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Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network

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Re: Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network

#51

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I think software engineers are this century's key perpetrators of "good intentions." Here's a hint: if you saw it in a dystopic thriller you probably don't need to build it, even out of morbid curiosity.

Reminds me of Boston Dynamics. Ten years ago, I was in awe and so entertained when watching their videos. Now, I am terrified and disgusted.

I was in awe while also being completely terrified. It didn't take Black Mirror or a viral ad to convince me that autonomous weapon systems are bad. I grew up watching Terminator and RoboCop. My first thought when seeing BigDog was "this is awesome but also we're all going to die".

When people didn't get it, I just showed them Petman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFrjrgBV8K0

Re: Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network

#52
post #28
post #8

Why are we building the technology of a dystopia? What happened to shows like Star Trek which gave us more helpful goals to work toward?

The Star Trek whose utopia needed a world war against the ethnic cleansing of genetically engineered Nazi supermen and an alien invasion to "civilize" humanity in the post-apocalyptic aftermath? After which which humankind just somehow evolved beyond the petty desires and violent impulses that had hitherto been baked into its primate genome for millions of years? I love Star Trek but one person's utopia is another pe…

Depends. In TNG the outlook tends to be far more rosy than in DS9 or DIS. There were a few episodes which hinted at darker tendencies in Starfleet but those usually turned out to be corrupt individuals or some kind of alien influence.

Having grown up with TNG my impression of the Federation was much like what the US was pretending to be prior to 9/11 (i.e. prior to "world police"), a beacon of liberty, equality and hope for mankind, but with all the ills of real-world USA eliminated by scientific progress and a more idealistic and altruistic society.

The show had a few militaristic undertones initially but they mostly went away in season 2 and later, except for the ranks. The ranks and offensive capabilities are lampshaded a number of times but Picard and other characters frequently prove that those are just born out of necessity and for self-defense, never to attack. The Borg represent such a threat exactly because they are not interested in diplomacy and Starfleet has to fight an all-out war to survive them -- unlike the Romulans or Klingons who even at the worst of times mostly didn't outright attack them.

Re: Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network

#53
post #8

Why are we building the technology of a dystopia? What happened to shows like Star Trek which gave us more helpful goals to work toward?

The reason I made this was that I noticed Mask R-CNN’s masking and object identification capabilities were pretty good and I needed a refresher on Python-based image manipulation. https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/976277067070300160?s=21 And then I remembered Black Mirror and it gave me an idea. The step toward dystopia was not the primary motivation for this project.

This is cool I remember trying to build a chrome extension for something like this a while ago for detecting and blocking images of animals people had phobia's for (e.g snake, spider and e.t.c) and I tried using pythons dlib object detector and shape landmarks predictor and it was a very stressful exercise in futility. Now I will have a look at mark r-cnn as it might help solve my problem and my few minutes of total brain fuckery after unlucky seeing a picture or a video with any kind of snakes in it, the big one's are of course worse.

Re: Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only gets built if some over-zealous nerds build it. That's the point.

Or someone that's "just doing their job".

Just doing your job is not a justification or defense.

Everyone has a choice to make as to what role they want to play in society, some people have chosen to build the tools of our destruction in exchange for pieces of silver, but that was their choice, "just doing their job" does not absolve them of that choice

Re: Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network

#55
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scanners have been refusing to scan certain things for ages.

It's always a "fun" party trick at the office to show people that you can't scan money.

In a stallman-esque world, this is just a problem in installing custom firmware in the scanner, right?

Re: Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network

#56
post #36

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I think software engineers are this century's key perpetrators of "good intentions." Here's a hint: if you saw it in a dystopic thriller you probably don't need to build it, even out of morbid curiosity.

> Here's a hint: if you saw it in a dystopic thriller you probably don't need to build it, even out of morbid curiosity. But, for example, you could make a chrome extension to remove Trump from all pictures on the internet! I'm sure that type of thing would make a some folks happy.

I’d like to see an opera extension to remove all the politic and pathos from the internet. If someone able reads this, thanks in advance for supporting opera too!

Re: Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network

#57

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I think software engineers are this century's key perpetrators of "good intentions." Here's a hint: if you saw it in a dystopic thriller you probably don't need to build it, even out of morbid curiosity.

You can't stop progress, even if it's negative. Especially something that is relatively easy to make. If nukes were easy to make, we'd all be dead.

You can absolutely work to redefine what “progress” means, who technology will serve, and how it’s bounty and harms are distributed.

If you live in a Western democracy, you’re reaping the benefit of a series of such struggles from the 17th century forward. The Enlightenment, various democratic revolutions, labor organization, etc. The fatalism, the “unchallengeable trajectory” solipsism that categorizes so much of the thinking around tech is the thing that’s new.

Re: Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network

#58
post #49

This doesn't seem to work for me. I ran "python person_blocker.py -i images/img1.jpg -l" after installing dependencies and I only get: /home/d33tah/virtualenv-py3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/h5py/__init__.py:36: FutureWarning: Conversion of the second argument of issubdtype from `float` to `np.floating` is deprecated. In future, it will be treated as `np.float64 == np.dtype(float).type`. from ._conv import register_c…

Author here: All of these are warnings, they shouldn't block the script. Check the current directory for person_blocked.jpg and person_blocked.gif.

Re: Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network

#59
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or someone that's "just doing their job".

Just doing your job is not a justification or defense. Everyone has a choice to make as to what role they want to play in society, some people have chosen to build the tools of our destruction in exchange for pieces of silver, but that was their choice, "just doing their job" does not absolve them of that choice

I agree, your sentiment is precisely what I was implying with the quotes.

These things don't always communicate perfectly through text or punctuation.

Re: Automatically “block” people in images using a pretrained neural network

#60
post #49

This doesn't seem to work for me. I ran "python person_blocker.py -i images/img1.jpg -l" after installing dependencies and I only get: /home/d33tah/virtualenv-py3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/h5py/__init__.py:36: FutureWarning: Conversion of the second argument of issubdtype from `float` to `np.floating` is deprecated. In future, it will be treated as `np.float64 == np.dtype(float).type`. from ._conv import register_c…

Author here: All of these are warnings, they shouldn't block the script. Check the current directory for person_blocked.jpg and person_blocked.gif.

Thanks! That helped.
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