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There is a very weird movement right now underestimating the drastic power of ML/AI. Take facial recognition for example (there are many many others, but this

There is a very weird movement right now underestimating the drastic power of ML/AI. Take facial recognition for example (there are many many others, but this is very illustrative). The possibilities of revolutionizing society with facial recognition is legion. Imagine having a camera attached to your jacket which is hooked up to your phone and immediately gives a compete profile of everyone you meet. This tech is possible today. It probably won’t work with total strangers, but will with people you are likely to meet given your social circles. The power it gives governments as well for monitoring and policing is very dramatic as well. Just look at Hong Kong’s recent law outlawing masks. NLP (GPT-2/BERT) is also extremely powerful and is evolving at a frightful pace. Just google news over the last month. I read a lot of generated text and non generated text and more and more I really can’t tell the difference. Yes, it doesn’t work in isolation, but human guided NLP is stunning in what it can do. Self-attention applied to many other areas is huge as well, such as Software engineering. Drones is another revolutionary technology which has already completely upended how war is executed. There are reasons why leading technology companies such as google, Microsoft, Amazon are dealing with employee blow back around the military and government. They recognize the possibilities here and are uncomfortable with with potential contributions to the disruptive downsides of what can be done by “smarter” algorithms (or whatever you want to call them). Software truly is eating the world.

notahacker 7y ago
It's less a 'very weird movement' and more the average person pushing back against the AI hyperbole movement. And in this case less to do with claims of social impact and more the tendency of marketing collateral and forecasts to attribute operational improvements involving capex on new hardware and new processes for humans entirely to 'AI' because somewhere along the line someone did some statistical modelling with a computer which may even have involved an ML process. > Take facial recognition for example (there are many many others, but this is very illustrative). The possibilities of revolutionizing society with facial recognition is legion. Imagine having a camera attached to your jacket which is hooked up to your phone and immediately gives a compete profile of everyone you meet. This tech is possible today. It probably won’t work with total strangers, but will with people you are likely to meet given your social circles. I mean, I can namesearch the internet for people I meet via my social circles without [admittedly much improved] facial recognition AI: the innovation's all in the hardware, culture of broadcasting one's life via social media and search tech. Hell, I could and did check out people's more basic social profiles online two decades ago when Kurzweil was predicting that by 2020 AI would have pushed life expectancy over 100, eliminated financial crises, economic deprivation and road accidents and simulated human personalities so convincingly that human-robot relationships were a normal thing. The facial recognition is neat, to the degree that it's accurate, but probably less revolutionary for social profiling than the cultural shift towards putting more information online. Similarly, AI startups are far from the only types of business where employees have ethical qualms about selling to the military and certain areas of law enforcement, and one of the biggest concerns employees have is what happens when bodies take action based on vastly overestimating the AI's conclusions...
- erikerikson 7y ago
  Not just the average person but also the experts.
scottlocklin 7y ago
> There is a very weird movement right now underestimating the drastic power of ML/AI. Generally consisting of people who know what they're talking about rather than marketers or science fiction fans. Hong Kong's mask law has nothing to do with tracking people. It has to do with protesters committing violent acts while masked. All you need to do is track people is get them to carry a cell phone which can be tracked via its SSID, IMEI and ICCID. Laughing at the idea of being afraid of BERT. Reminds me of Hofstadter thinking ATNs might soon achieve sentience.
- blazespin 7y ago
  Not so much as afraid as very excited about advances in NLP. Human computer collaboration is a very rich area of possibility. The pace of advancements is unnerving though. May you live in interesting times indeed.
sabalaba 7y ago
Having worked on a similar product to what you're describing, an always on camera embedded in a baseball hat that uses face recognition to catalog everybody you meet, I don't think it is going to happen any time soon. Primarily because it's not very useful. You end up with a bunch of data that you never look at again. There's a reason why that stuff has remained a niche for people interested in trying to implement Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think". Perceived pace of progress when seen from the inside of a field is significantly slower than the perceived pace of progress from the outside. That said, I will agree that the progress in AI and face recognition since 2011 has been phenomenal.
- blazespin 7y ago
  You don't have a job where such information is useful. I can assure you, such info in the hands of a cop (who already has a body camera) or salesperson (could use store cameras) would be quite powerful
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Imagine getting a full Wiki-Bio profile of everyone you meet. How long would it take you to read it? You can set up a useful automated virtual business card system without AI. There's no particular benefit to the facial recognition, and even less benefit to having a full profile to chew through. What you really need is an AI with an awareness of social context, and for that be useful you need an entire biographical information collection, filtering, categorising, and sharing, which doesn't exist today. But then there are privacy concerns. Do you really want complete strangers to know about your personal and professional resume (successes + failures) parking and speeding tickets and criminal record, sexual preferences, credit worthiness, major illnesses and minor health issues, and so on? Of course Google, FB, and China's Social Credit system are working towards this already. And we'd better hope they fail, because creating this kind of personal biographical infrastructure without oversight gives corporations and governments the potential to exercise an unholy level of personal and professional control over individuals. The point being - your supposedly "obvious" facial recognition application is in fact a demonstration of how thinking about these projects as if they're trivial hackathon demo pieces can lead to a culture of horrors. The real issues with all AI are political, not technical. And the problems can only be solved by strengthening limits on the exploitation of personal information by corporations and governments. Because otherwise we're going to be living in a culture where the primary application of AI is personality control - no matter if it looks like advertising, or media, or art, or political debate.
- blazespin 7y ago
  Of course it can lead to a culture of horrors. That's my exact point! Revolutions are very scary things. Black mirror episodes, some of them are very dead on and immediately relevant.

