by persuading consumers to part with their money. The ability to do this is limited both by their agency (if they don’t want it they don’t have to buy it, nor pay for it) and also by what everyone else has on offer: the competition. Capitalist free marketry thus solves problems, because anyone selling shoddy goods finds the money flowing to others offering something less terrible. Product design advances as the plutocrats compete with each other for access to our wallets. This is true even of gender and color recognition systems.
All of which is rather excellent really. We’ve an identified problem (bad software), we’d like a solution to it, and we find that the basic structure and set-up of our society is that very solution. Ensure the space for market competition and leave the capitalist lust for profit to do the rest. What else could we possibly need to do?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
