3 ms·

Everyone jumps to the dystopian scifi implication. But how about lets try thinking like real technologists? Example use: I know of three small but vibrant town

Everyone jumps to the dystopian scifi implication. But how about lets try thinking like real technologists? Example use: I know of three small but vibrant towns in Massachusetts where my wife and I would like to open a Bed 'n Breakfast. The problem is they're too expensive. So I feed the street views of these downtowns into the AI, and filter by <$250K home price. And it returns 20 beautifully "quaint" towns that I never could have found just by traditional census / business database searching.

supernumerary 10y ago
In terms of jumping to the sci-fi dystopian implication, I think it's quite fun to think about and certainly part of being a real technologist...: After all, doesn't the kind of of digital truth (or digital behaviourism) epitomized by this study threaten to undermine the foundation of ideas like individual emancipation or of the common? Like let's say you move to a quaint town that the AI found for you. Who moved in and is now a member of that community, you and your wife or your digital doppelgangers? And where did you move? The town or it's statistical analog warehoused in a data-center somewhere. When a new shop opens up in the town and you find your favorite brand of wine from your previous town on the shelves ... what's going on?
ucaetano 10y ago
A major example: data in emerging markets. For most emerging markets, there's nothing comparable to the per-track census data in the US (and other developed countries). Some fixed-line ISPs do market assessments by driving through neighborhoods and counting the number of cars and AC units in each house, as a proxy for income, and it is unlikely that better data will be available by traditional means any time soon. I once had to compile a lot of per-city info on Indonesia, it involved a friend actually going into the national statistics office, spending several hours drinking tea with them, getting the actual raw survey data recorded into a CD (this was a couple years ago, not a couple decades) so I could eventually process it and get some results (despite the abundance of gaps and errors in the data). In other words, Street View data is more pervasive, updated and readily available than data from the national statistics office.

supernumerary 10y ago

In terms of jumping to the sci-fi dystopian implication, I think it's quite fun to think about and certainly part of being a real technologist...: After all, doesn't the kind of of digital truth (or digital behaviourism) epitomized by this study threaten to undermine the foundation of ideas like individual emancipation or of the common? Like let's say you move to a quaint town that the AI found for you. Who moved in and is now a member of that community, you and your wife or your digital doppelgangers? And where did you move? The town or it's statistical analog warehoused in a data-center somewhere. When a new shop opens up in the town and you find your favorite brand of wine from your previous town on the shelves ... what's going on?

ucaetano 10y ago

A major example: data in emerging markets. For most emerging markets, there's nothing comparable to the per-track census data in the US (and other developed countries). Some fixed-line ISPs do market assessments by driving through neighborhoods and counting the number of cars and AC units in each house, as a proxy for income, and it is unlikely that better data will be available by traditional means any time soon. I once had to compile a lot of per-city info on Indonesia, it involved a friend actually going into the national statistics office, spending several hours drinking tea with them, getting the actual raw survey data recorded into a CD (this was a couple years ago, not a couple decades) so I could eventually process it and get some results (despite the abundance of gaps and errors in the data). In other words, Street View data is more pervasive, updated and readily available than data from the national statistics office.