【按】9月9日《经济学人》封面文章讨论的是“人脸识别”技术。读完本文你将了解：

1. 人脸识别技术目前已经有哪些应用？（手机解锁、安保、购物、广告投放以及识别同性恋……）
2. 人脸识别技术带来哪些好处，同时又存在哪些风险？

Enjoy eating and growing~

Nowhere to hide

What machines can tell from your face

Life in the age of facial recognition

Sep 9th 2017

机器从你脸上可以看到什么

1. THE human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognise each other and is crucial to the formation of complex societies. So is the face’s ability to send emotional signals, whether through an involuntary blush or the artifice of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives, in the office and the courtroom as well as the bar and the bedroom, reading faces, for signs of attraction, hostility, trust and deceit. They also spend plenty of time trying to dissimulate.

dissimulate: When people dissimulate, they hide their true feelings, intentions, or nature.

1. 人脸是一件了不起的作品。面部特征的惊人多样性有助于人们认识彼此, 并且对复杂社会的形成至关重要。脸部传递情感信号的能力, 不管是不由自主的脸红, 还是假笑的诡计, 同样有这些作用。人们花费大量他们清醒时的时间（在办公室、法庭以及酒吧和卧室）阅读面孔, 寻找吸引人、敌意、信任和欺骗的迹象。他们还花大量的时间试图掩饰感情。

2. Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers’ attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. This year Welsh police used it to arrest a suspect outside a football game. In China it verifies the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple’s new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the homescreen.

Ride-hailing encompasses a range of companies and services, including traditional taxis and car services. The overarching idea of ride-hailing is that a customer hires a driver to take them exactly where they need to go, something accomplished by hailing a taxi from the street, calling up a car service on the phone, or virtually hailing a car and driver from an app.

2. 技术正迅速赶上人类阅读面孔的能力。在美国, 教堂用面部识别来追踪信徒的出勤情况；在英国, 零售商用此来发现曾经的 扒手。今年威尔士警察用它在足球比赛外逮捕了一名嫌疑犯。在中国, 它（被用来）验证出租车司机的身份, 允许游客进入景点, 让人们用微笑购物。苹果的新 iPhone 有望用它来解锁主屏。

3. Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental. Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode them. Although faces are peculiar to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, intrude on something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyse images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to notions of privacy, fairness and trust.

Set against: If one argument or fact is set against another, it is considered in relation to it. 把…和…作比较;把…对照…来看
incremental: Incremental is used to describe something that increases in value or worth, often by a regular amount.
promise: If a situation or event promises to have a particular quality or to be a particular thing, it shows signs that it will have that quality or be that thing.
e.g. While it will be fun, the seminar also promises to be most instructive.这次的研讨会不仅会有趣，而且有可能会颇具启发意义。

3. 对比人的技能, 这些应用可能看起来是递增的。一些突破, 如飞行或互联网, 显然改变了人类的能力；面部识别似乎只是对它们进行编码。虽然面孔对个体是独特的, 它们也是公开的, 因此乍一看, 技术并没有侵犯隐私。然而, 低价、快速、大规模地记录、储存和分析面部图像的能力有可能有朝一日对隐私、公平和信任等概念带来根本性的改变。

The final frontier
最后的前沿

4. Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. FindFace, an app in Russia, compares snaps of strangers with pictures on VKontakte, a social network, and can identify people with a 70% accuracy rate. Facebook’s bank of facial images cannot be scraped by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Even if private firms are unable to join the dots between images and identity, the state often can. China’s government keeps a record of its citizens’ faces; photographs of half of America’s adult population are stored in databases that can be used by the FBI. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens’ privacy.

