Member-only story
General Intelligence
An iPhone for the Coronavirus Era
Plus, an A.I. program to assess your compatibility with potential roommates
Welcome to General Intelligence, OneZero’s weekly dive into the A.I. news and research that matters. You can receive General Intelligence in your email inbox every Friday by visiting OneZero’s homepage and clicking “Follow.”
Apple has spent the past three years convincing its customers that facial recognition is the future: It’s faster and more secure than using a fingerprint, and the smaller sensors give more real estate for a bigger screen.
That may all still be true in the long term, but now the company’s two largest markets, the United States and China, have been advised to wear face masks in public to curb the spread of the coronavirus, rendering Apple’s millimeter-precise facial scan useless.
As its customers try to trick their $1,000-plus devices into recognizing their faces with a mask, Apple released the iPhone SE this week, formally extending the life of the company’s humble fingerprint sensor.
Apple plans years in advance for product releases, meaning this was planned months before the coronavirus pandemic gripped the world. But as it so happens, the new iPhone SE is now the only device in the company’s current lineup that will actually work as intended while following health guidelines in public. (It’s also far less expensive than the company’s flagship phone, making it a more frugal purchase for those who can’t repair their current iPhone or need a new device in a time of mass unemployment or salary reduction.)
The extension of Apple’s TouchID does raise the question: What happens to facial recognition technology at a time when so many of our faces are obscured?
Will the coronavirus pandemic encourage even more intrusive surveillance technologies, like algorithms that recognize you by the way you walk or by identifying your outfit?
A.I. research already exists for identifying people wearing masks, and technology that could identify partially covered faces was a trend before the coronavirus. But the accuracy of those systems in practice is unclear, especially when even unobscured facial…
