Ah, the public corporation! Fictive structures created so that profit-making shall never be interfered with by moral or ethical concerns!
Just creating shareholder value, what else can you expect us to do!
Just creating shareholder value, what else can you expect us to do!
I think ownership is irrelevant. What matters is lawfulness and what remains lawful after pressure or indifference from the constituencies.
Hand in hand with this is the rule of law. Some countries on paper have great liberties and rights for their people, but in practice it’s up to the party to interpret and enforce (as in the great purges, etc,)
I have found it a certainty on HN that at some point, in any discussion of these things, that someone will step in and say "but this is legal, and the corporation must maximize its profits for the shareholders, so if you really want a change, change the laws, the company itself is utterly amoral and working as designed"
To expand on that idea - if something is both lawful and profitable, you have to have an almost absolute consensus amongst the people capable of doing it that it should not be done. Otherwise, potentially even if 1 person thinks it is fine, then they will be the one to do it.
Typically this is the main strength of the economic system - jobs that people don't want to do get allocated to the person who has the least problem with doing it.
The threat here was never the development of the technology - it is obvious that it is coming - the issue here is government demand. A corporation can only do so much with my face that annoys me - the government on the other hand can make life really miserable.
Sure, but you just need a weak consensus amongst everyone that it should not be done to make it unlawful.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification...
Prohibition is a great example of what laws can do, good and bad. After lots of bloodletting we realized it wasn’t good and we were not benefitting from it so it was reversed.
How have your interactions been with law enforcement during your life? Largely positive? Largely negative? Or non-existent? Do you, overall, feel that the US in largely a place where law-abiding citizens are free to go about their days?
The reality may be far different as the algorithms themselved make the biases even less seen and less able to be contested.We're not in full minority report territory, but I think the worry is that added the ability to do near permanent surveillance to an already militarized police force that thinks they are fighting a war is not...going to turn out well for some of us.
That is not my argument. I am merely saying that I don't think facial recognition is going to present problems that outweigh its value as a law enforcement tool. There will no doubt be some abuses, just as there is of any new technology. I support regulation and intense scrutiny of how law enforcement uses these tools, to minimize the severity and duration of these abuses. But I don't think that means it's a good idea that Amazon's board should have to approve each entity attempting to use their services individually.
By and large, I distrust American cops. I’ve had some bad experiences with them (though never catastrophic) but I’m well-aware that some people have had it far worse.
I don’t have a problem with facial recognition software being used by police. I have concerns about equipping police with MRAP vehicles, flashbangs, tasers, body armor, rifles, tear gas, and a few dozen other things, but not facial recognition. Why should I be concerned?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/asia/china-surveill...
Adding increasing automation when the foundations aren't great is a bad idea though. There are more stories everyday about people finding trouble with the law because of some software system with no human oversight.
I'm sure there are and the only way we can explore these benefits is to allow the population access to the technology.
> The first proposal would have made the company stop offering facial recognition to governments unless its board determined sales did not violate civil liberties. A second would have requested a study by September of the extent to which Amazon’s service harmed rights and privacy.
There is no world in which you are not disgustingly greedy, unempathetic, and immoral to reject sales of facial recognition technology to abusive governments.
Besides, there's a lot more going on in this space (and article) than the vote itself. There are calls to regulate facial recognition, which I think is an immoral option (and futile) as it only allows governments access to a powerful technology.
It is very common for people who have a particular issue that they care about to attempt to require the board of a company to handle that issue. But if big companies acquiesced to all such requests, the board would take on a large workload, making sometimes detailed decisions where they have no expertise.
Company owners delegate much of their authority to boards. Boards delegate much of their authority to employees. I am sure there will be entities to which Amazon would not offer facial recognition services. But that decision does not need to be made at the level of the board. BTW, this is why management almost always fights such propositions: it ties the hands of the company to use an inefficient decision process, for no provable gain on any worthwhile metric.
if it were a decision like "should we put this bin over on that shef?", then yes, it's reasonable to delegate to a rank-and-file employee.
"should we develop technology that can lead to a surveillance state?" is not one of those decisions.
that's a strategic decision entirely negotiated between the shareholders (via the board) and the management team, for which they should all be held accountable.
I believe that if the board of Amazon had more they wanted to say about this issue, either publicly or internally, they do not need a shareholder resolution to enable that -- especially a non-binding one. They can simply do so. So, the resolution's purpose is actually one of signalling the shareholder's stance on the technology being developed. Clearly, most shareholders agree with the board's implicit approval.
I see no reason to suspect that this is true.
You need to re-word this sentence. I agree with what (I think) you're going for, but your words say something else.
