Taser has started its own in-house AI unit • Hacker News Board

Re: Taser has started its own in-house AI unit

#21

Post by confounded » Fri, Feb 17, 2017, 9:33 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #15

xiphias wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too easy to implement, so it can't be regularized. The only thing you get in return is that you'll be able to recognize the faces of police officers as well with the same technology. The world is shrinking, and it will feel like we're all living in a huge village.

> and it will feel like we're all living in a huge village A very apt way of putting it. For a while now I've held the opinion that anonymity (and to some degree privacy, at least the privacy you expect from anonymity) as we know it is a short-lived artifact of our accumulation into larger groups, where it's not possible to know everyone around you and almost everything about them. The farther back you go, the less a…

> In that respect, what we're seeing is a return to the norm

In no way. Note that the article is about police body cameras. This is less about technology than it is about the power of the state over individuals.

Re: Taser has started its own in-house AI unit

#22

Post by Eridrus » Fri, Feb 17, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #18

Per the comments noting that this (police-mounted face recognition) isn't a thing: I'm amazed that pervasive face recognition isn't a thing. I figured it would be the killer app for Google Glass, popping up notes about everyone you see. Apple & Facebook could leverage it from the face tagging in Photos & FB. Police could be well-served by a vest-mounted lightweight system giving likely identifications of encountered…

It exists in Russia under the name FindFace.

Re: Taser has started its own in-house AI unit

#23

Post by hackuser » Fri, Feb 17, 2017, 9:37 PM UTC

paunchy wrote: post #11

I work at TASER/Axon, the company asserted to have this technology. This article, which appeared on the front page of the Drudge report this morning, is extremely disingenuous. They have repackaged a press release that announced our investments in computer vision and machine learning and have made a huge leap that we have built or are currently building facial recognition into our cameras. This is false. We believe t…

Thanks for sharing your perspective. Reducing inefficiency would be great, but what is TASER/Axon's view about this technology's effects on privacy and civil rights (EDIT: and on their responsibility to create products that protect rights and sell them to users who will do the same).

Re: Taser has started its own in-house AI unit

#24

Post by Eridrus » Fri, Feb 17, 2017, 9:40 PM UTC

xiphias wrote: post #5

confounded wrote: post #3

The only viable solution to this is regulation, and our only real hopes for it are the ACLU and the EFF.

It's too easy to implement, so it can't be regularized. The only thing you get in return is that you'll be able to recognize the faces of police officers as well with the same technology. The world is shrinking, and it will feel like we're all living in a huge village.

It can only be implemented if you have a database of faces. You can probably get that from mug shots, but false positives may be challenging without a database of everyone else.

And I think it's still quite hard to do for video and real-time though.

Re: Taser has started its own in-house AI unit

#25

Post by smilesnd » Fri, Feb 17, 2017, 10:03 PM UTC

confounded wrote: post #20

anigbrowl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't regulate technology out of existence; the harder you try the greater the potential rewards for using it asymmetrically. I can think of legal objections, but I can also think of equally good arguments that circumvent those objections. Rather than wishing a new technology away, which has never ever worked, it's better to assume it will be the norm and then try to imagine what countermeasures would be deployed…

> You can't regulate technology out of existence No, but you can regulate it into regulation. This is why police need a warrant to pick the lock on your front door, or to use a thermal imaging camera on your home.

Or why police need to announce that they smell weed before bashing in your front door to check. Or make a statement that they heard someone screaming for help before bashing in your front door. Or make a statement that they heard gun fire so they can bash in your front door. My point being police don't always need a warrant to enter a place. Just like they don't need warrants to MITM cell towers.

Re: Taser has started its own in-house AI unit

#26

Post by smilesnd » Fri, Feb 17, 2017, 10:13 PM UTC

paunchy wrote: post #11

I work at TASER/Axon, the company asserted to have this technology. This article, which appeared on the front page of the Drudge report this morning, is extremely disingenuous. They have repackaged a press release that announced our investments in computer vision and machine learning and have made a huge leap that we have built or are currently building facial recognition into our cameras. This is false. We believe t…

What is the technology/stack/infrastructure used there?

Re: Taser has started its own in-house AI unit

#27

Post by kbenson » Fri, Feb 17, 2017, 11:45 PM UTC

confounded wrote: post #21

kbenson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it will feel like we're all living in a huge village A very apt way of putting it. For a while now I've held the opinion that anonymity (and to some degree privacy, at least the privacy you expect from anonymity) as we know it is a short-lived artifact of our accumulation into larger groups, where it's not possible to know everyone around you and almost everything about them. The farther back you go, the less a…

> In that respect, what we're seeing is a return to the norm In no way. Note that the article is about police body cameras. This is less about technology than it is about the power of the state over individuals.

I'm not sure what you think gives the state a monopoly on this. There's massive amounts of information about most people online, and there will be even more in the future. I think it's likely that in the future even if you've never put a single picture of yourself online, there will likely be enough images of people in public and associated information to identify you anyway (use a credit card at a store? Why wouldn't they choose to associate your image from in-store cameras with that customer record?).

All the more egregious aspects of online marketing and tracking are coming to the physical realm. You too will likely be able to access this information for a price. Good luck trying to stop it. Honestly. The world would be a better place in my estimation if you could. I just have little faith in measures designed to combat economically incentivized behavior.