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Is it me, or is this technology really scary? I mean it is cool and everything, but what good can come out of it? On the other hand, bad scenarios easily come t

Is it me, or is this technology really scary? I mean it is cool and everything, but what good can come out of it? On the other hand, bad scenarios easily come to mind, like: "Lets drone him, he can't hide because we have it all mapped, inside out". Am I paranoid?

teraflop 10y ago
Well, SLAM is a fundamental building block for all kinds of autonomous robotics applications, with self-driving cars being one of the most obvious ones. I'm having a really hard time understanding exactly what you find concerning about this. If you're relying on the assumption that it's inconvenient for somebody with physical access to a building to draw up an accurate floor plan... well, sorry, but that just sounds like a bad assumption to me.
- MichailP 10y ago
  What is troubling for me is the scale of this. If you could use your phone to map your private house with this library, that is very neat and nice on some level. But I guess in the future everyone will have in their phone app for this (enabled by some additional sensor or via image analysis), and some 3rd party (say some future search behemoth) will collect all this data. That is kinda troubling for me. When you think benevolently, this is very cool. You could have targeted ads for furniture that fit your rooms, and mix and match well etc, but there probably has to be a negative side to this. Just paranoidly thinking out loud :) no need to downvote ...
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    This is what is so distressing to me as a founder. The fact that our company is actively doing exactly what you describe but despite our best efforts and press and everything even tech people who reside on the same tiny internet island as me have no clue we exist. *I appreciate the downvotes! God forbid someone be honest with their feelings. This isn't an indictment of the previous poster but rather an expression of the grinding head fuck that is building a company - which I would expect others to appreciate.
lettergram 10y ago
Kinda paranoid... But if we really want to blow your mind. They also know your exact location, mapped with Google maps, understand your connections, recognize how you write via your email and docs. Sure they don't know the inside of the building you are in or even inside you (although they will soon I'm sure). Now for the most horrifying... They have access to every Android phone, and they can listen to every single one if they wanted to. If you use Google voice, they can even "learn" your voice. Eventually, they can probably pick you out among the millions or billions of voices. Combine that with your Google searches, a convolutional neural net over all your selfies... Now sprinkle in some Android wear data and they literally have all of you. All of you.
- ge96 10y ago
  Now if they can just copy my a and reproduce it so I can then have sex with myself. That would be THE product.
CobrastanJorji 10y ago
> what good can come out of it? Yes, you're paranoid. A drone doesn't need to map out a museum before lobbing a missile at it. An autonomous vacuum cleaner, on the other hand, would probably love to know for sure that it has covered the entire surface. Personally, I'm imagining a little ball that I rent from the hardware store that rolls around my house for an hour and spits out the blueprints of my house so that I can feed it into a VR program for choosing furniture.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  That's what our company does already...kind of. Except we do it with an iPhone only and don't give you a scan yet - though we have proven we can build scans from videos. I won't spam the comment but we exist.
  - jdormit 10y ago
    Can you link to your company's website? This sounds interesting.
    - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
      www.pair3d.com
- m_eiman 10y ago
  There's an app for that: http://locometric.com/ http://locometric.com/ I've tested it briefly, and it seems fairly accurate as long as you follow the instructions.
- TFortunato 10y ago
  Full disclosure: former iRobot engineer speaking - Coincidentally, for the latest Roomba (the 980), we did have a camera on the robot which did visual SLAM for precisely that purpose...the idea being it would map your house while it went, and if it needed to stop for a recharge, it can go back to its dock for a recharge, and then resume cleaning right where it left off. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541326/the-roomba-now-sees-and-maps-a-home/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541326/the-roomba-now-see... We also worked on a remote presence (teleconferencing) robot, which used SLAM to map the building it was in, so that a user could just click on a location on a map or schedule the robot to be in a conference room for a certain time, and the robot could autonomously drive there without someone remotely controlling it. It's a very cool technology that has a lot of really useful, non-scary, applications!

teraflop 10y ago

Well, SLAM is a fundamental building block for all kinds of autonomous robotics applications, with self-driving cars being one of the most obvious ones. I'm having a really hard time understanding exactly what you find concerning about this. If you're relying on the assumption that it's inconvenient for somebody with physical access to a building to draw up an accurate floor plan... well, sorry, but that just sounds like a bad assumption to me.

MichailP 10y ago
What is troubling for me is the scale of this. If you could use your phone to map your private house with this library, that is very neat and nice on some level. But I guess in the future everyone will have in their phone app for this (enabled by some additional sensor or via image analysis), and some 3rd party (say some future search behemoth) will collect all this data. That is kinda troubling for me. When you think benevolently, this is very cool. You could have targeted ads for furniture that fit your rooms, and mix and match well etc, but there probably has to be a negative side to this. Just paranoidly thinking out loud :) no need to downvote ...
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  This is what is so distressing to me as a founder. The fact that our company is actively doing exactly what you describe but despite our best efforts and press and everything even tech people who reside on the same tiny internet island as me have no clue we exist. *I appreciate the downvotes! God forbid someone be honest with their feelings. This isn't an indictment of the previous poster but rather an expression of the grinding head fuck that is building a company - which I would expect others to appreciate.

lettergram 10y ago

Kinda paranoid... But if we really want to blow your mind. They also know your exact location, mapped with Google maps, understand your connections, recognize how you write via your email and docs. Sure they don't know the inside of the building you are in or even inside you (although they will soon I'm sure). Now for the most horrifying... They have access to every Android phone, and they can listen to every single one if they wanted to. If you use Google voice, they can even "learn" your voice. Eventually, they can probably pick you out among the millions or billions of voices. Combine that with your Google searches, a convolutional neural net over all your selfies... Now sprinkle in some Android wear data and they literally have all of you. All of you.

ge96 10y ago
Now if they can just copy my a and reproduce it so I can then have sex with myself. That would be THE product.

CobrastanJorji 10y ago

> what good can come out of it? Yes, you're paranoid. A drone doesn't need to map out a museum before lobbing a missile at it. An autonomous vacuum cleaner, on the other hand, would probably love to know for sure that it has covered the entire surface. Personally, I'm imagining a little ball that I rent from the hardware store that rolls around my house for an hour and spits out the blueprints of my house so that I can feed it into a VR program for choosing furniture.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago
That's what our company does already...kind of. Except we do it with an iPhone only and don't give you a scan yet - though we have proven we can build scans from videos. I won't spam the comment but we exist.
- jdormit 10y ago
  Can you link to your company's website? This sounds interesting.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    www.pair3d.com
m_eiman 10y ago
There's an app for that: http://locometric.com/ http://locometric.com/ I've tested it briefly, and it seems fairly accurate as long as you follow the instructions.
TFortunato 10y ago
Full disclosure: former iRobot engineer speaking - Coincidentally, for the latest Roomba (the 980), we did have a camera on the robot which did visual SLAM for precisely that purpose...the idea being it would map your house while it went, and if it needed to stop for a recharge, it can go back to its dock for a recharge, and then resume cleaning right where it left off. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541326/the-roomba-now-sees-and-maps-a-home/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541326/the-roomba-now-see... We also worked on a remote presence (teleconferencing) robot, which used SLAM to map the building it was in, so that a user could just click on a location on a map or schedule the robot to be in a conference room for a certain time, and the robot could autonomously drive there without someone remotely controlling it. It's a very cool technology that has a lot of really useful, non-scary, applications!