Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras • Hacker News Board

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#171

Post by extralego » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 8:52 AM UTC

wcrichton wrote: post #14

I’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…

To be fair, the absolute last thing “modern cinema” needs is another formulaic measurement of demographically correlated screentime.

I am not personally against girls seeing depictions of other girls in movies (have you consulted with the anti-bodyshaming sect?) however this claim to “social good” is telling of a desperate effort to ignore actual social problems, none of which are so conveniently morally distinct from the economic disparities Google instigates and defends on a daily basis. Studies show little girls who are homeless have bigger problems.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#172

Post by extralego » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 9:04 AM UTC

thrantaway wrote: post #152

wcrichton wrote: post #14

I’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…

It's disheartening that so many bright people work on research that will undoubtedly be abused by authoritarian governments and make the world a worse place for everyone. Ask a thousand people what video analysis can be used for and I bet the vast majority will say surveillance, and most would probably struggle to think about something else. I wish researchers would start to ask themselves if what they're building ca…

History? You mean Google?

Google will glorify it’s history in it’s middle schools just like America glorifies it’s history in it’s middle schools.

Considering the researchers are hired according to their sheltered backgrounds, holding them as indivuals accountable is futile.

If you care, vote accordingly, for politicians willing to refuse corporate donations.

If you care a lot, study revolutionary history, learn from it and organize. I’m just paraphrasing the only thing that seems to ever actually work.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#173

Post by King-Aaron » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 9:07 AM UTC

sidmani wrote: post #125

telltruth wrote: post #67

I fully expect this to keep getting advanced further. There has been no protest whatsoever within China and even many people of Chinese origin living in US with US citizenship seem to think this is necessary and good for the people. I have been told that "outsiders" won't "understand" this. The bottom line is that if people are not rebelling against current measures of social credit, government only has incentive to…

> TV sets with front camera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

> TV sets with front camera

https://www.samsung.com/us/es9000-75-inch-slim-3d-led-smart-...

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#174

Post by dang » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 9:13 AM UTC

bachbach wrote: post #159

dang wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads into political flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I will not, but I also didn't begin by introducing the tinder - he did. "USC/Google team used computer vision tools to identify gender bias in modern cinema" is waving a flag for a specific political belief that is not shared by most Westerners. Outside of the valley this is fringe stuff. The appropriate equivalent to this would be a right winger expressing concern at the 'appropriateness' of race mixing on camera (t…

That's true, but part of the art of posting a good HN comment, or at least not posting a bad one, is to resist reacting to the most provocative thing in a comment (other than possibly to downvote or flag it) and instead react to the most interesting thing, or not react at all. That's not easy for most of us, including me.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#175

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 9:18 AM UTC

bsenftner wrote: post #87

symisc_devel wrote: post #71

We 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.

[deleted]

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#176

Post by sharpercoder » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 9:30 AM UTC

b6 wrote: post #170

sharpercoder wrote: post #46

I understand that most western countries have societal controls grown over the past centuries. The Chinese did not, and are catching up quickly by implementing similar controls as we have. But now, it's the digital age, and as such they are using any available technology to implement these societal controls. From this perspective, it's completely normal what the Chinese do. Seen from western eyes it does look a bit s…

> I understand that most western countries have societal controls grown over the past centuries. The Chinese did not, and are catching up quickly by implementing similar controls as we have. A sibling comments asks you what you mean here. I'd like to know, too. This kind of sentiment is depressingly familiar -- it seems to me that a lot of Chinese people like to vacillate between "China is the best", "China is just d…

What happens when you request a loan? What happens when you apply for a job that involves kids, or requires trust? These are societal controls. China did not develop these the past centuries as much as the western world did, or they got destroyed in communist uprisings (e.g. Mao).

My parent comment is neutral, I'm only stating some facts and conclusions. I agree you need innovation, creativity and critical thinking to make a more diverse society. Success however is in the eye of the beholder; it's mostly a matter of what measure you use. Growth is not a panacea, while many western thinking seems it is. Neither is "amount of societal order", as China seems to think.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#177

Post by taurine » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 9:32 AM UTC

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #2

The 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?

I firmly believe (though in these matters it is hard to prove) that China and the US are in a technological AI war, with the first to largely automate their economy getting the biggest piece of the pie. One needs pervasive surveillance to accomplish economy automation.