notahacker 7y ago

It's less a 'very weird movement' and more the average person pushing back against the AI hyperbole movement. And in this case less to do with claims of social impact and more the tendency of marketing collateral and forecasts to attribute operational improvements involving capex on new hardware and new processes for humans entirely to 'AI' because somewhere along the line someone did some statistical modelling with a computer which may even have involved an ML process. > Take facial recognition for example (there are many many others, but this is very illustrative). The possibilities of revolutionizing society with facial recognition is legion. Imagine having a camera attached to your jacket which is hooked up to your phone and immediately gives a compete profile of everyone you meet. This tech is possible today. It probably won’t work with total strangers, but will with people you are likely to meet given your social circles. I mean, I can namesearch the internet for people I meet via my social circles without [admittedly much improved] facial recognition AI: the innovation's all in the hardware, culture of broadcasting one's life via social media and search tech. Hell, I could and did check out people's more basic social profiles online two decades ago when Kurzweil was predicting that by 2020 AI would have pushed life expectancy over 100, eliminated financial crises, economic deprivation and road accidents and simulated human personalities so convincingly that human-robot relationships were a normal thing. The facial recognition is neat, to the degree that it's accurate, but probably less revolutionary for social profiling than the cultural shift towards putting more information online. Similarly, AI startups are far from the only types of business where employees have ethical qualms about selling to the military and certain areas of law enforcement, and one of the biggest concerns employees have is what happens when bodies take action based on vastly overestimating the AI's conclusions...

erikerikson 7y ago
Not just the average person but also the experts.

scottlocklin 7y ago

> There is a very weird movement right now underestimating the drastic power of ML/AI. Generally consisting of people who know what they're talking about rather than marketers or science fiction fans. Hong Kong's mask law has nothing to do with tracking people. It has to do with protesters committing violent acts while masked. All you need to do is track people is get them to carry a cell phone which can be tracked via its SSID, IMEI and ICCID. Laughing at the idea of being afraid of BERT. Reminds me of Hofstadter thinking ATNs might soon achieve sentience.

blazespin 7y ago
Not so much as afraid as very excited about advances in NLP. Human computer collaboration is a very rich area of possibility. The pace of advancements is unnerving though. May you live in interesting times indeed.

sabalaba 7y ago

Having worked on a similar product to what you're describing, an always on camera embedded in a baseball hat that uses face recognition to catalog everybody you meet, I don't think it is going to happen any time soon. Primarily because it's not very useful. You end up with a bunch of data that you never look at again. There's a reason why that stuff has remained a niche for people interested in trying to implement Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think". Perceived pace of progress when seen from the inside of a field is significantly slower than the perceived pace of progress from the outside. That said, I will agree that the progress in AI and face recognition since 2011 has been phenomenal.

blazespin 7y ago
You don't have a job where such information is useful. I can assure you, such info in the hands of a cop (who already has a body camera) or salesperson (could use store cameras) would be quite powerful

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

Imagine getting a full Wiki-Bio profile of everyone you meet. How long would it take you to read it? You can set up a useful automated virtual business card system without AI. There's no particular benefit to the facial recognition, and even less benefit to having a full profile to chew through. What you really need is an AI with an awareness of social context, and for that be useful you need an entire biographical information collection, filtering, categorising, and sharing, which doesn't exist today. But then there are privacy concerns. Do you really want complete strangers to know about your personal and professional resume (successes + failures) parking and speeding tickets and criminal record, sexual preferences, credit worthiness, major illnesses and minor health issues, and so on? Of course Google, FB, and China's Social Credit system are working towards this already. And we'd better hope they fail, because creating this kind of personal biographical infrastructure without oversight gives corporations and governments the potential to exercise an unholy level of personal and professional control over individuals. The point being - your supposedly "obvious" facial recognition application is in fact a demonstration of how thinking about these projects as if they're trivial hackathon demo pieces can lead to a culture of horrors. The real issues with all AI are political, not technical. And the problems can only be solved by strengthening limits on the exploitation of personal information by corporations and governments. Because otherwise we're going to be living in a culture where the primary application of AI is personality control - no matter if it looks like advertising, or media, or art, or political debate.

blazespin 7y ago
Of course it can lead to a culture of horrors. That's my exact point! Revolutions are very scary things. Black mirror episodes, some of them are very dead on and immediately relevant.