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Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
81–90 of 223 posts
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#82This article examines A.I., policing and authoritarianism from a Western perspective, rather than the local perspective. I think it would have served the article's balance to get a more local and relativist view on the intersectionality of the things they are looking to be objective about. That said, if the technology delivers on the potential the gov't claims, I think they will have to relax the laws or make it flex…
China is a huge, huge country, historically it's been difficult for the central government to exercise its control all over its territory. This would be the realization of that historical desire. That sounds like a better argument for China breaking up than it does using force and dystopian surveillance to maintain a lock on power.
I don’t you’d see more than base level noise support to break up China, internally. Probably would not even register 1%. It’s an uncontested tenet for Chinese that they are the descendants and heirs of an uninterrupted, uncorrupted people stretching five thousand years and counting.
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#83The article says there are four times as many cameras in China than in the US. This means approximately the same number of cameras per citizen. Where is the NYT article about the US' dystopian dreams?
Disclaimer: I don’t consider myself prochinese government, if you think the below statements state otherwise, don’t call me a 50cents party. There are freedom in expressing ones thoughts on solid facts. It’s an insult to people’s rights by labeling them and automatically disregard their opinions. I think our collective consciousness should be to show the world that a free and open nation is the best form of national…
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Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#84The technology isn't quite there, and Chinese law enforcement clearly exaggerates in order to maximize the current impact. However, we are very close to the point where everything could be tracked, and recorded in a usable way - including the exact location of most citizens at all times, discrepancies in utility bills, shopping, internet activity (except possibly for those few with impeccable OpSec, and even that for…
Dissidents and revolutionaries would hardly be able to do much.
The main weapon of a dissident is public dissent. Mass surveillance doesn't directly prevent that.
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#85We were recently approached by a contractor who works behalf the Chinese gov. Basically, they wanted to purchase an insane number of commercial licenses of our embedded computer vision library[1] to implement face tracking (detection and recognition) for a custom OpenBSD fork running on a homegrown CPU architecture with 512MB of RAM. They didn't tell more about this hardware but impression is that is the new generati…
Actually what I am surprised about is that they even approached you at all. Products manufactured for the domestic Chinese market generally don't need to give a shit about the legal aspects of the GPL. Until somebody successfully sues a Chinese company in a domestic court and wins damages (vanishingly unlikely), BSD, GPL, LGPL, Apache and other licensed open source things will continue to be incorporated into embedde…
Yes, they really don't care about any open source license. In fact, they are notorious for GPL violation.
What they were looking for is the Real-time face detector implemented directly in the C code which is available only for the commercial version of the library (https://pixlab.io/downloads).
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#86I’m a PhD student focusing on large scale video analysis. It’s an unfortunate fact that a lot of the applied research in this space is motivated by surveillance, particularly in systems, eg what’s come out of Microsoft’s efforts here [0]. A colleague who attended CVPR said most of the industry booths were either surveillance or self driving cars. I wish researchers would start to think more creatively about what we c…
> The least we can do is try to use this technology for social good. For example, a USC/Google team used computer vision tools to identify gender bias in modern cinema That sounds entirely worthless. A social good involves helping somebody who needs aid. This proposal merely fills a perceived need by political dogmatics. This is exactly a sociopolitical memory leak.
> A social good involves helping somebody who needs aid.
The citation provided by the parent post presents concrete claims about who is being helped and how.
Here's my summary of the argument in the paper:
1. Gender bias exists in films (intro).
2. This bias has a tangible negative impact on women's lives (section titled "Role models on-screen make a difference").
3. Quantifying this bias helps filmmakers create films that are less biased (section titled "How can this technology change things?")
Summarily, women need aid because of how they are portrayed in films and quantifying/identifying bias helps portray women in a less damaging way.
To be clear, I think it's entirely reasonable to disagree with any one of these assertions (esp the third)!
But you don't present any opposing arguments, you just claim that the research doesn't meet a prime facie burden of "helping somebody who needs aid" even though the linked website goes to great lengths to make the case that it does meet this exact burden.
> This proposal merely fills a perceived need by political dogmatics
The same is true for surveillance technology, and military technology, and renewable energy technology, and even economic development. There are very few non-political notions of "social good".
Defining and achieving "social good" is fundamentally a political act.
If you want research to have an impact on the world, then you've got to be comfortable wading into the political. Because any time you change the world in non-trivial ways, politics is eventually at hand.
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#87We were recently approached by a contractor who works behalf the Chinese gov. Basically, they wanted to purchase an insane number of commercial licenses of our embedded computer vision library[1] to implement face tracking (detection and recognition) for a custom OpenBSD fork running on a homegrown CPU architecture with 512MB of RAM. They didn't tell more about this hardware but impression is that is the new generati…
I write real time, video based FR. The company I work has a strict policy that our sales, nor any partners even respond to Chinese company queries. The thing is, regardless of what they say, you'll never get paid AND they will reverse/rip-off your product.
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
you want local perspective? this is what happens when it's implemented against a religious and ethnic minority: https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/02/asia/china-xinjiang-detention... https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/travel-0327201816200... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/china-surv... https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turn...
That's not local perspective. Please don't take these threads further into political or national flamewar. They're flammable enough already.
Posting concrete examples of how police state mass-surveillance technologies can aid and abet in the suppression of disliked minorities is defined as a flamewar? Yeah...
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually what I am surprised about is that they even approached you at all. Products manufactured for the domestic Chinese market generally don't need to give a shit about the legal aspects of the GPL. Until somebody successfully sues a Chinese company in a domestic court and wins damages (vanishingly unlikely), BSD, GPL, LGPL, Apache and other licensed open source things will continue to be incorporated into embedde…
Yes, they really don't care about any open source license. In fact, they are notorious for GPL violation. What they were looking for is the Real-time face detector implemented directly in the C code which is available only for the commercial version of the library ( https://pixlab.io/downloads ).
If I were an unethical Chinese company that really wanted your library, I'd create a US LLC, get some web designers to make a decent looking page that looks real enough, license the C code for some small bespoke project, and then disappear once I had the code/library.
Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
#90The technology isn't quite there, and Chinese law enforcement clearly exaggerates in order to maximize the current impact. However, we are very close to the point where everything could be tracked, and recorded in a usable way - including the exact location of most citizens at all times, discrepancies in utility bills, shopping, internet activity (except possibly for those few with impeccable OpSec, and even that for…
Accuracy hasn't been a big deal for authoritarian governments and oppression anyway. I don't think they care. Outside of identifying risks associated with people who are close to people in power.... most authoritarian governments haven't seemed to worry about how much indiscriminate or inaccurate social punishment occurs, including China.