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"The social impacts of computer vision" says more about the hype around the subject matter than anything. It's marketing, not science. Computer vision isn't tha

"The social impacts of computer vision" says more about the hype around the subject matter than anything. It's marketing, not science. Computer vision isn't that cool, yet. Running a deep convolutional network is a sales pitch by AWS to sell GPUs by the second. I actually sell computer vision software - specifically designed to help reduce subjective evaluation of aesthetic material performance. Most computer vision is real prosaic. It's not scifi. You read a bunch of papers about horrible things done to marmot eyeballs in the 60s, build a discrete model because neural networks are notoriously hard to support in real-world applications where you have to explain yourself to a chemist, and move on. Her work is justifiably marginal.

cxw 6y ago
I also work in computer vision (for biological sciences). I use deep convnets every day, and certainly they are increasingly central in biology (https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00421 https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00421), proteomics (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3837439/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3837439/, https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaFold-Using-AI-for-scientific-discovery https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaFold-Using-AI-for-sci...), astronomy (https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05965 https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05965), chemistry (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-019-0086-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-019-0086-7, https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/sc/c8sc04228d#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/sc/c8sc0...), many other sciences. I think it's great, they're enabling progress in lots of really tough scientific problems. And for what it's worth, people are still doing horrible things to mice, salamanders, zebrafish, haha, being a model organism is not a good gig, but of course it's still a huge part of neuroscience... Personally, I don't think that an interest in the social impacts of one's work as a researcher should be considered hype -- shouldn't one be interested in their impact on the world? For computer vision in particular, these systems are widely deployed. Also, they are just part of a larger apparatus of automatic decision systems that everyone now interacts with every single day, from getting your insurance rates to getting a loan to... Those have now become prosaic too -- certainly not scifi.

cxw 6y ago

I also work in computer vision (for biological sciences). I use deep convnets every day, and certainly they are increasingly central in biology (https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00421 https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00421), proteomics (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3837439/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3837439/, https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaFold-Using-AI-for-scientific-discovery https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaFold-Using-AI-for-sci...), astronomy (https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05965 https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05965), chemistry (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-019-0086-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-019-0086-7, https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/sc/c8sc04228d#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/sc/c8sc0...), many other sciences. I think it's great, they're enabling progress in lots of really tough scientific problems. And for what it's worth, people are still doing horrible things to mice, salamanders, zebrafish, haha, being a model organism is not a good gig, but of course it's still a huge part of neuroscience... Personally, I don't think that an interest in the social impacts of one's work as a researcher should be considered hype -- shouldn't one be interested in their impact on the world? For computer vision in particular, these systems are widely deployed. Also, they are just part of a larger apparatus of automatic decision systems that everyone now interacts with every single day, from getting your insurance rates to getting a loan to... Those have now become prosaic too -- certainly not scifi.