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Facebook is researching AI systems that see, hear, remember everything you do
- sabujp 5y agoif you use fb, unfollow everything and everyone and then either selectively follow what you like or don't ever follow anyone again : https://gist.github.com/renestalder/c5b77635bfbec8f94d28#gistcomment-3924885 https://gist.github.com/renestalder/c5b77635bfbec8f94d28#gis... , it will greatly reduce your time on fb.
- h2odragon 5y agoApparently whoever paid for the most recent "Facebook is Bad" media hate package, only bought the 3 day ticket. Cheap bastards.
- lucasverra 5y agoWho would benefit from that service? Maybe PR services companies? "See what is happening to Fb, we can help you avoid that Mr other dodgy Tech" Who else?
- blackoil 5y agoTraditional Media. Politicians. Competing Social Networks. Also other tech. companies as FB is sucking up all media/political/people's energy and the rest can cruise current wave unharmed.
- faeyanpiraat 5y agoWhat social networks are you referring to?
- pessimizer 5y agoNot worth asking. It's part of a bizarre theory that Big Media is not only a single cabal, but that cabal is constantly whiteboarding attacks on the tech companies that have bought large pieces of it. I think it's for two reasons: 1) it's scarier to think that Big Media and Big Tech are getting along swimmingly despite a few minor conflicts and necessary keyfabe for the plebs, and 2) people who do horrible things for money in Big Tech want to feel better about themselves, and want people to think well of them (not like they think of people who worked at AIG, Arthur Andersen, or Countrywide.)
- knownjorbist 5y agoFacebook is consciously aware of the fact that they're optimizing a manipulation engine that has outsized net-negative effects on societies worldwide.
- arpa 5y agoNo, thank you. But I suspect people would still accept and use that tech just like they have accepted always-online/always-listening digital assistants. Just imagine the possibilities of large-scale manipulations, tho!
- fctorial 5y agoDo you use history in your shell?
- CGamesPlay 5y agoI do, but I don't upload it to any other parties.
- danShumway 5y agoWhat exactly is the comparison here? Remembering my shell history for commands I run locally on a single computer, stored in a format I can control/edit, that is never transmitted to other people or used for advertising, that is fed into a simplistic history algorithm I have complete control over, and that I can toggle on and off at will even for individual commands -- that's the same as a 3rd party analyzing on remote servers everything I look at while I'm walking around the real world?
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoOnly for the current session. When I close the terminal it is all gone
- seadan83 5y agoYes, and you can lead a command with a space for it to not be remembered in history. You can also delete it, and nobody else can access it without privileged access to your computet
- sys_64738 5y agoI hope it remembers why I deactivated my FB account.
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- hungryforcodes 5y agoI wish you so many upvotes for this comment.
- throwinawaysoon 5y agoupvotes: thoughts and prayers of the internet
- hungryforcodes 5y agoAmen.
- vstm 5y agoMaybe Facebook can create an AI that also sends thoughts and prayers to whoever needs it. It's also probably easier because most people remember why they need the thoughts and prayers.
- klyrs 5y agoOnly God can read the inputs to /dev/null yes "Dear $diety please protect this machine and save this lowly process from the OOM killer" > /dev/null You don't need facebook for that.
- tomjen3 5y agoMaybe, but they make people feel a little better and cause no lasting harm in small doses, so why not?
- jmfldn 5y agoWhen I read articles like this I experience a mini existential crisis that we could be heading to some very dark places technologically. I don't need to go into the reasons why it's bad. For anyone who's aware of the last 15 years of social media critique or novels like Brave New World, it's obvious that this would be a dystopia multiplier. Ad tech on steroids. If you think the manipulation is bad now just wait until this data is fed into the ML models. If you must have everything you see, do and say recorded then please, for the love of god, let's use non-profit, open source / free software platforms where we own our own data.
- sneak 5y agoIn one generation in the US we went as a whole society from most private p2p conversations not being logged and monitored and recorded by the government, to most private p2p conversations not only being logged and monitored and recorded, but available to the state at any time without probable cause or a warrant (FISA Amendments Act). iMessage, WhatsApp, Gmail, Facebook Messenger, Instagram: all of these are stored on the server effectively unencrypted (in the case of iMessage and WhatsApp, via the chat backups, a backdoor to the e2e encryption they promise). The state has access to all of them at any time. To top it off the carriers and a million different apps are constantly logging your location history for all time, for every member of society. If you think that isn't one of the most useful and powerful databases in the history of mankind, I question your imagination. The massive damage, which may just be existential, is not apparent to the USA just yet, but it will be eventually. The balance of power has shifted even more dramatically than just about ever before in history, in any country in history. Alarm bells should be going off left and right but nobody seems to care and it's just business as usual.
