24-08-2020

MonDAY, August 24, 2020
5
Face masks give facial recognition
software hard times
Alex Hern
It is an increasingly common
modern annoyance: arriving at
the front of the queue to pay in
a shop, pulling out a
smartphone for a hygienic
contact-free payment, and
staring down at an error
message because your phone
fails to recognise your masked
face.
As more and more nations
mandate masks to prevent the
spread of coronavirus,
technology companies are
scrambling to keep up with the
changing world. But some
experts are warning that the
change may have to start with
users themselves.
Apple's Face ID is the most
well-known example of a
consumer facial verification
system. The technology, which
uses a grid of infrared dots to
measure the physical shape of
a user's face, secures access to
the company's iPhones and
iPads, as well as other features
such as Apple Pay.
But although the service can
work through many barriers,
including heavy makeup, thick
beards and even sunglasses, it
fails with masks. Users can still
avoid some hassle with a littleknown
feature called express
Transit, which allows them to
use Apple Pay on public
transport
without
authentication.
But other than that, there has
only been one tweak to the
system to account for the new
reality. In mid-May, Apple
launched an update that
removed the delay between
failing to recognise a face and
showing a passcode for an
alternative authentication.
That speeds up the fallback
option, but is less than many
had hoped for by now.
Unfortunately, says Andrew
Bud, chief executive of facial
verification company iProov,
that might be the best we see in
the near term.
Face masks do not actually
make it significantly harder to
recognise a person, Bud says.
"Modern face recognition
relies quite heavily on the area
around the eyes. The old
paradigm - measuring the
geometry of the shape of the
face in general - that was
obsolete five years ago."
Face masks make it harder for a system to distinguish between a real face
and a spoof.
Photo: Pavlo gonchar
Instead, the problem masks
have is that they make it harder
for a system to distinguish
between a real face and a spoof.
That task, called "genuine
presence assurance", is at the
core of facial verification - and
the reason why Bud thinks we
may not see alternatives arising
any time soon. "Most genuine
presence assurance solutions
will struggle to deal with a large
mask covering the majority of
someone's face."
That problem has also
plagued alternatives. In 2017,
for instance, Samsung brought
out the Galaxy S8, a new
smartphone with iris
recognition. Within a month,
researchers had posted a video
of them unlocking the same
phone with just a photo of
someone's eye hidden behind a
contact lens. "By far [the] most
expensive part of the iris
biometry hack was the
purchase of the Galaxy S8," the
group wrote.
Other technologies might
show more promise. Bud's
company, which provides
verification services to the UK
government, has developed a
palm verification system that
can successfully recognise
people from a smartphone
picture of their hand - with the
same protection against
artificial spoofs. But ultimately,
he warns, the most likely
outcome is a change in
attitudes.
"In the future, when you
want to authenticate, you just
briefly take your mask off. We
think that's OK. We as a
company are focused on
usability, and that strikes me as
being an imposition you can
live with, even in the world of
Covid."
There is one silver lining. The
problems that facial
verification systems have with
masks have also been plaguing
manufacturers of a similar
technology, facial recognition -
used for surveillance purposes,
to track people using CCTV
footage. A July study by the US
government revealed that
widespread mask wearing
reduced the accuracy of facial
recognition algorithms by
between 5% and 50%.
tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple, has presided over an almost nine-fold increase in its share
price.
Photo: Bloomberg
Apple becomes a $2tn company
MArK SWeney
Apple became the first US $2tn
company on Wednesday, only two years
after becoming the first to be valued at
$1tn by Wall Street. The technology
powerhouse behind the iPhone needed
to hit a share price of $467.77 to reach
the milestone and moved through that
barrier during mid-morning trading on
the nasdaq exchange on Wednesday,
although it closed down just below that
historic level at $1.979tn (£1.51tn).
The figure means the company, cofounded
to sell personal computers by
the late Steve Jobs in 1976, is valued at
significantly more than half of the US's
total tax take of 2019.
Apple hit a $1tn market capitalisation
in 2018, 42 years after it was founded
and 117 years after US Steel became the
first company to be valued at $1bn in
1901. It is not the first company in the
world to have been valued at $2tn. Saudi
Aramco was briefly valued at that level
after the Saudi state-backed oil company
made its stock market debut last year,
but it then slipped back.
