Setting who wants to do this aside in order to avoid the constant 'X is worse than Y' arguments.
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that in a near future we will have cameras that can do much more than identification on a massive scale. It may be easy to track things like how stressed, healthy, sober etc. people are without their consent or without them even noticing. And this would be precise, not speculative like the current online tracking.
Would you live comfortably in this world? Would you build this?
This kind of world gets built by some people who are excited to work towards this goal, but also by a much larger group of people for whom meeting their daily needs outweighs the abstract, distant drawbacks that they can pretend to rationalize away.
It will be built through economic coercion appealing to their livelihoods, and the impacts will be perceived as externalities. Incidentally, this is the same way most of the modern world got built over the last several centuries, with those having to work to earn their keep taking on various risks to enrich themselves ostensibly to provide for their families: mining, military service, or data mining others' personal information to sell ads; their participation in these has far-reaching impacts on the world, but gets distributed over a large population and avoids hitting close to home.
Some people can't rationalize this away, so (in a low-violence society) they quit and do something else. Given enough time, the workers who are uneasy will be replaced by people who have no such qualms. They, and their bosses, will make good money until an outraged public prompts government regulations to catch up. By that point, they will likely have a seat at the table. In an authoritarian society, or when the state itself is the actor, there's even less of a chance of this balance.
When you hypothesize a world where AI uses cameras everywhere to know everything they can about everybody,
you haven't characterized that world at all.
First, IS IT REALLY EVERYBODY? (But let's assume for now, it's really everybody).
The question that will characterize the kind of world, is what is done with that information.
You can choose to use it to oppress and repress people; or you could use it to help them. If you detect a person overly drunk, you can send somebody fetch her, and either send her to the police station or to her home. Here you can ask what kind of world you would live more comfortably in? But it has nothing to do with cameras AI, and databases.
If the AI detects that some person is becoming stressed and loses her health, you can use that information to fire her, (bad health leads to bad productivity right?), to forbid her to get insurance, etc, or you can use that information to give her some holidays and schedule a consultation with health services. Here you can ask what kind of world you would live more comfortably in? But it has nothing to do with cameras AI, and databases.
And if the AI detects that some crime is being committed or about to be, you can send the police after or before the damage is done to the victim, and you can put the criminal in jail or send back to his country of origin, or leave him on the streets to try again another crime. Here you can ask what kind of world you would live more comfortably in? But it has nothing to do with cameras AI, and databases.
Yup. Think about how you can recognize your friends without even seeing their face, by the way they walk, what they wear, how tall they are, and other contextual clues. Computers will be able to do all of that. Also think about other things that only computers with massive amounts of data will be able to do. Computers will be able to enumerate your wardrobe, your possessions. They'll be able to figure out most of the books you've read or own. They'll know where you work, what your schedule is, where you shop, what you do for fun, when you take vacations and where. They'll be able to learn all of this even if you don't freely give all this information up through social media posts and what-have-you by following you in the background of other stuff or through other "feeds". Imagine how much easier it is to identify someone in a picture or a video if you can pull in "big data" context which narrows down the possible/likely people who could be in that location at that time (wearing those clothes, doing that activity, within a given weight/height range, etc, etc, etc.)
We don't really know what the feasible computational and data limits are here, the potential (and likelihood, I think) is that they are much, much lower than where we would like them to be. In the near future something very close to ubiquitous surveillance is very likely to be the norm. And that has all sorts of chilling implications. If systems can keep track of where you are and what you're doing most hours of most days then that opens up a lot of questions in terms of free expression, political organizing, civil disobedience, etc.
And, in the not so distant future after that, it's safe to assume that people will be forced to have chip implants. Why use a camera and ml when you can just tag someone?
Even if it gets built, I can count on thousands of my countrymen to install it improperly, lose the documents, mail the cheques late, accidentally lose equipment, and fail to plug it in.
Don’t worry, systems like this are incredibly fragile. You could spray paint the cameras and force the government into an attrition war (I can spray paint them faster than you can replace them, and paint is cheap).
I made a couple trips to the South Pole in grad school. Down there you were either a scientist in a red parka, black insulated pants, and white boots or support staff in brown carharts. No part of the body could be seen at a distance and even the gloves were standard issue.
What constantly amazed me was how you could see someone walking a quarter mile away and instantly know exactly who it was.
