How would you feel if you found out that you were being suspected of crimes before they were even committed based off of facial recognition? That’s exactly what China is doing today. China is using artificial intelligence to decide whether or not someone is more likely to commit a crime based off of their facial features. Sounds crazy right? Well it’s absurd. You cannot possibly predict whether or not someone will commit a crime based off of how slanted someone’s eyes are or what degree their nose is at. But China’s vice-minister of science and technology says that crime prediction will become a key factor in A.I. technology. 

Innocent people are being convicted of crimes they didn’t commit way too often due to facial recognition. Amazon’s release of facial recognition which is used by many police departments and organizations has wrongly matched faces to the wrong identities. A test was set up using the lawmakers facial recognition and they were matched up with people who were convicted of crimes already, proving that facial recognition is simply not reliable. Not only is it unreliable but it’s not morally correct. Judging someone based off of their facial features isn’t something the justice system is supposed to follow. It’s profiling. Unless they are looking for someone that fits the description of a suspect they are looking for, one cannot simply use facial recognition to decide if a person is likely to commit a crime.

Facial recognition is also an invasion of privacy. Society is being abused by artificial intelligence with regards to constant surveillance under law enforcement. Again, China is already abusing facial recognition with arresting citizens for extremely minor crimes like jaywalking. Which then leads back to the question is the right individual being arrested or was there an error in the technology. In the U.S. every individual is innocent until proven guilty and if the only reason an individual is being detained is because of the use of facial recognition then something must be done about it. The technology is too inaccurate and inconsistent for it to be this dependent on.