Retinal scanning

[Loveacuppa]

Yesterday I read Caroline Criado Perez's highly informative email which mentioned that researchers have found that AI can deduce Sex by a retinal scan.

"This paper described an algorithm that was able to predict sex from the eye’s retinal fundus. And what’s kind of wild about that is that…we didn’t know there was a sex difference. We don’t know what it is that the algorithm is spotting that’s enabling it to discern sex from these images of eyes."

Given we are in a situation whereby organisations offering single-sex services may experience difficulties in ascertaining who should be permitted to use the service, perhaps retinal scans may provide a solution?

Clearly in my head I'm picturing a Mission Impossible / Charlie's Angels - esque system whereby the door won't open without a set eyeball (and it's unlikely that the tech is readily available outside of Hollywood imaginations). But I thought it a potentially interesting one to ponder.

Cross-sex eye transplants on the horizon!

Cue hundreds of people saying "funny they should find that now, I've always felt my retinas weren't really part of "me" "

Interesting finding though, thanks OP!

It's going to be like the Ship of Theseus, isn't it?

pondering the prospect of 'eyeball feminising surgery' is the nightmare I didn't know I could experience.

What this demonstrates is that biological sex is recorded in every cell in our body. The difference in male and female retinas is so small that scientists had no idea it was there, but it's detectable when you set AI algorithms to learn from vast numbers of scans in combination with patient records.

It's worth noting that this particular research was designed to see what information on a medical record could be predicted by looking at eye scans - and in fact the AI did a fairly good job of predicting someone's age and of the likelihood of them developing heart disease. But the information it predicted most accurately was sex.

Do they match by sex at the moment? If they didn't think there was a difference maybe they didn't.

That's assuming retinal transplant does happen. I'm sure I read about some stuff.
Here's a whole rabbit hole I never thought I was going into today!

Oh noes! Am I the only genital fetishist (don't kink shame me) who was hoping for mandatory genital checks on the door of every loo and changing room?

Lol. I always thought a sniffer dog would do the trick but retinal scans are the way to go Funny.

Ha my dog would do this job very well. He only sniff's women's bums. Such a transphobe.

Surely the ai is just scanning the whole eye area and picking up trace mascara? 😂😂😂🤔

I used to have a dog like that Funny. He would go up under skirts...

That’s so interesting on so many levels. It’s more than a little scary that AI can find out stuff we didn’t know!

I wonder how many transwomen it would take to break the ai, if you told it they were women? GIGO, if you give the program bad data it will inevitably corrupt the output. How many medical treatments and discoveries are going to be killed at birth by conflating sex and gender? A simple and accurate blood or urine test for diseases like protate or ovarian cancer that will be missed because of lies about the basic reality of the people from whom the samples were gathered.

Obviously they didn’t include anyone in the study who had taken ✨magical hormones✨ because they’d totally have fooled the AI.

@guinnessguzzler apparently it's looking at the retinal fundus which is the back curve of the inside of your eyeball so make-up shouldn't be an issue

Contact lenses about to become very popular?

My dog chews the crotches out of used women's underwear. She will dig through the laundry to find them. Not interested in men's briefs at all.

Don't need a retina scan to realise that that man with a beard in the women's toilets is a man.

I thought this was known? I knew that baby boys' eyes appear to react differently to girls. Also that females see more colour (unless colour blind.)

Sorry @howdoesatoastermaketoast that was (supposed to be) a joke 😂

That's interesting, I didn't know that @WarriorN

(I have a particular fascination with visual processing and perception due to my job, so going a bit nerd here! And I've stopped myself rambling further...)

www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/120907-men-women-see-differently-science-health-vision-sex

I feel like there's more to the story and it both differences could be variable because of this situation futurism.com/uk-woman-extra-cone-cell-her-eyes-can-see-more-colors

And this which describes how the brain is plastic (adapting to present cess colour) and how there's a lot of natural variation: medicalhealthhumanities.com/2018/01/23/wws-p3-women-with-superhuman-sight/

(More on study www.bibalex.org/SCIplanet/en/Article/Details?id=10304)

The fast tracking ability in males appears to be due to neurones in the brain, which we also know to be plastic. I can't find the study on infant eye reactions, it may have been mentioned in a bbc prog with M Mosely and Alice Roberts but I did find a study on differences between the sexes in infant gaze behaviour on faces (but that could be more about social interaction.)

But I maybe assumed this was retinal which actually it isn't, the thread describes a third difference. And one that's likely to become more known if we go down retinal scanning routes.

Loving the science, thanks for the links WarriorN.

I did Google retinal scans - in my head, they were much like facial recognition to unlock a phone (but eyeball-based). Turns out they take 5 mins and may need eye dye. So not what I pictured.

RoyalCorgi, absolutely, written in every cell of our body in ways and with implications we are yet to discover.

sorry @guinnessguzzler I occasionally channel sheldon and need a sarcasm sign

I read the newsletter and thought the same thing.

Wasn’t there trans-uproar a while back when AI facial recognition scanners kept misgendering trans folk?