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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 11 2017, @09:44PM (4 children)
No, eugenics has a bad name because it is bad. Everyone understands the science, but it is inhumane. Immoral. Unethical. Wrong! Anyone who advocates for eugenics is literally pro-genocide.
Even without worrying about moral implications there are still problems with eugenics. No human can predict the full impact of artificially selecting specific genetic traits, and you can easily see the potential problems in dog breeds. Speeding up evolution can have unintended consequences and lead scientists / society into accepting more drastic measures such as major gene therapy, genome "cleanup", etc. In a quest for improvement we could quite possibly cause our own extinction.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 12 2017, @03:28PM (3 children)
I agree that eugenics is bad because of the potential problems you cite, but how on earth is it "literally pro-genocide"? Genocide is when you murder a bunch of people, usually because of their membership in some group like race or nationality. Eugenics isn't about murder, it's about controlling breeding. No one gets killed, but their freedom to breed the way they want is curtailed. There's obvious ethical issues there of course, but even if you were going as far as involuntarily sterilizing a bunch of "undesirable" people, it's just not the same as sticking them in a gas chamber. Lots of people never have children, either because of choice, lack of a partner they like well enough, or especially medical issues. So your claim is like claiming someone is a "victim of genocide" if they got some natural disease that rendered them infertile.
Things can be really bad without having to make up false equivalencies and using wrong terminology about them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @03:52PM
Eugenics is almost always supported by racists types who love to use such "scientific" arguments to promote murder / sterilization. Even without the racism eugenics is aimed to destroy all "unfit" people, prevent them from breeding. I guess it would be possible for a humane and decent eugenicist to exist but I won't hold my breath waiting.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday September 12 2017, @04:59PM (1 child)
Forced sterilization of an entire target population is the functional equivalent of mass-murder, it just takes longer and is easier to swallow. This fact is not lost [blackgenocide.org] on the African American population of the United States. Imagine if racist eugenics had their way and forcibly sterilized every woman on the dark side of the brown bag test. In less than 100 years of having no children the population of dark-skinned Americans would be a rounding error statistically. This is not a theoretical issue, it's already been tried and stopped [blackgenocide.org] in the United States. From the page I just linked:
The women affected by the doctors mentioned above can justifiably be called victims of genocide. There's a very big difference between the few people who for whatever reason are not able as individuals to have children and targeting an entire population for eradication via denying the ability to reproduce.
I have to wonder whether there's an equivalent of Muphry's law for logical fallacy...
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 13 2017, @12:35AM
I think I see the problem here. Here's what Wiktionary says about "genocide":
So I was going by the "common usage", but you're correct, the formal and legal definition means the elimination of an ethnic group, even if it doesn't involve actually killing them.