The iMac to iPhone maker has so far
proved to be coronavirus-proof,
crushing Wall Street expectations in
each of the last two quarters. Apple had
expected to take a hit, issuing a revenue
warning and withdrawing financial
guidance in February well before the
pandemic had gone global. Instead, its
share price has risen more than 50% this
year, adding more than $1tn to its value
since March. It is now worth $300bn
more than the next largest listed US
company, Jeff Bezos' Amazon.
However, the company's rise to tech
behemoth status has seen its carefully
cultivated image as the plucky challenger
replaced by accusations it is now abusing
its power. last month, Apple faced
accusations of anti-competitive
behaviour at a heated congressional
hearing in Washington. And last week,
Fortnite-maker epic Games launched
legal action against Apple and Google
after the enormously popular video
game was removed from their app stores
for violating Apple's strict payment
guidelines.
The Apple juggernaut has successfully
navigated major changes in recent years
as Jony Ive, the British chief architect of
groundbreaking designs from the iMac
to the iPhone who reinvigorated the
business alongside Jobs, left the
company after almost 30 years last year.
Jobs passed away in 2011 and his
successor, Apple lifer Tim Cook, has bet
big on moving the company away from
an over-dependence on its stalwart
product, the iPhone. Cook has presided
over an almost nine-fold increase in
Apple's share price since taking over, a
run that saw the 59-year-old join the
billionaire club last week.
It has been Apple's push into services
and so-called wearable products that has
really paid off, making more than $13bn
in the last quarter alone. The company
has moved into Spotify territory with its
subscription music offering, Apple
Music.
AI will create useless class of human
At the inset, added city details of Queens in new York.
google Maps gets worldwide
visual overhaul
TeCHnOlOGy DeSK
Google Maps is getting a visual overhaul
worldwide, finally letting users distinguish
forest from floodplain, and desert from
snowfield, at a glance. Alongside the changes to
natural environments, a new set of maps will be
rolling out in major cities, beginning with
london, new york City and San Francisco,
aiming to more accurately represent the builtup
environment to help pedestrians and
cyclists navigate.
"Google Maps has high-definition satellite
imagery for over 98% of the world's
population," said Sujoy Banerjee, a product
manager for the app. "With a new colourmapping
algorithmic technique, we're able to
take this imagery and translate it into an even
more comprehensive, vibrant map of an area at
global scale.
"exploring a place gives you a look at its
natural features - so you can easily distinguish
tan, arid beaches and deserts from blue lakes,
rivers, oceans and ravines. you can know at a
glance how lush and green a place is with
vegetation, and even see if there are snow caps
on the peaks of mountaintops."
The new detail comes from algorithmic
analysis of satellite imagery, which attempts to
automatically discern the nature of the
environment. It then adds new colour on to the
map in an attempt to reflect the varieties of
landscape.
rather than following a predefined key, as
with a paper map, the automatic colouring
allows for different features to be emphasised
according to need. In Iceland, the land can be
darker green depending on the level of tree
cover, but in Washington State, a darker green
Photo: google
is instead used to detail the borders of Mt
rainer national park.
Those changes are due to roll out "starting
this week", Google says. Alongside the newly
detailed terrain, the company is also launching
more detailed maps for selected urban areas,
starting with london, new york City and San
Francisco.
Those updates will include visual
representations of features such as pavements,
road widths and pedestrian crossings and
islands. That, Banerjee says, is "crucial
information if you have accessibility needs, like
wheelchair or stroller requirements. These
details are particularly helpful as more people
are opting to walk or take other forms of solo
transportation due to the pandemic."
Google's rival Apple is in the process of
overhauling its own mapping service,
introducing a Street View-like feature dubbed
"look around" and improving the detail of rural
and urban areas. Apple's refreshed maps,
which were first launched in California's Bay
Area in 2018, will finally hit the UK, Ireland
and Canada this autumn, after expanding to
Japan, the first non-US deployment, earlier
this year.
A few American and Chinese cities will also
receive cycling directions in Apple's update,
more than 10 years after Google introduced the
feature. Competition between rival mapping
companies has been steadily intensifying, as
Google and Apple seek to reposition their
respective mapping apps as more fullyfeatured
"local search" offerings. As well as
taking users from A to B, Google Maps can now
be used to book restaurants or hotels, hire cabs
and place orders for takeaway or delivery
meals.
IAn SAMPle
It is hard to miss the
warnings. In the race to
make computers more
intelligent than us, humanity
will summon a demon, bring
forth the end of days, and
code itself into oblivion.
Instead of silicon assistants
we'll build silicon assassins.
