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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Appearing first in Google Assistant and Google Photos, Google Lens uses artificial intelligence (A.I.) to specifically identify things in the frame of a smartphone camera.
In Google's demo, not only did Google Lens identify a flower, but the species of flower. The demo also showed the automatic login to a wireless router when Google Lens was pointed at the router barcodes. And finally, Google Lens was shown identifying businesses by sight, popping up Google Maps cards for each establishment.
Google Lens is shiny and fun. But from the resulting media commentary, it was clear that the real implications were generally lost.
The common reaction was: "Oooh, look! Another toy for our smartphones! Isn't A.I. amazing!" In reality, Google showed us a glimpse of the future of general-purpose sensing. Thanks to machine learning, it's now possible to create a million different sensors in software using only one actual sensor -- the camera.
In Google's demo, it's clear that the camera functions as a "super-sensor." Instead of a flower-identification sensor, a bar-code reader and a retail-business identifier, Google Lens is just one all-purpose super-sensor with software-based, A.I.-fueled "virtual sensors" built in software either locally or in the cloud.
Talking about the Internet of Things (IoT) four years ago, the phrase "trillion sensor world" came into vogue in IT circles. Futurists vaguely imagined a trillion tiny devices with a trillion antennas and a trillion batteries (that had to be changed a trillion times a year).
In this future, we would be covered in wearable sensors. All merchandise and machinery would be tagged with RFID chips that would alert mounted readers to their locations. Special purpose sensors would pervade our homes, offices and workplaces.
We were so innocent then -- mostly about the promise and coming ubiquity of A.I. and machine learning.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Monday May 22 2017, @05:33AM (3 children)
As per the stainless steel rat, when you can no longer avoid the DB, overload it. What we need is to start wearing Vendetta like masks or paper masks like the Chinese do in general public. Get a mask of yourself and exchange with someone else so you are not where you are...
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday May 22 2017, @09:34AM (2 children)
Until they make wearing masks, or otherwise hiding your identity in public illegal. Then what?
(Longer post on the same idea here: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=19634&page=1&cid=513403 [soylentnews.org] )
Not to mention, it has been shown you can detect quite accurately who a person is by:
a) their height
b) their girth
c) their gait (how you walk).
So, a future of wearing masks, going on high heels to alter our height, wear padding to alter our girth, and making sure to walk in funny ways awaits us!
It would be surreal and funny I guess, if it wasn't a sad reality to exist in.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Monday May 22 2017, @06:45PM (1 child)
We could do like South Korean women seem to have done and all have plastic surgery so that we look the same. I also think that the success rate of such software has been blown out of proportion by the folks who have a vested interest in it 'financial' success.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601786/are-face-recognition-systems-accurate-depends-on-your-race/ [technologyreview.com]
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday May 22 2017, @11:06PM
> I also think that the success rate of such software has been blown out of proportion by the folks who have a vested interest in it 'financial' success.
Oh I am sure it isn't as good as they say. However getting a false positive is an even bigger bitch then it being accurate. One thing to identify someone for $whatever because of $threat, another to identify an innocent incorrectly, then $do_nasty to them, including possibly shooting them, like the police did to Charles De Menzes in London (for reference for those who do not know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes). [wikipedia.org]
Getting shot because an AI incorrectly identified me is not much consolation to the flawed system of AI, quite frankly. There are a lot of really thick people out there, where if computer says "yes", they will $do_nasty to person, and think later (if at all).