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Another Scientific Incarnation of Selective Correlation

dlb writes:

When the 19th century was young, a Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall got the ball rolling for the "science" of phrenology. (Not to be confused with phenology.) Phrenology believed that the shape and contour of a person's skull revealed their character, and thus could be used by employers and the criminal justice system to identify the lazy and the miscreants with simply a few quick measurements.

It also came in handy to justify slavery in the U.S., as depicted in Tarantino's Django Unchained.

Phrenology never went away, but went on to lurk in spin-offs such as eugenics. And if there were to be an updated incarnation of using a few quick body measurements to find the evil among us, it would have to employ sci/tech terms as "researchers", "algorithms" and "AI".

And so it does: Convict-spotting algorithm criticised

Researchers trained an algorithm using more than 1,500 photos of Chinese citizens, hundreds of them convicts.

They said the program was then able to correctly identify criminals in further photos 89% of the time. But the research, which has not been peer reviewed, has been criticised by criminology experts who say the AI may reflect bias in the justice system. "This article is not looking at people's behaviour, it is looking at criminal conviction..."

So, will AI ever get this god-like?

[Continues...]

AI Can Predict the Future Criminals Based on Facial Features

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following related story:

The bankrupt attempt to infer moral qualities from physiology was a popular pursuit for millennia, particularly among those who wanted to justify the supremacy of one racial group over another. But phrenology, which involved studying the cranium to determine someone's character and intelligence, was debunked around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and few outside of the pseudo-scientific fringe would still claim that the shape of your mouth or size of your eyelids might predict whether you'll become a rapist or thief.

Not so in the modern age of Artificial Intelligence, apparently: In a paper titled "Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images," two Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers say they fed "facial images of 1,856 real persons" into computers and found "some discriminating structural features for predicting criminality, such as lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the so-called nose-mouth angle." They conclude that "all four classifiers perform consistently well and produce evidence for the validity of automated face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding the topic."

[...] The study contains virtually no discussion of why there is a "historical controversy" over this kind of analysis — namely, that it was debunked hundreds of years ago. Rather, the authors trot out another discredited argument to support their main claims:, that computers can't be racist, because they're computers:

[...] Absent, too, is any discussion of the incredible potential for abuse of this software by law enforcement. Kate Crawford, an AI researcher with Microsoft Research New York, MIT, and NYU, told The Intercept, "I'd call this paper literal phrenology, it's just using modern tools of supervised machine learning instead of calipers. It's dangerous pseudoscience."

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