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We are kind of lucky that Moore's law does not apply anymore and computers are not getting much faster these days. It might be that such mass surveillance will
by mamon 9y ago
We are kind of lucky that Moore's law does not apply anymore and computers are not getting much faster these days. It might be that such mass surveillance will never become possible, or at least will remain too expensive even for US government.
- tachyonbeam 9y agoWell, I don't mean to scare you, but, we already have the computing power to run facial recognition on probably on the order of thousands (tens of thousands?) of faces per second on a single desktop GPU. It's also not the case that compute power will just stop improving. It hasn't yet, and this is only the beginning. Several companies (including Google) are working on specialized hardware designed specifically to accelerate neural networks. We may not be able to shrink fabrication processes much more than they are, but we can probably shrink them enough to get an order of magnitude improvement. Then, we can get one or two orders of magnitude improvement by building hardware designed for the task. Then, we may be able to get yet more improvements by going with creative solution. For example: chips that use analog electronics to implement multipliers with just one to five transistors. Noisy and not very accurate, but still usable for neural networks. Besides this, Facebook has the compute power, right now, to run facial recognition on every picture being uploaded. Running facial recognition on videos isn't that far-fetched. Even if you think that's too computationally expensive, you could just run the facial recognition at a lower frame rate. There are also tricks that can be used to save computing power. If the system is able to track specific people, it can avoid having to analyze all the data coming in all the time.