- jmfldn 5y agoAgree. We desperately need something like Tim Berners Lee's Solid. A way for us to take control from the centralised data silos owned by big tech. I know its almost mission impossible to turn the tide, but if the alternative is giving in then engineers worried about this must fight for alternatives, however grim the odds. As for this specific issue, of course there are the usual massive issues around data privacy. The major issue I was alluding to here is ad tech AI processes being fed an unimaginably rich source of intimate data. It's a horrifying prospect.
- mgreb 5y agoWait, are such devices even legal? Looks like walking spy-cam to me. I want to know if someone records video/takes picture of me. With this glasses you can`t tell if you are being filmed.
- blackoil 5y agoIs it illegal to shoot videos in public place without permission of all present ? Private places may have their own rules. Also this is R&D, long way before such questions matter.
- jjulius 5y agoNah, these questions matter now.
- de_keyboard 5y agoIn most western countries it is legal. I'm not sure it should be, given recent technological advances.
- picardythird 5y agoDon't you think answering these questions should guide the R&D?
- KaiserPro 5y agoYes, there is a "right to panorama" in most countries. However this dataset has been recorded with the _express permission_ of all the people involved. Which is different to the imagenet, where they just crawled a whole bunch of images and called it a day. Second, you need to take the "Argh its facebook, boo hiss" hat off. Then apply some critical thinking. an AR world that is connected to the physical _requires_ this kind of thing. Your device need to anticipate what you are going to do so that it can work out the probability of your need and act on it. Like Jeeves, but less able, and more annoying. As its ML, it need a massive dataset to train on. this is <0.5% of that dataset. Depending on how things are done, if facebook are first to market with a usable AR system, they will be forced to have anonymisation built in (as in remove faces at the sensor level, unless you have permission to remember). Apple will have a showy "pixelation" layer, that is mostly ineffectual, but will PR it out to make them seem like they've cured cancer. Google, if they ever manage to get back into AR will just make things cheap and let the shitty android marketplace spy on what ever they like. You will also have to remember that the power budget of these glasses is absolutely fucking tiny. All day screen, SLAM, AI and possibly music will need to all fit in to ~2-5watt hours. This means that virtually everything will need to be on device. (dropping to the cloud eats a boat load of power.) Now that's not to say that 100% accurate [if thats even possible] "diarisation" won't rip society apart. There are lots of questions that need to be answered, the problem is, tech journalists are ill equipped to ask them. Most of the teams designing the glasses are well meaning, but their targets and life experience has not equipped them to do a good job at ethics.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoAll I need is to see people’s names right above their heads.
- jstx1 5y agoIt should only cost you half of your remaining life span.
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- jensensbutton 5y agoAnyone mad at the universities that actually collected this data? Or just Facebook?
- de6u99er 5y agoI am mad at both. Universities should not participate in such unethical activities! Just as a reminder Cambridge Analytica also started at a University. And many politicians are seek advice from academics who are directly or indirectly incentivized by Facebook. Through grants and/or through access to data others don't have access to.
- fithisux 5y ago... and don't forgive, unless you buy the "premium" version.
- ToddWBurgess 5y agoAnd this is why you need ad blockers and privacy protection plugins for your web browser. If you can't stop Facebook snooping on you at least make it hard for them. As my grandfather taught me, "if you can't win then make it hard for the other guy to win."
- kelseyfrog 5y agoI don't like this pattern in calls to action. The pattern starts with an implicit hopelessness of affecting any external change and results in all responsibility being assumed by the individual. This is an antipattern of change. It does not need to be perpetuated because it reproduces the permanence of the constructs we want to dismantle. Even more importantly, these entities are fully aware of this and craftily guide the masses toward individual responsibility as a default, knowing that it won't affect real change. The antidote to this is critical collective action which realizes the impossibly of change as itself an impossible stance to take.
- pessimizer 5y agoChange isn't caused by strength of belief; it's magic that only works based on how hard you believe in it. Collective action doesn't do itself, and the words "collective action" don't constitute a plan. Individual evasions at least make things more expensive to do. Also, individual action doesn't crowd out collective action. Not protecting yourself doesn't create collective action. A concrete plan with concrete individual actions to take creates collective action. Individual sacrifice to create institutions creates collective action. IMO you should be ready to tell people where to show up before you tell them not to help themselves.
