So are people in general, doesn't mean we're gonna kill everyone does it?

For everything there is a use that could enable any dystopia, doesn't mean that it will actually enable it.

The facial recognition cat is out of the bag.

If AWS is "enabling dystopia", so are Linux and Ethernet.

Linux and Ethernet do not "Easily add intelligent image and video analysis to your applications."

Any image recognition API is likely to heavily rely on them.

You can do positive things with Rekognition. You can do dystopian things with it, too. Get AWS to stop doing it and folks will just use GCP and Azure's similar offerings.

This is a problem that fundamentally needs government regulation to be successfully addressed.

> You can do positive things with Rekognition.

[Citation needed]

I’ve recently worked on an app that uses it for an entirely harmless image classification feature.

This thread seems to be following the general logic that because Amazon is a big company that uses AI/ML, they must be using it for evil. I’ve never seen a thread on HN that accuses OpenCV of facilitating dystopia, or compares the project to selling guns to a serial killer.

There’s a healthy debate to be had about the risks of facial recognition, but I don’t think that it gets inherently worse when a company like Amazon streamlines the process. This particular technology is out of the bag.

[Citation provided]

The NYT (and C-SPAN, apparently) uses it to identify members of Congress:

https://open.nytimes.com/how-the-new-york-times-uses-softwar...

Shutterfly is apparently using it for image categorization:

http://ir.shutterfly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/...

I use Google Photo's image recognition all the time. I wish it was 1000x better but it's still amazing.

I uploaded about 120k photos including all my father's photos I had scanned. (about 4000)

I injured my toe when I was 10yrs old. Searched in my Google photos "toes". Found the picture pretty quickly. Have had similar success finding pictures of my childhood dogs. Can also search by people (face recognition).

It's still got a long way to go but I love it when it works.

Amazon Rekognition helps Marinus Analytics fight human trafficking http://www.marinusanalytics.com/articles/2017/10/17/amazon-r...

Sure, but the scale and degree matters, it's not a simple 1-bit binary equation.