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from the that's-a-silly-name-for-an-AI dept.
Stanford University researchers have used software in an attempt to determine sexual orientation from photos:
"Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images" is the title of an article by Stanford University's Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The abstract:
We show that faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain. We used deep neural networks to extract features from 35,326 facial images. These features were entered into a logistic regression aimed at classifying sexual orientation. Given a single facial image, a classifier could correctly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men in 81% of cases, and in 74% of cases for women. Human judges achieved much lower accuracy: 61% for men and 54% for women. The accuracy of the algorithm increased to 91% and 83%, respectively, given five facial images per person. Facial features employed by the classifier included both fixed (e.g., nose shape) and transient facial features (e.g., grooming style).
Consistent with the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation, gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression, and grooming styles. Prediction models aimed at gender alone allowed for detecting gay males with 57% accuracy and gay females with 58% accuracy. Those findings advance our understanding of the origins of sexual orientation and the limits of human perception. Additionally, given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people's intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women.
The images and the sexual orientation information were drawn from an online dating site. Note that the study was limited to white people from the United States, because of the relative lack of images of nonwhite gays and lesbians on the site.
Also at TechCrunch, The Advocate, and The Guardian.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday September 11 2017, @06:56PM (4 children)
I wonder what the solution is, or will be. ... It seems to me that we're likely to entering into a brave new world of eugenics. The only question is de facto or de jure? And while I'm implying it will be somewhat dystopic, need it really be?
You're wondering what the future is going to look like. "Gattaca" proposed one possible vision, though I think it was very flawed (why bother having the low-IQ people run around cleaning stuff when you can just build robots for that?). Personally, I think something like "Brave New World" is a pretty good vision of the future, except again we don't really need many less-intelligent people because of automation, but overall that society does seem to solve the problems of divorce, poor child-rearing, etc. However, the most likely vision of our future I think is seen on the TV show "The Walking Dead".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Monday September 11 2017, @08:48PM (3 children)
What is intelligence though? I don't think we've fully answered that, nor have we come up with suitable tests. If all we ever looked at was pattern recognition, speed, and basically mathematical and/or spatial puzzles, are we unduly denigrating somebody that could be a great artist?
That's my worry about a GATTACA style future. Parents selecting based on traits that are profitable and lead towards power. That doesn't sound like a future where we get the eccentric people that so greatly contribute to the arts. Would classical composers suitable pass the intelligence tests to be allowed to live?
I think they would make robots, and then eventually we would find nobody making new music or art. A world so dull, you would take the Walking Dead life over it.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday September 11 2017, @09:34PM (2 children)
I sure as shit would take the Walking Dead universe, because I'm pretty sure I could quickly and easily outsmart a bunch of slow zombies: Construct walk-in cuisinart, lure zombies in, blend. Wash, rinse, repeat. Pretty soon, hey, no more zombies!
Good point about different possible futures, though. Is our end goal as humans to become profit-maximizing units to enrich some other asshole? Is it to reduce everything and everyone to some idealized archtype? A future where a pack of supermodels sits around drinking latte and discussing Kant seems a special sort of nightmare.
Me, I'd be content with generalized leave-me-the-hell-alone-ism.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday September 11 2017, @10:11PM
Yuuuuuuup!
Zombies are nothing when compared to people (as shown in WD).
Much rather deal with the Zombies.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 12 2017, @03:22PM
I sure as shit would take the Walking Dead universe, because I'm pretty sure I could quickly and easily outsmart a bunch of slow zombies: Construct walk-in cuisinart, lure zombies in, blend. Wash, rinse, repeat. Pretty soon, hey, no more zombies!
It's not that easy. (Disclaimer: I've never seen The Walking Dead, but I've read plot synopses.) You're looking at a situation where there's hordes of zombies, and very few humans left, and not a lot of food/resources for them. So the problems isn't that the zombies are smart and fast, because they're exactly the opposite. The problem is the other humans. Even in good times, humans are terrible at working together effectively, without people being evil and stabbing others in the back for their own personal gain. In a post-apocalyptic scenario, it's going to be far, far worse. And from what I've read about the show's plot, that's exactly what happens: dealing with some mindless zombies may be a bit of a challenge if everyone were working together as a well-knit team but it'd be doable, but here there's a bunch of people from different walks of life who don't trust each other, and a bunch of them are outright scum, so that just ruins everything.
A future where a pack of supermodels sits around drinking latte and discussing Kant seems a special sort of nightmare.
Sounds a lot better than what we have now. I'd rather have a future where everyone's a supermodel drinking latte and talking about tech stuff though; that sounds like paradise actually, as long as they're not conservatives or religious (which for some reason seems to have a high degree of correlation with tech). I had a roommate who was a philosophy major (yeah, I know...) and talked about Kant all the time. No thanks.