I try to keep them more substantive overall, but what else can be said about this. Clearly there are still major ethical concerns with access to these facial recognition black boxes and clearly amazon shareholders are far more concerned with expanding into any legal market as quick as possible.
Amazon is /the/ poster child of late capitalism as far as I'm concerned. Ruthlessly efficient, impossible to escape even if you hate them (I mean, come on, like I'm gonna go to a store when I just grab it on Prime now), and literally run all the retail stuff as a revenue front to expand deep into subterranean territory (AWS, etc). No nod to "Don't Be Evil" here, just a gigantic black box that can pump out money for shareholders. Enough money and leverage to apply impossible pressure in almost any market they decide to want to dominate (Still waiting to see what they do to grocery with the WF buy).
And still mostly building the layers and connections for domination. They haven't even switched into eat-the-world mode yet, they are still just grinding and building resources...
this part is capitalism working as intended and (mostly) as desired. the challenge of course is that it has also led to highly undesirable power structures (corporations, oligopolies, cabals, cartels, etc.) that increasingly eclipses the individual as principal agent. that's a failure (by omission) of capitalism.
while governments, communities and other social structures can contain that consolidation of power to some extent, subservience to corporate power is a looming threat for common folk. it's crucial to further codify and protect the equivalence of the individual and the corporation.
for instance, contracts (like EULA's) shouldn't be one-sided ultimatums inflicted on the indivudual, but the beginning of a negotiation between two equal parties. corporations would argue that the administrative overhead of this would be prohibitive, but that's the price for access to a lucrative market (and that sweet, sweet revenue stream).
in addition, corporations naturally have asymmetrical information advantages that need to be leveled in the exchange of value contemplated by an economic transaction. we have financial disclosure laws, for example, but they don't go far enough. basic information like the actual prices paid by other customers and the reasons for differences should be made available to the counter-party.
>this part is capitalism working as intended and (mostly) as desired.
I think we need to be careful to define what we mean by "efficient". Do we frame efficient as "churns out the highest revenue / spending ratio" (ironically evaluating capitalism by a metric created by capitalism)? Then yes, that may well be true. But what about the overworked and abused workers? What about the stifled competition? What about the 40% increase in fuel and emissions to reduce shipping from 3 to 2 days? Is it all worth it, to get your consumerist crap a few hours earlier in the post? This are not just rhetorical questions, these are actual questions we need to pose ourselves (e.g. is it worth an excess X million tons of CO2 per year to get prime deliveries Y hours faster).
Would that fit into a definition like "increases overall quality of life the most"? Food for thought, in my opinion.
>for instance, contracts (like EULA's) shouldn't be one-sided ultimatums inflicted on the indivudual, but the beginning of a negotiation between two equal parties.
Isn't this one of the classical critiques of capitalist (e.g. Marx), that it is impossible to have a negotiation between two equal parties when the two parties are so... well, unequal.
Free markets are neither entirely good nor entirely bad. Many things that we would consider to be intrinsic and inextricable parts of the human experience are things which cannot survive the relentless assault of unrestricted Darwinian competition.
A free market is a defect-defect equilibrium, and a defect-defect equilibrium is like fire. It's very powerful, and absolutely necessary; we wouldn't have what we have without fire, and we wouldn't even be human as we are without it, but we must be very careful that it doesn't escape the fireplace and burn the house down.
You ask what would "increase overall quality of life the most?" There are non-economic markets, as well. Mating, for instance. Until very recently it was highly monogamous and strictly regulated. And now it isn't. Winner-take-all.
I don't know where I'm going with this, except to say that our world is the direct product of decisions, our collective decisions... and the people who make them:
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."
— Edward Bernays, Propaganda.
yes, efficiency has multiple definitions (e.g., productive, allocative, etc.), but i think the problems you raise (overwork, anti-competitiveness) are primarily regulatory. communities (governments) set the rules, and capital has to be allocated within the confines of thsoe rules, like 40-hour work weeks and antitrust laws (akin to out-of-bounds rules in sports). similarly, the costs of pollution should be internalized, as logically, it's a form of stealing (taking enjoyment, health and even lives from others).
> "Isn't this one of the classical critiques of capitalis[m]..."
i suppose marx made a similar argument about the tension between capital and labor, which could be further extended to the consumer-citizen as another economic stakeholder. we invented the fictional personhood of the corporation to resolve a legal conundrum (how to interact legally with businesses, separate from owners) and even gave them special privileges to foster innovation (e.g., the corporate veil). it's only fair to maintain equivalency in negotiations in exchange for those privileges.
Profitability has little to do with the overall margins of the market you are in, but in whether you can find places to optimize ROI that your competitors have not.