I believe stories like these carry a certain propaganda element and are directed behind the scenes. What ultimately sticks is "Don't share your tech with the Chinese or they will use it to build 1984's Orwell. Go work for harmless Silicon Valley instead, so you can make people click on advertisements and get them addicted to your platform.".

If we had access to all the facts (we don't), we could honestly compare the US's surveillance apparatus to the Chinese. I believe that it was the US that started it with the early Echelon systems, forcing the Chinese to step up their game (every time a Chinese spy got caught with these systems, their picture of US capabilities got a bit more clear).

All modern ML is build on old military projects, adversarial images is researched due to the military wanting no mistakes, and all popular tools see investments by DARPA/IARPA. There is just no way to escape the military when working with advanced technology, except for putting on the blinders and pretend that your work/code/tutorials are not being consumed by (foreign) intelligence agencies.

The US government is legit afraid to lose to China, because China seems to care way less about the unfairness and biases presenting itself in IT systems, while the educated US citizens demand fair automated treatment and justification. In the eyes of progress, those are mere hindrances and roadblocks that need clearing first, giving China a head start. The only thing you can do to lessen this drawback, is to publish wide and far that China does not care about ethics in AI, turning it into a PR problem for them.

DeepMind winning at Go would be like Alibaba winning the Superbowl with robots. It was a huge wake up call, and I think it rattled some cages of foreign militaries.

I myself share a lot of information with the US, including KYC data. A lot of US companies try to track every move I make online. Even if I wanted to go 1 month without touching anything Akamai, I could not. Commercialized mass surveillance it not much better than state-led mass surveillance.

It would have been interesting to see how the US would be portrayed if it was not the top dog. Like the US media attacks and publicizes the poor rights of women in countries like Afghanistan as part of the war effort, I wonder what aspects of US culture a country like Afghanistan would attack/deem subhuman.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#178

Post by rqs » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 9:33 AM UTC

telltruth wrote: post #67

I fully expect this to keep getting advanced further. There has been no protest whatsoever within China and even many people of Chinese origin living in US with US citizenship seem to think this is necessary and good for the people. I have been told that "outsiders" won't "understand" this. The bottom line is that if people are not rebelling against current measures of social credit, government only has incentive to…

> Chinese origin living in US with US citizenship seem to think this is necessary and good for the people

Of course, they don't have to live with all that so they don't actually care. Next time you could ask them whether or not they're willing to renounce their U.S. citizenship and become Chinese citizen again so they can be monitored 24/7 for their own "insider" "good", then you will start to get true answers from them.

Back to the topic though, as a Chinese, I don't actually at the opposite of video surveillance in public, it made many places more safer and thus prosper.

However, surveillance cannot went too far, and certainly cannot be use to shame people. It's about respect of one's dignity, a bottom line that a government should never cross.

Plus, given the poor accuracy that system outputs, what if the system made a wrong detection and displayed information of an innocent? Chinese government probably don't care about it though.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#179

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 9:42 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #169

jacquesm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps this "war on science", however naive and inarticulate its proponents, is actually a war on the abuses of technology, such as the parent describes. No, it definitely isn't. It's the willful and deceitful spreading of lies and portraying of scientists as bogeyman rather than the bringers of bad news. It's the purposeful act of dumbing down citizens and putting lies instead of facts in their heads to use 15 ye…

> It's the willful and deceitful spreading of lies and portraying of scientists as bogeyman rather than the bringers of bad news. Well, science is a noble aspiration and a great methodology. A scientist, on the other hand, and "scientific results" in actual practice can be anything, from great, to non-reproducible crap (most papers), to trite BS (lots of papers), to lies and distortions to sell some product, corporat…

Heh, you suddenly made me realize that that old school publishing house may have a role after all: At least now there is some way to distinguish corporate crap from actual science.

Not that all of it is great but at least there is a bar to be crossed. There are some examples of outright fabrication in scientific publishing but the bulk of it seems to be in earnest.

Re: Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

#180

Post by Fnoord » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 10:01 AM UTC

superflyguy wrote: post #168

extralego wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artivism is a fallacy of romance and a mark of decadence. I sympathize and appreciate the sentiment but we must let it die. Aesthetics compliment power but never redirect it. Let’s not fool ourselves.

Ah yes, the "art terrorist". Someone who has spent too much time sniffing paint cans and not enough time studying history.

Communication (and media) is important during a revolution (Examples: [1]). Or, more recently, look at the Arab spring where GSM and Bluetooth were important. The importance of radio and TV. Art is a form of communication, and with proper coverage the message is spread (ie. Bansky).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989