【经济学人】面部识别技术将颠覆社会

面部识别技术将颠覆社会

译者：邓小雪 & 王妍

校对：鲁城华

策划：周树人

Facial recognition is not just another technology. It will change society

面部识别不仅仅是一项新技术。它将改变世界。

本文选自 The Economist | 取经号原创翻译

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THE human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognise each other and is crucial to the formation of complex societies. So is the face’s ability to send emotional signals, whether through an involuntary blush or the artifice of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives, in the office and the courtroom as well as the bar and the bedroom, reading faces, for signs of attraction, hostility, trust and deceit. They also spend plenty of time trying to dissimulate.

人脸是一个了不起的杰作，千变万化的面部特征使人能认出彼此，并组成了复杂的社会形态。面部能发出情绪信号，比如不自觉的脸红或者欺骗性的假笑。无论是在办公室、法庭、酒吧或者卧室，人们在醒着的大部分时间里都在不断读识面部表情，寻找那些吸引、敌意、信任和欺骗的信号，同时也花费大量时间掩饰自己。

deceit / dɪˈsiːt; dɪˋsit/ n [U] deliberately leading sb to believe or accept sth that is false, usu so as to get sth for oneself; deceiving 欺骗; 欺诈

Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers’ attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. This year Welsh police used it to arrest a suspect outside a football game. In China it verifies the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple’s new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the homescreen.

科技也在不断进步，试图赶上人类读识面部表情的能力。面部识别技术在美国教堂用来记录礼拜者的出席情况；在英国被零售商用来找出偷窃老手。威尔士警察局今年利用该技术在球场外逮捕了一名嫌疑犯；中国则用其对网约司机进行认证、游客通过“刷脸”进入景区、以及直接微笑付款。苹果的新手机也将使用面部识别来解锁主屏。

Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental. Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode them. Although faces are peculiar to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, intrude on something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyse images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to notions of privacy, fairness and trust.

弥补人类技能的科技越来越多，飞行或网络等突破性技术打破了人类能力的天花板，而面部识别技术看起来似乎只是一个编码而已。尽管面部因人而异，但也是公开场合能看到的，所以乍一看该项技术并不会侵犯私人空间。然而，以如此廉价、迅速而大规模的方式记录、存储、分析人们面部影像，终有一天会从根本上颠覆人们对于隐私、公平和信任的认知。

peculiar / pɪˈkjuːlɪə(r); pɪˋkjuljɚ/ adj [pred 作表语] ~ to sb/sth (a) belonging only to sb/sth 独有; 独特

The final frontier

最后的前线

Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. FindFace, an app in Russia, compares snaps of strangers with pictures on VKontakte, a social network, and can identify people with a 70% accuracy rate. Facebook’s bank of facial images cannot be scraped by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Even if private firms are unable to join the dots between images and identity, the state often can. China’s government keeps a record of its citizens’ faces; photographs of half of America’s adult population are stored in databases that can be used by the FBI. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens’ privacy.

首先是隐私问题。与其他生物数据（例如指纹）最大的不同在于，面部识别不需要接触。只要有手机就能拍一张照片进行人脸识别。俄罗斯有一款名为 FindFace 的 APP，能将任意一张陌生人的照片与社交软件 VKontakte 的数据进行比对，从而找出个人身份信息，正确率在70%。硅谷大佬 Facebook 不会将大量的人脸图片另做他用，但它能获取进入车展的参观者照片，并通过面部识别技术向他们推销汽车广告。另外，即便私企不会利用面部识别查找个人身份，国家也会用。中国政府保留了公民面部的档案；一半美国成年人的照片存在数据库里可以被 FBI 调用。如今执法部门手握追踪罪犯的强大武器，但也很可能会侵犯公民的隐私。

The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analysing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, such as Hajdu-Cheney syndrome, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic people a grasp of social signals they find elusive. But the technology also threatens. Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated that, when shown pictures of one gay man, and one straight man, the algorithm could attribute their sexuality correctly 81% of the time. Humans managed only 61%. In countries where homosexuality is a crime, software which promises to infer sexuality from a face is an alarming prospect.

人脸不止是姓名的标签，也展示了很多其他信息——并且同样也能被机器识别。这将带来很多好处。一些公司通过面部分析能提早做出罕见基因状况的自动诊断，比如Hajdu-Cheney氏综合征。情绪检测系统能帮助难以理解外部世界的孤独症患者掌握社交信号。另一方面来说，这一技术也带来威胁。斯坦福大学的研究者已经证实，计算机算法通过一张照片就能以81%的准确率判断出他是直男还是同性恋，而人类判断的准确率只有61%。在视同性恋为犯罪的国家，以面部来判断性取向的软件令人担忧。

algorithm / ˈælgərɪðəm; ˋælɡəˏrɪðəm/ n (esp computing 尤作计算机术语) set of rules or procedures that must be followed in solving a problem 算法; 计算程序.