- kelseyfrog 5y agoOf course not. We both agree that organizing doesn't appear out of nowhere and that it takes real work to mobilize people. The call to action of installing adblockers in this particular case makes people feel like they are taking real action, but it's equivalent to "hope and prayers" and that doesn't work either. My point is that "If you can't stop Facebook snooping" is a self-limiting assumption. Of course we can stop Facebook from snooping. Facebook's ability to snoop relies on the social, political, legal, and economic assumptions all of which are constructed by people and therefore aren't immutable constants. Our progress toward changing that is realizing that all of these things are things we made and therefore can change.
- dylan604 5y agoIt just seems like the people at FB have watched Black Mirror and decided they want to do all the things they saw.
- blunte 5y agoRegardless of who provides this, and even irrespective of marketing concerns, there most likely will be data leaks/theft. Imaging having audio+video recordings of what you see and what you say in the hands of the wrong people. And "the wrong people" could be a wide array of different parties, from banks to police to political enemies to nosy neighbors and beyond. Granted, many of us already collect and give away significant amounts of very personal data, some of which regularly gets leaked or stolen; but first person video and audio recordings?... scary. And then with Facebook... I trust Zuckerberg with my life data as much as I trust his choice in hairstylists.
- fergie 5y agoThere is no way that this will ever be legal in the EU.
- hetspookjee 5y agoSometimes I dream of a Facebook machine; e.g. the eerily creepy recommender for your next best action, but than with an objective function not to optimise the recommenders revenue (by being as effective ad seller as possible) but rather changing the objective function to optimise for health, wellbeing and happiness. Now surely it is far from trivial to define these, but atleast you can make a start somewhere: - You could factor in the cost for environment per each recommendation and have that drive down the score of a recommendation: I think the "fast-fashion" idiotic anti-environmental trends would die out fast than. - You could factor in, based on some overarching theme of ethos, that each person needs to eat healthy and recommend the right healhty food at the right time; instead of recommending the next best McDonalds burger to an already obese person. - Take into consideration, based on studies, what actual heatlhy behaviour looks like, and try to fit that to a person - with respect to their actual persona and state of health (which are obviously known already given that each bit of you is pretty much on the street already) I could go on, but in truth, a personal recommender that would know me better than I even would, and would optimise towards happiness and greatness, instead of # shit sold like it currently is, would already be a tremendous improvement. Surely, this idea is also far from original, but I hope that we someday get to such a thing. Atleast a thing that stops recommending environmentally destructive behaviours like buying so much stuff I don't really need.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y agoUnfortunately I think we live in a society where the people who could use this the most are the people least able to afford the costs of such a service.
- rumblerock 5y agoI'm certainly wish this were possible, and people who left would probably go back to the platform if it reformed itself in this direction. But as the years go on all I see are more and more catastrophic impacts from short term thinking and near term profit generation, whether it's Facebook, climate, VC-funded startups or the current supply chain crisis. Perhaps the public consciousness around the unhealthy design of existing social media is approaching a point where a new Facebook-like social network could actually achieve a critical mass of users. On the order of years I think it'll happen (like rates of smoking cigarettes), but how long that will be who knows. I can only hope it comes in the next few years as I fear the destructive ripple effects through culture and society are only getting worse.
- pesenti 5y agoI support Facebook AI. The actual news is that we are releasing an extensive egocentric dataset with associated tasks for the research community. Collecting such dataset in a private and responsible way is a significant challenge. Happy to answer any questions. https://ai.facebook.com/blog/teaching-ai-to-perceive-the-world-through-your-eyes/ https://ai.facebook.com/blog/teaching-ai-to-perceive-the-wor...
- Hnrobert42 5y agoWhat are you all doing to allow those of us that don’t want to be a part of your utopia to opt out?
- pesenti 5y agoI encourage you to read the details of the news, in particular how the data was collected with full consent from all (something that most research datasets don’t do well). It doesn’t answer your question directly but gives you an idea on how we think about these issues. AI-powered wearables will have stringent privacy guarantees, both for the wearer and the people around.
- picardythird 5y agoOne of the features outlined in the article for this post was for the glasses to remember things that other people said. How would such other people who don't want to be recorded for these purposes opt out?
