He sure did, Gianna. And the changes are just getting started.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna called on Congress Monday to enact reforms to advance racial justice and combat systemic racism while announcing the company was getting out of the facial recognition business.
The decision for IBM to get out of the facial recognition business comes amid criticism of the technology, employed by multiple companies, for exhibiting racial and gender bias. Amazon’s own use of facial recognition was put to a shareholder vote last year, with 2.4% of shareholders voting in favor of banning the sale of the technology to government agencies amid privacy and civil rights concerns.
“IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency,” Krishna wrote in the letter delivered to members of Congress late Monday.
“We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.”
Facial recognition is a big and growing business, with law enforcement being its single biggest target market, but criticisms of the technology have been part of the conversation almost from the beginning. Implicit bias, largely the result of mostly white, mostly male engineers training facial recognition systems on their own faces, have long been known to cause inaccurate results when those same systems are pointed at any non-white, non-male subject, resulting in innocent people routinely being misidentified as matches to criminal suspects.
Combine that with disproportionate policing, you end up with a system of injustice in which more people of colour, and particularly black people, who are already more likely to have their faces in criminal policing databases for activities that don't result in criminal records for white citizens, are now even more likely than before to end up on the receiving end of altercations with gun-wielding police who are amped up for a confrontation with someone who facial recognition software has misidentified as a violent criminal. The inevitable result? Even more innocent black lives lost, purely because over-enthusiastic software salesmen have convinced already over-agressive police forces that facial recognition is magic and infallible.
IBM's step away from a potentially lucrative side-business, and calling for the technology to be abolished entirely as a bad job, marks the first time that any purveyor of facial recognition technology has done so. Those hoping that Amazon will follow suit, however, are probably in for a long wait; Jeff Bezos doesn't seem to understand why people are upset about Rekognition, and will probably continue to chase the money, regardless of the cost in innocent lives, until legislation and regulation force him to change course.