At its core, the purpose of digital technology is to provide exact answers that are robust to noise. For something to be digital, there are a few criteria that must be met. Digital technology: has a fixed number of symbols/inputs, can reliably distinguish the difference between these symbols, is able to solve any problem that can be represented by these symbols regardless of the medium, and can detect errors at each point and correct them.
Recognizing faces and facial expressions is a distinctly human process. It is a defense mechanism carefully crafted by natural selection to help humans discern who is a friend and who is a threat. In our modern digital age, facial recognition technology has been developed to help governments keep tabs on their citizens.
According to the website Kaspersky, “the face capture process transforms analog information (a face) into a set of digital information (data) based on the person’s facial features.” This information is then compared against databases like Facebook to find a match. A human brain performs this exact same process, but it does not have the capacity to remember such exact details of a face, and it certainly does not have the ability to remember so many faces.
So, is facial recognition a digital process, right? I would like to argue otherwise. While law enforcement officials may want us to believe that they have crafted a perfectly accurate system that is robust to noise, there is significant evidence to suggest otherwise. An article I found on Yahoo News states that “American Amara Majeed was accused of terrorism by the Sri Lankan police in 2019. Robert Williams was arrested outside his house in Detroit and detained in jail for 18 hours for allegedly stealing watches in 2020. Randal Reid spent six days in jail in 2022 for supposedly using stolen credit cards in a state he’d never even visited.” How many times have you seen someone who looked so familiar, but it turns out you had never seen them before in your life? The same thing is happening with facial recognition, but the consequences are much higher than ever before.
I believe that facial recognition technology perfectly represents the new digital age that we live in. Today, being digital means taking a function performed by the human brain (an analog device) and making it robust to noise. Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are doing the same thing with other mental processes performed by the brain. While these new devices and processes are continuously improving, I don’t believe that they have reached a level of efficiency yet to be sufficiently considered robust to noise. In the case of facial recognition, it still struggles to distinguish differences in the symbols it uses.
https://usa.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/what-is-facial-recognition#
https://www.cnil.fr/en/facial-recognition-debate-living-challenges
https://news.yahoo.com/news/face-recognition-technology-follows-long-134215671.html
Edited for spelling and grammar by ChatGPT 3.5