Technically there is average IQ by country site, just google. Not that difficult to get faces by country. Put them together. Of course there are regulations and ethic. But in some cases it should work well and is more or less acceptable. Like on Down syndrome or alcohol/drugs abuse. Also age detection should work. So, it can be used within legal and acceptable range.
While I also took the parent comment as sarcasm and see a valid critique in there, what's really ridiculous here is your comment.
Determining age, race and gender from an image is possible in the majority of cases. It becomes problematic when these are used as an indicator for predicting other variables (like IQ). This is a very real problem, and your argumentation just distracts from that.
> It's totally possible to estimate ... race from a face.
It's possible to estimate people into groups of stereotypes as determined by the people who created the models. But race/ethnicity? How can one do that when there is no formal taxonomy? Take the DeepFace example of how they are dong this.[0] They use FairFace to train on. FairFace "labels are East Asian, Southeast Asian, Indian, Black, White, Middle-Eastern and Latino-Hispanic." But the DeepFace guy adds "Merging both east and southeast Asian races into a single Asian race would be better."
This one can stereotype people into "Indian, Black, White, Middle-Eastern and Latino-Hispanic"; apparently they somehow know through images which Latinos are Spanish speaking and/or from counties related to Spain. And let's just merge east and southeast Asian people together into one "Asian"; never mind that many of these Asian countries are homogeneous societies both ethnically and culturally (and as applies to this, drastically different facially) with varying ethnic sub-groups within them.
All that before even getting started on the US. Genetically, many Americans are "multi-race", even the ones getting grouped into White or Black. This is a touchy subject for folks, but will leave this link[1]; it was so common, some states went out of their way to make sure "invisible blackness" was not getting by them.
In the same vein, Native tribes had their own rules for what to do with their "mixed" children. Lucky for them, if these kids were also "white" (though this is not the grouping DeepFace would put them; then they had a shot at getting land or payments when their tribes were...relocated) I mean there is no taxonomy for Natives in DeepFace so I guess they just go with other brown people here? I would not at all say that it is totally possible to estimate race, unless you are only looking for what will amount skin tone, even when that is not what they think they are doing.
Finally, this part of DeepFace's post on race/ethnicity[0]: "Recognizing ethnicity from face photos could contribute a huge contribution to missing children, search investigations, refugee crisis and genealogy research. " How? Me and a couple of my siblings offspring would be in at least 3 different groups using this (and not based on melanin production, we all look very not-related) . The DeepFace people must live in a very homogeneous society to think their logic on this subject is anything more than stereotyping.
Your 20W meat computer does it in the background without you having any control of this process, is that unethical, too?
Besides, people not being the same is a fact of reality which really shouldn't be suppressed from consciousness too much, but that's perhaps a discussion for a different thread.
Part of the core human experience is to estimate these parameters in social settings. It's how we make friends, evaluate social situations, and navigate life. I can't imagine being told we should wear blindfolds. Why would it not be appropriate for computers to do so?
It's not like we'd be using these algorithms to make hiring decisions. We already have a lot of protective legislation on the books.
Ethically viable? That threshold has been crossed a long time ago when any of these related sets of technocratic tyranny enabling abilities were developed.
There are now cameras everywhere and now facial recognition is being integrated into everything, on top of all the other ways of essentially harvesting human rights and dignity for profit and oppressive purposes.
Your mention of ethical viability seems rather late to the situation, a bit of a feel of closing the barn door after the horses have bolted.
What humanity is creating here is more akin to the Matrix than people are able or willing to even acknowledge, even if it is many years out and turns out even worse than the limited imagination of people from the past. Maybe Her and The Terminator are more immediate phases of human development, but the trajectory is clearly there when you simply look at humanity’s tendencies over history and even now. Just as an example, did you ever think you would see something so nakedly and blatantly homicidal and evil as what the Israelis have done and are even still doing in Gaza? Does any of that indicate that humanity is going to do anything responsible and ethical?
The only purpose of appeals to ethics and morality appear to have been to disarm the dominant power by the subordinate power that aspires to become the dominant power in the world, an amoral, unethical, nakedly narcissistic and psychopathic power.
