Won't the tech be built regardless of Amazon? It is either SV companies help with it and reduce costs or else blood-suckers such as IBM will come in with their contracts and low tech but costly solutions..
Make up your mind, will the solution work if IBM makes it? If so, then it's not really low tech. If not, then Amazon staying out of the game did exactly the right thing because all of the capable people abstained.
I mean, it can work but not perfectly. For face recognition tech, accuracy matters and my hypothesis is that Amazon could do better vs. IBM. And Amazon doing it could be much cheaper and better. The taxpayers money will be spent regardless and in one case it would be more efficient.
If it's inaccurate it's a failure or it won't be widely deployed. It's idiotic to make a perfect surveillance machine using the excuse that, if you don't, someone will make a crappy one.
This is about it being an unethical thing to make, not wasting taxpayer money. The optimal outcome is that it is a complete failure and the government learns not to do it again.
probably, but the problem is that the people at amazon signed up to do X and now they are being asked to do Y.
if they had joined a company specifically to do Y then it wouldn't be an issue
What is X tho’? Exploiting minimum wage warehouse workers? Shipping counterfeit goods? Industrial scale tax shenanigans? Adtech? They were OK with all of this, remember.