- KaiserPro 5y agoThis is a static dataset. You'll want to ask that question about "Project Aria". for example, can FB provide a list of recording locations and times, so I can request my image/audio removed? How good is facebook's anonymisation system? what % of faces can be removed (on average) Has every single piece of footage captured with Aria been anonymised?
- goldenkey 5y agoIt's so strange how everytime I get a Facebook link from someone, it requires me to login to read more than 1/4 of it ( and it's cut off just at the right place to entice ) and then before I know it, I'm looking at a bunch of silly unread notifications and terribleness in my feed. It's strange, like a realizing I was hypnotized for a second. I immediately log out and close the window as I snap out of it. Facebook is truly...a cancer. Do not give me the whole song and dance about how their targeted ads help small businesses. 99% of the stuff I've seen on FB, business-wise, is ads for shady products, scams or schemes. They took a truly golden opportunity to connect people and ravaged it, then turned to acquiring every possible competitor they could, as their main product turned into hot garbage. Even AOL garners more of my respect than FB, how is this even possible?! FB needs to die like AOL died. It'll only take the boomer generation to die out. Unfortunately, Instagram is still a decent property, probably because they didn't let Zuckerfuck fuck it up. Expect Instagram to become cancer too once FB is no longer the main profit center.
- achenet 5y agoThis reminds me of the Ted Chiang story The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling.
- TeeMassive 5y ago> Episodic memory: What happened when (e.g., “Where did I leave my keys?”)? > Forecasting: What am I likely to do next (e.g., “Wait, you’ve already added salt to this recipe”)? > Hand and object manipulation: What am I doing (e.g., “Teach me how to play the drums”)? > Audio-visual diarization: Who said what when (e.g., “What was the main topic during class?”)? > Social interaction: Who is interacting with whom (e.g., “Help me better hear the person talking to me at this noisy restaurant”)? Now consider the fact that Facebook is actively suppressing some subjects from popping up in their users' feed. If users becomes reliant on this AI to initiate, guide and execute most day to day tasks then Facebook will literally have the power to make certain aspects of their users' life disappear. For example, you have a contact who criticizes Facebook or their business partners too much? Don't remind them of their birthday.
- moogly 5y agoWW3 might be against Facebook.
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- throwawaymanbot 5y agoOf course they are… I wonder if they are doing this already and are trying to find a way to justify it by saying.. ohhh it was the AI… not us…
- zwaps 5y agoI suggest everyone to carefully read the replies of the Facebook employees in this thread. These data are being released in hopes of furthering the developments of these techniques - which ultimately benefits a future use by Facebook. In turn, people like "presenti" have pointed out several times that the data were collected in Facebook offices or other places where all participants consent. The implication is clear: While the present data are legal, they would not be if shot in the "wild". In many jurisdictions, there is no legal use case for these methods. It is literally not possible to have a widely-used implementation of these glasses that would not violate the privacy rights of "bystanders". Of course, Facebook will work hard to make it legal, on all fronts. Whether laws need to be changed or, as pointed out by presenti, some innovation may arise to make you at least an anonymous blob, separate from name and address. And if you do not have an account - see in this thread - what is there to worry about? Well, even if the association would only be indirect, any data collected from you (with increasing sophistication) would be part of Facebook and its models. Even as a group of anonymous users, you would become less and less anonymous and increasingly more explainable. If you are so far unconvinced that this matters, please be also aware that the only thing standing between businesses and the extraction of the entire surplus (or consumer welfare) is asymmetry of information. As soon as your needs and wants are sufficiently modeled, companies will use these data to maximize the profit from all their interactions with you. You will, in a sense, pay monopoly prices without facing monopolies. Again, read the replies carefully. See how legal constraints are certainly something that is "to be solved in the future". However, whether you should ever be afforded privacy or anonymity in the face of facebook's algorithm is implicitly answered, with (frankly) a worrying amount of arrogance and dismissal: no, you and everything about you should no longer be any unexplained variation for facebook. One way or another, facebook plans to uncover you, and there is no negotiating this point. You must now realize that Facebook is not interested in your name and birthdate, they are interested in being able to predict everything about you without these personal data. Faeebook wants a model, one that is fundamentally opposed to your welfare. And this objective will be realized. Take heed of this, better now than later.
- reilly3000 5y agoI’ve been hanging around HN for quite nearly a decade. This is the first comment I’ve felt compelled to mark as Favorite. Precision perception and behavior modification at scale is a dream of autocrats and marketers alike. The fact that it is private/anonymous is entirely irrelevant.