Face and voice recognition de-bunked

If anyone seriously thinks that face and voice recognition could be widely deployed to spot evil-doers (lets face it, you don't have to be a terrorist to be an evil-doer) they should think again. Why? Well did you ever notice how, every time someone appears on Arab TV purporting to Saddam Hussein, or Bin Laden, it takes our government days to pass judgement on whether its them or not? Think about it. It takes the government, with all its human experts and super-secret analysis techniques, days to pass judgement. So what chance does a machine at the airport have when its just some cheapo PC running Windows (they always do, have you ever noticed the number of X-Ray machines suffering from the blue screens of death?) and all the time it has is a few milliseconds?

Yes you can argue that the government is shooting for a much higher probability of being correct with their analysis. After all Saddam has a $25M price tag on his head (I'll be blogging about that next) so you want to be damned sure you're right. Right? Sorry but I think that is a bogus argument. The reason is, if and when face and voice recognition are widely deployed at our airports, on our streets, and in our phone systems, there will quite literally be tens of billions of recognition events every day. Hence any technology that is going to ever stand a chance of being practical will have to have an extremely low false positive rate. Otherwise thousands if not millions of people will be stopped, hauled off and get accused of being evil-doers every day. And if its false positive rate is bad than its likely that a good number of legitimate evil-doers will walk on by due to false negatives.

Also, we shouldn't forget that Saddam is one the most studied, photographed, and video-taped people on earth. Automated systems are lucky to get a few blurry ten by eights to base their recognition on. So I believe all the evidence indicates that fully automated systems are still years, if not decades away from being useful. The government should just stop wasting their money on the foolish notion it can use these systems now to "protect us". It should instead channel its efforts into finding out who is responsible for all of these people wanting to do "evil" against us. I for one, could recognize that person in a flash...