5. 从隐私开始。面孔和其他生物特征数据 (如指纹) 之间的一个很大的区别是它们远距离起作用。任何有电话的人都可以拍一张为脸部识别程序所用的照片。FindFace, 俄罗斯的一个应用程序, 比较陌生人的照片与 VKontakte（一个社会网络）上的照片，并且识别人的准确率达到70% 。Facebook 的面部图像库不能被其他人所获取, 但是，这家硅谷巨头可以，比如说,获取汽车展厅访客的照片, 之后用面部识别来提供汽车广告给他们。即使私人公司无法把图像和身份联系起来, 国家也会经常这样做。中国政府保存其公民面孔的记录；美国半数成年人口的照片存储在 FBI 可以使用的数据库中。执法机构现在在跟踪罪犯的能力方面有一个强大的武器, 但对公民的隐私有巨大的潜在风险。

6. The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analysing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, such as Hajdu-Cheney syndrome, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic people a grasp of social signals they find elusive. But the technology also threatens. Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated that, when shown pictures of one gay man, and one straight man, the algorithm could attribute their sexuality correctly 81% of the time. Humans managed only 61%. In countries where homosexuality is a crime, software which promises to infer sexuality from a face is an alarming prospect.

condition: If someone has a particular condition, they have an illness or other medical problem.
e.g. Doctors suspect he may have a heart condition.医生怀疑他可能有心脏病。
a grasp of: A grasp of something is an understanding of it.
e.g. They have a good grasp of foreign languages.他们外语掌握得很好。
elusive: an elusive idea or quality is difficult to describe or understand
e.g. For me, the poem has an elusive quality.

5. 脸不只是一个名字标签。它还显示了许多其他信息, 而且机器也可以读取它。这再次有可能带来好处。一些公司正在通过分析面部来为罕见的遗传疾病提供自动诊断, 如豪-谢综合征（一种罕见的代谢性骨病——译注）, 远远早于不用这种方法诊断。测量情绪的系统可能会让自闭症患者理解他们难以描述的社交信号。但这项技术也有威胁。斯坦福大学的研究人员已经证明, 当分析一个男同性恋者和一个异性恋者的照片时, 算法准确判断他们的性取向的可能性有81%。而人判断正确的概率只有61%。在同性恋还是一种罪行的国家, 那些可能从面部推断性取向的软件意味着一个令人担忧的前景。

Keys, wallet, balaclava
钥匙，钱包，帽兜

6. Less violent forms of discrimination could also become common. Employers can already act on their prejudices to deny people a job. But facial recognition could make such bias routine, enabling firms to filter all job applications for ethnicity and signs of intelligence and sexuality. Nightclubs and sports grounds may face pressure to protect people by scanning entrants’ faces for the threat of violence—even though, owing to the nature of machine-learning, all facial-recognition systems inevitably deal in probabilities. Moreover, such systems may be biased against those who do not have white skin, since algorithms trained on data sets of mostly white faces do not work well with different ethnicities. Such biases have cropped up in automated assessments used to inform courts’ decisions about bail and sentencing.

deal in: to be interested or involved in something
e.g. As a scientist, I do not deal in speculation.
crop up: if a problem crops up, it happens or appears suddenly and in an unexpected way = arise
inform: formal to have an influence on sth
e.g. Religion informs every aspect of their lives.
e.g. These guidelines will be used to inform any future decisions.

6. 不那么粗暴的歧视也会变得普遍。雇主们已经可以根据自己的偏见来拒绝给予别人工作。但是, 面部识别可以使这种偏见更常规, 使企业能够过滤所有的工作申请来查看种族、智力征象和性取向。夜总会和运动场可能面临这样的压力：通过扫描进入者的脸来判断其暴力威胁来保护人们——尽管, 由于机器学习的特性, 所有的面部识别系统不可避免地涉及到概率。此外, 这种系统可能对那些没有白皮肤的人有偏见, 因为基于大多数白人面孔的数据组而被训练出来的算法对不同族裔就运行得不好。这种偏见在被用来影响法院关于 保释和判刑决定的自动化评估中已经出现 。

