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This is automation of what's already being done, but at larger scale. My father used to do a lot of business in China. He has a lot of interesting stories, bu

by pcurve 9y ago

This is automation of what's already being done, but at larger scale. My father used to do a lot of business in China. He has a lot of interesting stories, but one of my favorites is one about how he was under constant surveillance by government employees and party members. They would monitor his movements and keep logs. He knew this because some didn't even bother keeping it discrete. He'd see the same guys over and over, and they would whip out a note pad and write things down. Labor cost was cheap back then to do this type of low-tech surveillance.

murukesh_s 9y ago
These are two different things IMO. In what I understand this is an isolated usage of face recognition to replace a manned booth with automation. The underlying need for manned booth may be questionable, but it's cultural so let's leave it aside and look at the possibilities of automation, especially when AI is so hot and threatening to eat into our jobs. In this case there were human employees behind the dispenser to notice that toilet paper was issued more that once to same person within a minute or so and he is pocketing it(you may think it's toilet paper, but it's more that a billion population and theft is a theft). Now with facial recognition they can eliminate that job done by a human and make it compeletly automatic. Of course they do use face recognition or other forms of AI to track civilians (as seen from some videos openly put in YouTube) for surveillance but which govt isn't?
- vageli 9y ago
  > Of course they do use face recognition or other forms of AI to track civilians (as seen from some videos openly put in YouTube) for surveillance but which govt isn't? How is reasonable? Does genocide become okay if multiple countries are committing it simultaneously?
  - murukesh_s 9y ago
    Not at all, but the overall sentiment in the comments were biased towards Chinese govt's mass surveillance program, which is a different beast than the article was about. What I was mentioning is this particular instance is a good practical non-surveillance use of face recognition..

by pcurve 9y ago

murukesh_s 9y ago

These are two different things IMO. In what I understand this is an isolated usage of face recognition to replace a manned booth with automation. The underlying need for manned booth may be questionable, but it's cultural so let's leave it aside and look at the possibilities of automation, especially when AI is so hot and threatening to eat into our jobs. In this case there were human employees behind the dispenser to notice that toilet paper was issued more that once to same person within a minute or so and he is pocketing it(you may think it's toilet paper, but it's more that a billion population and theft is a theft). Now with facial recognition they can eliminate that job done by a human and make it compeletly automatic. Of course they do use face recognition or other forms of AI to track civilians (as seen from some videos openly put in YouTube) for surveillance but which govt isn't?

vageli 9y ago
> Of course they do use face recognition or other forms of AI to track civilians (as seen from some videos openly put in YouTube) for surveillance but which govt isn't? How is reasonable? Does genocide become okay if multiple countries are committing it simultaneously?
- murukesh_s 9y ago
  Not at all, but the overall sentiment in the comments were biased towards Chinese govt's mass surveillance program, which is a different beast than the article was about. What I was mentioning is this particular instance is a good practical non-surveillance use of face recognition..