The doomsday story of an
evil AI has been told a
thousand times. But our fate
at the hand of clever cloggs
robots may in fact be worse -
to summon a class of
eternally useless human
beings. At least that is the
future predicted by yuval
noah Harari, a lecturer at
the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, whose new book
says more of us will be
pushed out of employment
by intelligent robots and on
to the economic scrap heap.
Harari rose to prominence
when his 2014 book,
Sapiens: A Brief History of
Humankind, became an
international bestseller. Two
years on, the book is still
being talked about. Bill
Gates asked Melinda to read
it on holiday. It would spark
great conversations around
the dinner table, he told her.
We know because he said so
on his blog this week.
When a book is a hit, the
publisher wants more. And
so Harari has been busy. His
next title, Homo Deus: A
Brief History of Tomorrow,
is not out until September
but early copies have begun
to circulate. Its cover states
simply: "What made us
sapiens will make us gods".
It follows on from where
Sapiens ends, in a
provocative, and certainly
speculative, gallop through
the hopes and dreams that
will shape the future of the
species.
And the nightmares.
Because even as the book has
humans gaining godlike
powers, that is only one
eventuality Harari explores.
It might all go pear-shaped,
of course: we sapiens have a
knack for hashing things up.
Instead of morphing into
omnipotent, all-knowing
masters of the universe, the
human mob might end up
jobless and aimless, whiling
away our days off our nuts
on drugs, with Vr headsets
strapped to our faces.
Welcome to the next
revolution.
Harari calls it "the rise of
the useless class" and ranks
it as one of the most dire
threats of the 21st century. In
a nutshell, as artificial
intelligence gets smarter,
more humans are pushed
out of the job market. no one
knows what to study at
college, because no one
knows what skills learned at
20 will be relevant at 40.
Before you know it, billions
of people are useless, not
through chance but by
definition.
"I'm aware that these
kinds of forecasts have been
around for at least 200 years,
from the beginning of the
Industrial revolution, and
they never came true so far.
It's basically the boy who
cried wolf," says Harari. "But
in the original story of the
boy who cried wolf, in the
end, the wolf actually comes,
and I think that is true this
time."
The way Harari sees it,
humans have two kinds of
ability that make us useful:
physical ones and cognitive
ones. The Industrial
revolution may have led to
machines that did away with
humans in jobs needing
strength and repetitive
actions. But the takeover was
not overwhelming. With
cognitive powers that
machines could not touch,
humans were largely safe in
their work. For how much
longer, though? AIs are now
beginning to outperform
humans in the cognitive
field. And while new types of
jobs will certainly emerge,
we cannot be sure, says
Harari, that humans will do
them better than AIs,
computers and robots.
AIs do not need more
intelligence than humans to
transform the job market.
They need only enough to do
the task well. And that is not
far off, Harari says.
"Children alive today will
face the consequences. Most
of what people learn in
school or in college will
probably be irrelevant by the
time they are 40 or 50. If
they want to continue to
have a job, and to
understand the world, and
be relevant to what is
happening, people will have
to reinvent themselves again
and again, and faster and
faster."
even so, jobless humans
are not useless humans. In
the US alone, 93 million
people do not have jobs, but
they are still valued. Harari,
it turns out, has a specific
definition of useless. "I
choose this very upsetting
term, useless, to highlight
the fact that we are talking
about useless from the
viewpoint of the economic
and political system, not
from a moral viewpoint," he
says. Modern political and
economic structures were
built on humans being useful
to the state: most notably as
workers and soldiers, Harari
argues. With those roles
taken on by machines, our
political and economic
systems will simply stop
attaching much value to
humans, he argues.
none of this puts us in the
realm of the gods. In fact, it
leads Harari to even more
bleak predictions. Though
the people may no longer
provide for the state, the
state may still provide for
them. "What might be far
more difficult is to provide
people with meaning, a
reason to get up in the
morning," Harari says. For
those who don't cheer at the
prospect of a post-work
world, satisfaction will be a
commodity to pay for: our
moods and happiness
controlled by drugs; our
excitement and emotional
attachments found not in the
world outside, but in
immersive Vr.
All of which leads to the
question: what should we
do? "First of all, take it very
seriously," Harari says. "And
make it a part of the political
agenda, not only the
scientific agenda. This is
something that shouldn't be
left to scientists and private
corporations. They know a
lot about the technical stuff,
the engineering, but they
don't necessarily have the
vision and the legitimacy to
decide the future course of
humankind."
Most of what people learn in school will be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50. Photo: Antonio olmos