I get your point that a system that claims to detect terrorists but only really detected Arabic people would be an evil one - but you're automatically calling the terrorist system evil without knowing if it really does detect terrorists or not.

As an extra hypothetical question, do you feel a system that could detect people who were really just about to commit terrorist attacks as good or evil? At a conceptual level, assume the system somehow scanned brain waves or some other truly difficult method.

There's no way a decision like this one didn't get approval from the top layers of the company as it no doubt had to go through different levels of legal, product and everything in between.

What the authors here did is correct - they've publicized the issue. Releasing this data as a torrent is not 'publicizing' anything - it is stabbing millions of people in the back, and then waiting for the crowds to come and gape at the dead bodies.

People can be stabbed in the back if they go into dark alleys without watching behind them. Let's stab a few people who go into these alleys so that everyone will be afraid to do so and we have an opportunity to prevent people being stabbed in future by making them aware.

Why would you possibly think this is a good idea? The idea is to prevent pain, not cause more pain in some bizarre attempt at making people afraid. There's enough privacy violations - we don't need to be making more of them ourselves.

If you wanted a study on that variable, you'd likely need to at least get input from someone who says going to dentists is a bad idea - but at that point, you're just going to have a shouting match and a statistics measuring contest between the dentists and the guy who doesn't think anybody should see dentists. Your results would likely be contradictory and fairly useless.

We haven't yet found a way to do such studies in a useful manner, and it's an ongoing problem in politics that has yet to have a solution. And may never have a solution. And it's very important to be able to determine when such study variables align with the financial and ideological requirements of the researcher.

If you can tell without doubt what the result of a study by a certain group will be before the study takes place, it's usually a red flag.

In a follow up study, we could go and ask the labour unions how much benefit they give to the average worker. Surprise finding! Labour unions benefit all workers immensely, and they benefit workers who pay the most in membership fees. And then we can follow up with a study by dentists on how regularly you should visit your dentist (hint: it's more often than you think!)

[1] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24994/sexual-harassment-of-women...

The remaining performance left behind is all in memory allocation and garbage collection - something you could optimize relatively easily if it were written in C. Such as by using a memory pool, so that you wouldn't need allocations or garbage collection at all.

Of course if performance isn't a big issue for your task, then none of this is really important.

A similar thing happened to Microsoft back around the time of Windows Vista (and similarly poor mismanagement by management at the time), so we already know where this train is going.

> Eight of the rivers are located in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.

https://xkcd.com/882/

And if you think this only applies to statistics, you need to think about the problem being described here a bit more.

However that aside, AI is very big in China right now, and they're using it for numerous applications with thousands of students going through Chinese universities being taught how to handle this stuff. While the same doesn't apply to niche interests like genetically enhanced humans (who is working on that, really?), something like AI with thousands of capable researchers and engineers is a different story.

The question is: should America compete in the arms race? I don't know. But there are big consequences either way.