The South Pole is a smaller population than China so I'd be worried about false positives (probably mostly within families as kids learn to stand and walk like their parents and have similar dimensions when fully grown) but I suspect it's actually a pretty robust identification technique.
This will cause people to start walking on the street in the same way as Fremen in Frank Herbert's Dune, by varying frequency and step length in order not to attract a (government) worm.
So, my understanding is that the machine vision technologies discussed in this article don't really work that well, at least not once deployed in the real world, outside of "the lab" and away from the controlled conditions of a scientific experiment reported in a research paper.
I wonder, then- do the authorities of the various countries (by far not just China) who make use of this kind of technology know how little they add to their ability to spy on their citizens? If they know- do they use it anyway just so that lucrative contracts can be signed and money exchange hands? Do they (also?) figure that the fear of being identified by all-seeing, all-knowing cameras will keep the population in the straight and narrow, even if the cameras are blind and dumb as bricks, in practice?
My Bachelor's (of engineering) thesis was in biometrics and if there's one thing I remember from the seminars it's that gait along with typing rhythm and voice are these modalities that pop up every now and then only to disappear after a while after their proponents figure out that it's no use.
These modalities simply don't carry enough information to reliably identify anyone.
Facial recognition works best when you need the subject to be unaware that they are being identified.
You don't necessarily need to identify one amongst 1.3 billion. (requiring 30 bits of information out of the gait!)
The context is a crowd of about 100 (10 - 1000), in which you are tracking a few percent, and you need to keep "eyes" on an individual, discriminating amongst a few others that have crossed is path.
That said, I'd agree that it looks difficult to help distinguish individuals in a trained team.
This is not new, and is not unique to China. Any country with intelligence units, like the US, is using data mining to identify and control their citizens. It has become fashionable lately to imply that China is the only country doing these things, or somehow doing it in larger scale. Has everyone forgotten what Snowden revealed?
It’s controversial because China does not have an independent judiciary or any real civil rights protections, so the potential for and likelihood of abuse is much higher. See also the concentration camps containing over 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang province [0].
China is doing it at MUCH larger scale and a lot more intrusive. Everything on the internet is tracked and filtered, cameras everywhere. Chinese government can pinpoint location of any of it's 1.3 bln citizens.
Chinese government can kill any citizens anytime they want. If Snowden is born in China, his parents and relatives will be used as hostage or sent into jail.
I think it's important to remember that the Snowden leaks occurred shortly before the "Big Data" craze went into full swing. Even Snowden said at the time that their was more data than could be effectively analyzed.
While I agree with what you're saying, it makes sense that we'd be getting this information only just now - after there has been enough time for 1) data scientists and the like to become prevalent/cheap enough for government contracting and 2) enough time to build working applications on top of all that data.
Yea, china is in a different league. You are talking about 400M video cameras. The only thing close are the self driving car companies, who will be selling info the feds :)
Also the specific concept of gait analysis[0] has been around for decades. Changing one's gait has been an important piece of the tradecraft tool box for a long time now[1].
Don't even pretend that the US and the China use this tech the same way. The US might have a few bad apples in intelligence using data mining for bad things and there have been some questionable data being mined; but suppression of people isn't happening from it. China is using this tracking to actively suppress their people and view that do not align with the state.
The real punchline from that article "no peer reviewed scientific studies have ever been done to prove the basic assumption that every person’s fingerprint is unique."
I'm about to walk out the door so I can't look up papers, but I'm going to guess that it's based as much on dynamics as actual proportions of limbs. I would estimate the number of features to be on the scale of 2000-2010 era facial recognition. Dynamics would increase the number of dimensions, making it possible to separate two people with nearly identical features.
However, I do agree that inferring the proportions from video imagery at various angles and with various items of clothing is going to be challenging due to systemic distortion, e.g. inferring incorrect angle due to clothing.
One of the books I read when I was younger that got me into programming is Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. In the book, the high school they attend has cameras that identify students by measuring gait. The characters in the book put gravel in their shoes to throw the tech off when cutting class.
If this is all out in the open in China and many Chinese people even approve of it, wouldn't it be more efficient to have everyone wear ID tags of some kind?
I'm skeptical, especially of the surveillance claims. If you already know who you're looking for and you have lots of footage of that person, you might be able to train your system to pick up that person's gait from new footage. But that's a far cry from being able to "identify anyone" by their gait, i.e. set up lots of cameras around the city and track individuals coming and going.