Keys, wallet, balaclava

钥匙、钱包、巴拉克拉瓦帽

Less violent forms of discrimination could also become common. Employers can already act on their prejudices to deny people a job. But facial recognition could make such bias routine, enabling firms to filter all job applications for ethnicity and signs of intelligence and sexuality. Nightclubs and sports grounds may face pressure to protect people by scanning entrants’ faces for the threat of violence—even though, owing to the nature of machine-learning, all facial-recognition systems inevitably deal in probabilities. Moreover, such systems may be biased against those who do not have white skin, since algorithms trained on data sets of mostly white faces do not work well with different ethnicities. Such biases have cropped up in automated assessments used to inform courts’ decisions about bail and sentencing.

隐性歧视可能会变得越来越常见。雇主本会依照个人偏好选择雇员。但如今，面部识别可能将这种偏好变成习以为常，企业因此可以通过种族、智力水平和性别筛选求职者。夜店和体育馆通过刷脸入门的方式规避暴力风险，这种安保方式压力很大。就算是仪器有自我学习的能力，但面部识别系统都不可避免会出现失误。此外，面部识别系统可能无法识别那些非白皮肤的人，因为数据大部分都源于白人，这种算法无法很好地识别其他人种。在常用于传达法院关于保释和判刑决定的自动化评估过程中，这种偏见也是屡见不鲜。

bail / beɪl; bel/ n [U] money paid by or for a person accused of a crime, as security that he will return for his trial if he is allowed to go free until then 保释金.

Eventually, continuous facial recording and gadgets that paint computerised data onto the real world might change the texture of social interactions. Dissembling helps grease the wheels of daily life. If your partner can spot every suppressed yawn, and your boss every grimace of irritation, marriages and working relationships will be more truthful, but less harmonious. The basis of social interactions might change, too, from a set of commitments founded on trust to calculations of risk and reward derived from the information a computer attaches to someone’s face. Relationships might become more rational, but also more transactional.

最终，持续的面部记录和将电脑数据变为现实所用的小工具可能就会改变社交的本质。伪装有助于生活之轮的运转。如果你的伴侣都能注意到你每一个忍住的哈欠以及你上司愤怒时表情的变化，那么婚姻关系和工作关系虽然将更加真实，但却会不再那么和谐了。从一系列基于信任而作出的承诺到通过计算机识别面部信息而对风险与奖励作出预测，这一过程中，社交的本质原则将被改变。各种关系可能会变得更加理性，但也变得更像是交易。

grease v / griːs; ɡris/ [Tn] put or rub grease on or in (esp parts of a machine) 在（尤指机器部件）上涂油或擦油.

In democracies, at least, legislation can help alter the balance of good and bad outcomes. European regulators have embedded a set of principles in forthcoming data-protection regulation, decreeing that biometric information, which would include “faceprints”, belongs to its owner and that its use requires consent—so that, in Europe, unlike America, Facebook could not just sell ads to those car-showroom visitors. Laws against discrimination can be applied to an employer screening candidates’ images. Suppliers of commercial face-recognition systems might submit to audits, to demonstrate that their systems are not propagating bias unintentionally. Firms that use such technologies should be held accountable.

在民主国家里，至少还有法律能平衡利弊好坏。欧洲监管机构在即将出台的数据保护法中加了一条法令，即包括“脸部印记”（faceprints）在内的生物识别信息属于其所有者，使用需经所有者同意。因此不像美国，在欧洲，脸书可就不能随便把广告推广给车展观众了。雇主面试求职者需遵循反歧视法。商用面部识别系统的供应商可能会受到审查，以此来证明他们的系统没有刻意歧视之嫌。使用面部识别科技的企业应该承担责任。

Such rules cannot alter the direction of travel, however. Cameras will only become more common with the spread of wearable devices. Efforts to bamboozle facial-recognition systems, from sunglasses to make-up, are already being overtaken; research from the University of Cambridge shows that artificial intelligence can reconstruct the facial structures of people in disguise. Google has explicitly turned its back on matching faces to identities, for fear of its misuse by undemocratic regimes. Other tech firms seem less picky. Amazon and Microsoft are both using their cloud services to offer face recognition; it is central to Facebook’s plans. Governments will not want to forgo its benefits. Change is coming. Face up to it.

即便如此也无法改变发展的方向。随着可穿戴设备的推广，照相机只会越来越普及。所有企图迷惑面部识别系统的技俩，从戴太阳镜到化妆，都已经被识破。剑桥大学的研究指出，人工智能可以透过伪装重建面部结构。谷歌已明确表示不支持人脸与身份匹配的技术，因为担心非民主国家会滥用这项科技。其他科技公司似乎就没这么多顾虑。亚马逊和微软就都在利用云服务支持面部识别。这项科技是脸书计划的核心。各国政府断然不会放弃获益的机会。变革即将来临。勇往直前吧！

forgo / fɔːˈgəu; fɔrˋɡo/ v (pt forwent / fɔːˈwent; fɔrˋwɛnt/, pp forgone / fɔːˈgɔn; US -ˈgɔːn; fɔrˋɡɔn/) [Tn] give up or do without (esp sth pleasant) 放弃或没有（尤指美好的事物）也行

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