7. Eventually, continuous facial recording and gadgets that paint computerised data onto the real world might change the texture of social interactions. Dissembling helps grease the wheels of daily life. If your partner can spot every suppressed yawn, and your boss every grimace of irritation, marriages and working relationships will be more truthful, but less harmonious. The basis of social interactions might change, too, from a set of commitments founded on trust to calculations of risk and reward derived from the information a computer attaches to someone’s face. Relationships might become more rational, but also more transactional.

texture: the essential quality of something
grease the wheels OR oil the wheels: help something to work more smoothly and easily

7. 最终, 持续的面部记录和将计算机化数据绘制到现实世界的工具可能会改变社交互动的基本特性。掩饰有助于让日常生活更容易。如果你的伴侣可以发现每一个压抑的哈欠, 你的老板能发现每一个恼怒的面部扭曲, 婚姻和工作关系将更加真实, 但更不和谐。社交互动的基础也可能发生变化, 从一组建立在信任上的承诺, 变为源于计算机加于某人面部信息的风险和回报的算计。人际关系可能会变得更加理性, 但也会更加具有交易性。

8. In democracies, at least, legislation can help alter the balance of good and bad outcomes. European regulators have embedded a set of principles in forthcoming data-protection regulation, decreeing that biometric information, which would include “faceprints”, belongs to its owner and that its use requires consent—so that, in Europe, unlike America, Facebook could not just sell ads to those car-showroom visitors. Laws against discrimination can be applied to an employer screening candidates’ images. Suppliers of commercial face-recognition systems might submit to audits, to demonstrate that their systems are not propagating bias unintentionally. Firms that use such technologies should be held accountable.

decree: If someone in authority decrees that something must happen, they decide or state this officially.
submit to: To submit to something means to undergo or accept it. You must submit to a search if the police have a warrant.

8. 在民主政体中, 至少立法有助于平衡好的和坏的结果。欧洲监管机构在即将出台的数据保护条例中嵌入了一套原则, 规定包括“脸纹”在内的生物特征 信息属于其所有者, 其使用需要征得同意——因此, 在欧洲，不像在美国，Facebook不能随便向那些汽车展厅的访客展示广告。禁止歧视的法律可适用于雇主筛选候选人的形象。商业面孔识别系统的供应商可能接受审计, 以证明他们的系统没有不经意地传播偏见。使用此类技术的公司应承担责任。

9. Such rules cannot alter the direction of travel, however. Cameras will only become more common with the spread of wearable devices. Efforts to bamboozle facial-recognition systems, from sunglasses to make-up, are already being overtaken; research from the University of Cambridge shows that artificial intelligence can reconstruct the facial structures of people in disguise. Google has explicitly turned its back on matching faces to identities, for fear of its misuse by undemocratic regimes. Other tech firms seem less picky. Amazon and Microsoft are both using their cloud services to offer face recognition; it is central to Facebook’s plans. Governments will not want to forgo its benefits. Change is coming. Face up to it.

bamboozle: To bamboozle someone means to confuse them greatly and often trick them.
turned its back on: to reject sb/sth that you have previously been connected with
Face up to: to confront or deal directly with someone or something previously avoided
e.g. faced up to my fears

9. 然而, 这种规则不能改变前行的方向。随着穿戴式设备的普及, 摄像头的使用将变得越来越普遍。欺骗面部识别系统的努力, 从太阳镜到化妆, 已经无效；剑桥大学的研究表明, 人工智能可以重建伪装者的面部结构。谷歌已经明确地拒绝了将面孔与身份相匹配, 因为担心它会被独裁的政权滥用。其他科技公司似乎不那么挑剔。亚马逊和微软都在使用他们的云服务来提供人脸识别；而这是 Facebook 计划的核心。政府不会愿意放弃自己的利益。变革即将来临。抬起脸面对它。

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原文出处：经济学人

翻译：七呵夫

本译文仅供个人研习、欣赏语言之用，谢绝任何转载及用于任何商业用途。本译文不代表本人立场。本人同意简书平台在接获有关著作权人的通知后，删除文章。