There are already amazing airborne camera systems that track the motion of every license plate in a city, and even that isn't the same as tracking every car's movement because you still have to know which license plate to follow -- you just can't care about all movement of all cars. I suppose someone will say that you can store all movement in a database, but I'll wager that's just not worth anywhere near the cost. Your computing power would be much better spent on computing large primes.
Anyway, it's a cool sci-fi movie premise. You can see the murderer shaving off his mustache, burning off his own fingerprints and then knee-capping himself to avoid detection.
Mitigation strategies discussed in an unrelated (but relevant) conversation between WIRED and Jonna Mendez - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8&t=278 (if you're not auto-jumped, find 4:38 in the video)
Anyone who's heavily near-sighted knows this technique. In college, my dorm bathroom was quite a distance from my room. At night, I would remove my contact lenses, and upon returning I would always identify certain people by their style of walking, or their posture.
Surely gait analysis is part of the US arsenal as well. It's unique like a fingerprint and is used extensively by equestrian teams, etc., to detect shoe and health issues early to protect the investment in the horse. Many relevant health problems are visible early on as a change in the horse's gait.
It can be done with an accelerometer or a camera, and probably other kinds of sensors.
It could also be used for early diagnosis in humans, but is cost prohibitive for human preventative care use.
Remember a decade or so ago when the U.S. military was icing Middle Eastern "terr'ist" targets based upon gait analysis?
Well, now it's you. And also, once again, brought to "the world" by China. (Maybe they'll sell it along side of or as an add-on to their Great Firewall turnkey systems.)
I remember viewing a few of those old video segments (drone- and plane-based platforms) and feeling pretty nervous.
[+] [-] cimi_|7 years ago|reply
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that in a near future we will have cameras that can do much more than identification on a massive scale. It may be easy to track things like how stressed, healthy, sober etc. people are without their consent or without them even noticing. And this would be precise, not speculative like the current online tracking.
Would you live comfortably in this world? Would you build this?
[+] [-] temp-dude-87844|7 years ago|reply
It will be built through economic coercion appealing to their livelihoods, and the impacts will be perceived as externalities. Incidentally, this is the same way most of the modern world got built over the last several centuries, with those having to work to earn their keep taking on various risks to enrich themselves ostensibly to provide for their families: mining, military service, or data mining others' personal information to sell ads; their participation in these has far-reaching impacts on the world, but gets distributed over a large population and avoids hitting close to home.
Some people can't rationalize this away, so (in a low-violence society) they quit and do something else. Given enough time, the workers who are uneasy will be replaced by people who have no such qualms. They, and their bosses, will make good money until an outraged public prompts government regulations to catch up. By that point, they will likely have a seat at the table. In an authoritarian society, or when the state itself is the actor, there's even less of a chance of this balance.
[+] [-] informatimago|7 years ago|reply
When you hypothesize a world where AI uses cameras everywhere to know everything they can about everybody, you haven't characterized that world at all.
First, IS IT REALLY EVERYBODY? (But let's assume for now, it's really everybody).
The question that will characterize the kind of world, is what is done with that information.
You can choose to use it to oppress and repress people; or you could use it to help them. If you detect a person overly drunk, you can send somebody fetch her, and either send her to the police station or to her home. Here you can ask what kind of world you would live more comfortably in? But it has nothing to do with cameras AI, and databases.
If the AI detects that some person is becoming stressed and loses her health, you can use that information to fire her, (bad health leads to bad productivity right?), to forbid her to get insurance, etc, or you can use that information to give her some holidays and schedule a consultation with health services. Here you can ask what kind of world you would live more comfortably in? But it has nothing to do with cameras AI, and databases.
And if the AI detects that some crime is being committed or about to be, you can send the police after or before the damage is done to the victim, and you can put the criminal in jail or send back to his country of origin, or leave him on the streets to try again another crime. Here you can ask what kind of world you would live more comfortably in? But it has nothing to do with cameras AI, and databases.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|7 years ago|reply
We don't really know what the feasible computational and data limits are here, the potential (and likelihood, I think) is that they are much, much lower than where we would like them to be. In the near future something very close to ubiquitous surveillance is very likely to be the norm. And that has all sorts of chilling implications. If systems can keep track of where you are and what you're doing most hours of most days then that opens up a lot of questions in terms of free expression, political organizing, civil disobedience, etc.
[+] [-] dewiz|7 years ago|reply
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11407094/CCTV-...
