The fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning are moving so quickly that any notion of ethics is lagging decades behind, or left to works of science fiction.由于人工智能和机器学习领域发展得过于很快，实在太任何伦理概念都迟缓几十年，或是留下了科幻作品。This might explain a new study out of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which says computers can tell whether you will be a criminal based on nothing more than your facial features.这或许需要说明上海交通大学的一项新的研究。该研究指出，计算机只需根据你的面部特征就能辨别出有你是否是一个罪犯。In a paper titled Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images, two Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers say they fed facial images of 1,856 real persons into computers and found some structural features for predicting criminality, such as lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the so-called nose-mouth angle.在一篇为题《基于面部图像的自动犯罪概率推测》的文章中，两位上海交通大学的研究人员回应，他们将1856个真人的面部图像载入计算机，找到一些需要预测犯罪率的结构特征，例如上唇曲率、内眼角间距和鼻唇角角度。

They conclude that all classifiers perform consistently well and produce evidence for the validity of automated face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding the topic.他们的结论是：尽管该主题仍然具备历史争议，但是所有的分类器都表现出色，并为人脸识别技术辨识罪犯的有效性获取了证据。In the 1920s and 1930s, the Belgians, in their role as occupying power, put together a national program to try to identify individuals ethnic identity through phrenology, an abortive attempt to create an ethnicity scale based on measurable physical features such as height, nose width and weight.在20世纪20年代及30年代，比利时人以占领国的身份制订了一项国家计划，企图通过骨相来辨识个人的民族特性，企图根据可测量的身体特征，如体重、鼻子宽度和重量，来区分一个的种族范围。The study contains virtually no discussion of why there is a historical controversy over this kind of analysis — namely, that it was debunked hundreds of years ago.此项研究完全没辩论为什么这种分析有一个历史争议，它在几百年前就被识破了。

Rather, the authors trot out another discredited argument to support their main claims: that computers cant be racist, because theyre computers.忽略，作者明确提出了另一个可靠的论点来反对他们的主要论点：计算机无法沦为种族主义者，因为它们是计算机。Unlike a human examiner/judge, a computer vision algorithm or classifier has absolutely no subjective baggages, having no emotions, no biases whatsoever due to past experience, race, religion, political doctrine, gender, age, etc.与人类检查员/法官有所不同，计算机视觉算法或分类器意味著没主观观点、没情绪、没由于过去经验、种族、宗教、政治信条、性别、年龄等而导致的种族主义。

Besides the advantage of objectivity, sophisticated algorithms based on machine learning may discover very delicate and elusive nuances in facial characteristics and structures that correlate to innate personal traits.除了客观性的优势，基于机器学习的简单算法有可能找到面部特征和结构中十分错综复杂和难以捉摸的细微差别，这些细微差别与先天的个人特征涉及。

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