Physiognomy's New Clothes

Source: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Margaret Mitchell and Alexander Todorov
Affiliation: Medium

In this article, the authors discuss the history of physiognomy, or "scientific racism," and how some machine learning scientists today are using deep learning to perpetuate this scientific racism. Physiognomy is the pseudoscientific belief that someone's facial features can are related to their personality, beliefs, criminality, etc. The authors provide an overview of how physigonomy has manifested itself in history. They also discuss how two academic papers have been published that claim to use deep learning to predict criminality from faces. The authors discuss why these machine learning models are deeply flawed.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence , Computer Science , Emotion Recognition , Facial Recognition , Physiognomy , Tech Ethics