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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 Unixnut on Monday May 22 2017, @09:28AM
" To start off, privacy legislation!"
Ha, you are joking right? Look at every other piece of privacy legislation put forward. It pretty much isn't worth the paper it is printed on. Governments will violate it whenever they want, however they want. I guess you can sue the government, but in the end:
a) you would have spent a lot of money
b) you might get some compensation, or you might lose against someone with far more money than you, and possibly have your life ruined.
c) your privacy would still be violated
and
d) because the government is funded by taxes, you are essentially being paid compensation with money they took (or will take) from you in the first place, so no real gain, and an overall loss, because their court and legal expenses , are charged to you as well (whether you win or lose).
So, really relying on government to save you, when they would be the first to use this tech against you, is naive to the max.
It might help with corporations, however any corporation with this kind of level of tech would be heavily embedded with the government, so the above would be exactly the same, except if you did get some compensation, it would come from the company, who would take out debt, which would be provided by a central bank printing money, which is basically taking from the public anyway.