Megan Rolfes

Great choice in article here! This topic seems like it will be very important to discuss as this technology continues to grow. As for how I would handle this, obviously the technology can be used to help prevent theft and it should be used that way. I believe that the store must post a notice on its doors that states that it is using this technology so that anyone entering the building knows that their likeness will be recorded, similar to signs on buildings that indicate security cameras. Realistically, you are in a business or a public place when these cameras are taking images of you and because of that, you do not have a reason to assume anonymity or privacy. For that reason, as long as there are clear signs posted about the use of this technology, and the data is only used for the stated purpose, I believe that businesses should be allowed to use this technology to help protect their assets.

While this certainly has potential for helping with major issues facing retail and similar industries such as shoplifting, I can certainly see where people are coming from when they state privacy concerns with the implementation of such a technology. Forefront on my mind as a major potential concern is the ability to link certain customers to their past purchasing data as they come in to a store. I could see this leading to discrimination against customers who won’t spend what the store considers to be enough money. While that is unlikely to be a concern at places such as grocery stores, it could definitely become a problem at higher end stores where people already face discrimination based on any number of factors. That being said, it is certainly interesting to see how it could be used to catch shoplifters and help stores protect against shrinkage.

Facial recognition making its way into the retail world in my opinion is detrimental. Having a system that logs shoplifters facial records into a database for access to shopkeepers in multiple locations may cause shopkeepers to rely on this information heavily and create a virtual retail prison. What I mean by this is that someone can shoplift from one store brand and then become labeled as a shoplifter in another store and ultimately become banned from shopping in their network. Another issue to consider is privacy regulations as mentioned. What if the shoplifter is under age but appears to look older. How will the system deal with underage shoplifters? I think facial recognition shouldn’t be the combating factor for shoplifting unless they place heavy regulations for the shopkeepers that ensure no abuse of the system.

I agree that there is definitely an aspect of threat coming with these new advances in technology. A few years computers did not have any capabilities of consuming unstructured data such as texts and images. Today we have artificial intelligence, which can creatively build new human faces or create new argumentative texts, which are barely distinguishable from the ones written by humans. Especially, your mention of nonsensical, made up information is scary. We have already experienced that fake news and purposefully placed misinformation influenced the U.S. elections, what will be happening when the content will be even more convincing? I believe the biggest issue is that these fake news could be created at a speed no human could ever achieve and thus reach a great enough audience to cause significant damage.

That is very interesting to me that AI is capible of writing a realistic article like this. This leads to many important questions. For example, if AI can be used to write an article, could it eventually be used to make new discoveries? I’ve heard of theories where scientists believe that they can import the brain “data” of some of the smartest scientists to attempt to make new discoveries. While this seems like a good thing, it does raise some ethical questions about AI and how it should interact with us.

Unfortunately, I do think AI is somewhat blurring the lines between conversations. For example, most customer service applications use a chat bot to gather initial information. While this does speed up the process, some people do not like the feeling of talking to a computer. Overall, AI will definitely change how we communicate with each other.

After I read your piece about Apple’s inability to quality test and questions surrounding whether or not new bugs were present, I was reminded of a quote that is similar to “Programming is a race between the engineers attempting to make better programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots.” I think that there are clearly more bugs present and no matter how much quality testing is done, a new user will always come along and find a potential exploit.
What I think is much more concerning is the fact that Apple took so long to fix the bug. If the bug/exploit was even more potentially dangerous, one would hope that Apple would act immediately, but it seems that the firm chose not to. In the wrong person’s hands, one could begin to track people by using the aforementioned exploit – extremely dangerous. I think that Apple and other large technology giants are also forced by the public to push out software as quickly as possible to recoup money spent on the research and development of those products. As a result, often times, you get faulty software, just like in this instance. Great article!