This summer will be remembered as the moment that facial recognition technology was, suddenly, everywhere. From British shoppers in King's Cross to Hong Kong protesters, people around the world have found themselves under the watchful scrutiny of artificial intelligence.
今年夏天将被铭记为人脸识别技术突然间变得无所不在的时刻。从伦敦国王十字站(King's Cross)的英国购物者到香港的抗议者，世界各地的人们发现自己处在人工智能的监视之下。
Last week a UK court found that police trials of facial recognition technology in Welsh public spaces did not contravene either human rights or data protection laws. This will come as a relief to British police forces which are keen to deploy the technology, despite the lack of a clear government mandate to do so. Yet the enthusiasm is difficult to square with the proven fallibility of current machines, which have been shown to be inaccurate, unreliable and biased. It often fails to do what it says on the tin — that is, recognise faces, particularly if those faces belong to women and people of colour.
英国一家法庭最近裁定，警方在威尔士公共场所进行的人脸识别技术试验，没有违反人权或数据保护法律。这将让热衷于部署这项技术的英国各地警方松一口气，尽管他们没有明确的政府授权。然而，这种热情与现有系统的易错性不合拍，这些系统已被证明不准确、不可靠和有偏见。这类技术往往起不到其明示的作用——识别人脸，尤其是女性和有色人种的脸部。