Y'know how you might look at someone and can't help but wonder if they have a genetic disorder? We've taught AI to do the same

Re: Why not test the system on politicians ?

Yeah! The Japanese flag in the centre of their face is often a strong clue.

My old aunt had this tech sussed decades ago; eyes too close together shifty expression, thin lips, all indicators of deficiency. She was a racist too.

Re: Why not test the system on politicians ?

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)? That's fake news!

Re: aaaand another step to enable systemic eugenics

From TFA:

"Both training and testing datasets are largely made up of faces from Caucasian backgrounds, and the algorithm's performance may differ for people of other races"

Right there in TFA. "Caucasians"? "Other races"? Pure USA bullshit racism in one sentence. The USA loves its racism and doesn't want to be parted from it by mere biology and biochemistry, hence the Wikipedia article which is a mishmash of racist statements ("the neutrality of this article is disputed") and some extremely careful putting in the boot in a form that the racists won't notice is criticism.

How often does it have to be repeated that the "Caucasian" thing is pure pseudo-scientific garbage* and there's only been one human race since either the Neanderthals or the Hobbits went extinct?

I hope that sentence was a comment and not in the original research.

*It has its origins in an 18th century German trying to "prove" the superiority of "caucasians" over "mongoloids" - the German idea which, ultimately, led to WW2 in which the "mongoloids" got their chance to make their case.

Re: Yep.

It is an indicator, but not necessarily a cause -> effect.

That is, some genetic defects have multiple resulting deformities. One of those may be physical development.

Other times it's not a guarantee.

But we already have the "facebook is down, must be the phase of the moon" problem with 99% of people, so I don't hold out any hope.

Re: This can only end badly

What else would cause your face to look a certain way besides genetics? I'm not talking about a scar from falling off your bike or a red nose from a cold.

Just because we know a syndrome and know what to look for, do not mean we know what genes are causing this. In a related example neural nets can analyse people's sexual preferences, supposedly with great accuracy. We still don't know what genes are at the basis of this, or even if there is any.

James 51,

Blood tests take time and money.

When a child first presents with symptoms, parents will got to their GP. Who's not an expert in all these esoteric conditions.

As my Mum's GP said to her when I was a few weeks old - "your son can't have [insert genetic condition], it's extremely rare, and I've never seen a case of it".

And at least in the UK you have to get a GP referral to see the actual specialist who can diagnose that yes I do have that rare condition. And the reason my GP had never seen it before was because it was, of course, rare.

So in this case a simple but not very reliable tool to help narrow down possibilities might be useful. As long as it's not giving out so many false positives that the specialists can't get any work done.

The other downside of having a rare genetic condition is that there aren't many qualified doctors you can see. So the last thing I want is all my possible appointments used up by some AI causing GPs to send half their patients in for checking. To be fair, with pointers in the right direction GPs can usually look up what tests they need to do, their problem is just that they're generalists who don't see enough of the odd cases to be able to recognise them without a hint.

For example I ended up in A&E having an X-Ray on a wrist injury a few years ago. And had to wait an extra ten minutes before finding out if it was broken so the doc could use me as a quick exam question for his students. So there's 5 doctors who should be slightly better equipped to do that diagnosis in future.

Not that I'm convinced this AI thing will work, but it could be capable of doing just enough to help GPs a bit for very little cost - so I can see it being quite successful as an approach. Maybe. If they can get it working reasonably well and still persuade users that it's only an indication not absolute truth. The second maybe being a harder job than the first?

Re: Get your Callipers out

Why look to 1930s Germany?

In the US, Indian Indians were banned from becoming citizens because they were not "caucasians". Then someone pointed out that according to the best racist science, Indian Indians were Caucasians. So it was then decided that they still couldn't be citizens because they were not "white".

The rot began in Germany in the 18th century with "racial science" but was enthusiastically adopted in the US. Had it not been, perhaps US industrialists would not have been so keen on Hitler and WW2 might not even have taken place in the West.

Hitler needed IBM and Ford.

Re: Get your Callipers out

What does this have to do with 1930's Germany? Determining the viability, virility, and success of someone's genes has been something humans and ever other species of animal have been doing since life has existed on this planet. Could you imagine how long we'd have made it as a species if we couldn't tell when someone had bad genes before mating with them?

Re: Reading the learning sytem's mind...

Not really, due to the way most machine learning (what this most likely is) works what is in between the input and the output is just a bunch of weighted tensors. You can get the weights and the methods used to combine the inputs to get the outputs, but those don't really give you any more info than the outputs themselves.

Re: Reading the learning sytem's mind...

Because it just makes a matrix of numbers, and picks a number from it.

We don't know what that pixel/number means, we just know it is there.

A difference between getting a slap in the face and getting a slap in the face and someone saying "because you said I was fat". ;)

Re: Is this the

Is this the "new" and "improved" version of phrenology?

Er, no ... facial abnormalities are literally used in medicine to screen for and identify genetic disorders.

The idea itself is science, not pseudo-science. Can't speak to the execution here though.