You may be right. The facial recognition does seem to interact with the 4th amendment, at least. But then it happens in the public place? I don't know the answer to that one. I fear that in the age of social media and Antifa, the protections that we had before are no longer enough. Now we have additional actors on the streets who may turn to physical violence on a dime. I feel that the streets should be free from physical violence.
My instinct for self-preservation tells me that this is not a good thing. I understand the need for privacy, but what happens if somebody puts a gun (or a knife) to your face? I think that the need for privacy could be solved through the legislation: we can have very severe restrictions on who could look at this data and why. Also, we can have severe restrictions on the admissibility of such data in court. Unfortunately, I have not seen any credible efforts from politicians, right or left, to introduce privacy protections from the surveillance abuses.
Should we be worried about the future of JetBrains' products? I love their IDEs, especially PyCharm and CLion, but when the "woke" comes in, the competency seems to go out the door next, although it takes a few extra years. What would be the reason for doing this? Especially by the Russian team out of Prague?
I think this is a prime example of the "narrative engineering" done by Facebook. Before, the narrative was supposed to be X (e.g. no Wuhan leak) and now it's Y (it's Ok to think/talk about Wuhan leak). Who controls the narrative? We don't know, but presumably special interest groups with direct influence over Facebook senior management?
Of course not. I am not actually sure how to solve this problem. I think a good start would be to move back towards encouraging freedom of speech on campus and dialog between people with different opinions.
At the end of the article, the author seem to have listed every diversity criteria, except the diversity of thought. With Democrat to Republican ratio of professors in the leading US Universities being 11.5 to 1 [1], there is a growing danger that Stanford will go the way other universities have gone: lowering academic standards, admitting students based in their identity affiliations (and of course rich parents who could skirt the system), lowering faculty standards in technical departments, etc... The Stanford startups will move towards social engineering, disguised as impact investing. Move towards normalizing the discrimination against Asian and Indian male students and entrepreneurs.
I fully support the concerns that the author brings up. It's a big problem and we need to figure out how to address it. At the same time, I can't help but notice that this is coming from the ACM itself. The credibility of ACM has really tanked in my eyes in the last 2 - 3 years. Communications of the ACM magazine is full of articles that belong to the "social engineering magazine" and not to the Computer Science publication. Last time I was renewing my membership, I had to sign some kind of a pledge "not to harass people". Are you kidding me? What are we, 12? Because of that, while it's a very important issue, I am very distracted thinking about ACM itself. I guess this is a lesson that reputation and credibility is important. Once you lose it, everything you say, even if it's truly good, gets colored in a certain way.
Maybe I am too cynical, but I think in Google's case, the difference between targeting based on data and having the data will be several extra zeros in their price point.
Just to make sure: this protects you from your co-worker/spouse looking at your search history at your desk/device. The advertisers and corporations can freely purchase your search history from Google. It does not seem like a significant step towards privacy to me.
I think it's hard to argue that the SF government is not comprised of people on the forefront of the progressive agenda. Am I wrong about this? Take a look at Chesa Boudin, for example [1]. All their policies are progressive (their voters would certainly hope so). Are you saying that San Francisco's progressive policies are not the right progressive policies? Which place has the right policies then? Chicago? Their crime rate does not seem much better. Or Chicago also implements wrong progressive ideas?
I do not think that the current crime situation in San Francisco appeared by some fluke or an accident. Specific policies were put in place by the progressive government officials and progressive people in San Francisco voted for these policies. I think is a cautionary tale for the rest of the country on what happens when progressive utopia gets voted in.
Can you expand on what do you mean as being blind to race? Do you want them to see your race, treat different races differently? Aren't we supposed to be a color-blind society? Maybe I am just not understanding what you mean.
I find these allegations hard to believe. Google is one of the most progressive "big tech" companies out there, committed to diversity and inclusion. Susan Wojcicki, a woman, is a CEO of Youtube division and she is blocking all "hate speech" that is "directed at women". I remember, in an interview, Susan Wojcicki was asked about of example of sexist behavior at Google and she ready relied that "men try to interrupt her sometimes". I could not imagine a better defender of women rights. I am sure that Chelsey Glasson herself was very supportive of these policies while she was Google. So she must know first-hand, how supportive Google is of women. And now she is suing them. I am not sure I buy that.
Google Brain team is great and Google DeepMind London team is truly amazing. They both care about AI ethics very much and I am very interested to hear what they've got to say on the subject. It's the Timnit Gebru's "AI Ethics" team that is very problematic in my view. Getting into a public spat with Yann LeCunn, demonstrating that she has no idea about AI to begin with. Demonstrating totally politicized, ideological views.
Sammy Bengio is a good researcher, but Google really needs to align its team around company's business. The AI "Wokeness" team was really an embarrassment for the company. As the "woke" people are leaving, my respect for Google gradually keeps growing back (although, admittedly it's a long road back to the actual respect). I hope Google gets back to engineering.