| Project Detail |
Rethinking Facial Recognition for an Ethical and Inclusive Future Facial recognition technology is found all around us, from unlocking our phones to being used by law enforcement in public spaces. While it promises enhanced security and convenience, it also raises important concerns. Critics argue that it invades privacy, increases surveillance and can be inaccurate, leading to discrimination. These technologies affect different communities in various ways, often with harmful consequences. The ERC-funded fAIces project will tackle these issues by bringing together diverse groups, including scientists, tech professionals, activists, Black communities and artists, to explore their perspectives. Through this collaboration, the project aims to create a new social theory of the face and develop ethical guidelines for a more inclusive future for facial recognition technology. Facial recognition technologies collect billions of faces that are stored for multiple uses spanning individual identification and tracking, to training of deep neural networks, the mainstay of modern artificial intelligence (AI). From tagging a photo on social media or unlocking a computer, to controversial applications of facial recognition in public spaces, schools, workplaces, and law enforcement activities, facial processing technologies have entered almost every aspect of our lives. While expected benefits relate to security and safety, critics highlight that these technologies normalize surveillance and erode privacy, exacerbate discrimination, and contain insurmountable flaws and inaccuracy. The fAIces project asks: What matters in facial recognition technologies, and why? How politics of mattering enact diverse ways of being implicated? Which forms of citizenship and public engagement are affected? How multiple and complex ethical choices emerge? This study develops a novel methodology by which the perspectives of social groups that have never been studied together, which are jointly but antagonistically implicated in facial recognition technologies, are taken into consideration: scientists who conduct research on facial recognition; professionals working in start-ups and technology companies; members of advocacy groups and activists; black communities; and artists who incorporate facial recognition in their work. The fAIces project will produce an innovative social theory of the face through the combination of a new conceptual approach – “etho-assemblages”, which transgresses the idea of pre-given fixed and dichotomic ethical principles – and the generation of original empirical data. Major outcomes are based on expanding ethics and imagining alternative futures, fueling citizenship and public engagement, and fostering opportunities for academic thinking to be inspired by activism, underrepresented groups, and artistic practices. |
