The top of the story features an example where human recognition was not sufficient:
> One Tuesday night in October 2018, John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery store chain, was having dinner at Cipriani, an upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, when his daughter, Andrea, walked in. She was on a date with a man Mr. Catsimatidis didn’t recognize. After the couple sat down at another table, Mr. Catsimatidis asked a waiter to go over and take a photo.
> Mr. Catsimatidis then uploaded the picture to a facial recognition app, Clearview AI, on his phone. The start-up behind the app has a database of billions of photos, scraped from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Within seconds, Mr. Catsimatidis was viewing a collection of photos of the mystery man, along with the web addresses where they appeared: His daughter’s date was a venture capitalist from San Francisco.
> “I wanted to make sure he wasn’t a charlatan,” said Mr. Catsimatidis, who then texted the man’s bio to his daughter.
So it's OK these days to randomly ask a waiter to go and snap a photo of some other customer in a restaurant? Maybe call me old-fashioned, but that strikes me as outrageous behavior.
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we
are. They are different. ”
The karmic payback is that soon he’ll be walking around with a live #iamabillionaire tag on his head, which is not entirely a good thing for him, if you know what I mean.
Of course, he’s welcome to never leave home, in a prison of his own creation.
Billionaires are only occasionally interested in mingling with the hoi polloi. Businesses that cater to them provide all sorts of separate entrances, security staff, etc. to prevent them from suffering the proletarian gaze. They don't care what we think of them, so long as they never have to know about it.
It's a "good" idea though. I'm sure that several of the dozens of inevitable similar AR apps focused on child molesters will sell well. Someone will have a good time hacking those apps...
I think that is the first problem really. People tend to be goddamned idiots doing the equivalent of looking for burglars wearing striped shirts and carrying swag bags marked with dollar signs. It is all about servicing confirmation bias. They think Elizabeth Holmes is a successful entrepreneur and anyone in a cheap suit is a fraudster.
So many of the common preconceptions are idiotic. Like "someone looking like a sexual predator". They can look like literally anyone.
> One Tuesday night in October 2018, John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery store chain, was having dinner at Cipriani, an upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, when his daughter, Andrea, walked in. She was on a date with a man Mr. Catsimatidis didn’t recognize. After the couple sat down at another table, Mr. Catsimatidis asked a waiter to go over and take a photo.
> Mr. Catsimatidis then uploaded the picture to a facial recognition app, Clearview AI, on his phone. The start-up behind the app has a database of billions of photos, scraped from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Within seconds, Mr. Catsimatidis was viewing a collection of photos of the mystery man, along with the web addresses where they appeared: His daughter’s date was a venture capitalist from San Francisco.
> “I wanted to make sure he wasn’t a charlatan,” said Mr. Catsimatidis, who then texted the man’s bio to his daughter.