[+] [-] marmaduke|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] un-devmox|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbob2000|7 years ago|reply
Don’t worry, systems like this are incredibly fragile. You could spray paint the cameras and force the government into an attrition war (I can spray paint them faster than you can replace them, and paint is cheap).
[+] [-] matz1|7 years ago|reply
if its not then I find a way to adapt. I accept that the only thing constant is change.
> Would you build this?
many2 reason or could be simply just because is exciting
[+] [-] yodon|7 years ago|reply
What constantly amazed me was how you could see someone walking a quarter mile away and instantly know exactly who it was.
The South Pole is a smaller population than China so I'd be worried about false positives (probably mostly within families as kids learn to stand and walk like their parents and have similar dimensions when fully grown) but I suspect it's actually a pretty robust identification technique.
[+] [-] r-bryan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] on_and_off|7 years ago|reply
edit : a source : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8
[+] [-] ctoth|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Upvoter33|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geggam|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|7 years ago|reply
2. Countermeasure: use stone in the shoe, tape and other things to fool the gait detector.
3. Counter-countermeasure: detect artificial gaits. Everyone unrecognized with artificial gait is person of interest.
[+] [-] otto2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|7 years ago|reply
I wonder, then- do the authorities of the various countries (by far not just China) who make use of this kind of technology know how little they add to their ability to spy on their citizens? If they know- do they use it anyway just so that lucrative contracts can be signed and money exchange hands? Do they (also?) figure that the fear of being identified by all-seeing, all-knowing cameras will keep the population in the straight and narrow, even if the cameras are blind and dumb as bricks, in practice?
[+] [-] Tade0|7 years ago|reply
These modalities simply don't carry enough information to reliably identify anyone.
Facial recognition works best when you need the subject to be unaware that they are being identified.
[+] [-] informatimago|7 years ago|reply
The context is a crowd of about 100 (10 - 1000), in which you are tracking a few percent, and you need to keep "eyes" on an individual, discriminating amongst a few others that have crossed is path.
That said, I'd agree that it looks difficult to help distinguish individuals in a trained team.
[+] [-] coliveira|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsamuels|7 years ago|reply
Comparing what the NSA does to what China does is like comparing the treatment of women in the US and Saudi Arabia
[+] [-] guelo|7 years ago|reply
No matter it's many faults the US is still a democracy with checks and balances.
[+] [-] _iyig|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: Sourced claim.
[0] https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-01/satellite-images-e...
[+] [-] dmitriy_ko|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dob1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Just_Smith|7 years ago|reply
While I agree with what you're saying, it makes sense that we'd be getting this information only just now - after there has been enough time for 1) data scientists and the like to become prevalent/cheap enough for government contracting and 2) enough time to build working applications on top of all that data.
[+] [-] alexnewman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Benjammer|7 years ago|reply
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_analysis [1]: https://youtu.be/JASUsVY5YJ8?t=278
[+] [-] nil_pointer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partiallypro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trainingaccount|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jandrese|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2048|7 years ago|reply
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/forensic-tools-wh...
The real punchline from that article "no peer reviewed scientific studies have ever been done to prove the basic assumption that every person’s fingerprint is unique."
[+] [-] gowld|7 years ago|reply
False-positives don't matter, since China has no civil rights.
[+] [-] diydsp|7 years ago|reply
However, I do agree that inferring the proportions from video imagery at various angles and with various items of clothing is going to be challenging due to systemic distortion, e.g. inferring incorrect angle due to clothing.
[+] [-] geitir|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wwarner|7 years ago|reply
There are already amazing airborne camera systems that track the motion of every license plate in a city, and even that isn't the same as tracking every car's movement because you still have to know which license plate to follow -- you just can't care about all movement of all cars. I suppose someone will say that you can store all movement in a database, but I'll wager that's just not worth anywhere near the cost. Your computing power would be much better spent on computing large primes.
Anyway, it's a cool sci-fi movie premise. You can see the murderer shaving off his mustache, burning off his own fingerprints and then knee-capping himself to avoid detection.
[+] [-] d0ne|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eganist|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Erlich_Bachman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 80mph|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cooperellis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resters|7 years ago|reply
It can be done with an accelerometer or a camera, and probably other kinds of sensors.
It could also be used for early diagnosis in humans, but is cost prohibitive for human preventative care use.
[+] [-] pasbesoin|7 years ago|reply
Well, now it's you. And also, once again, brought to "the world" by China. (Maybe they'll sell it along side of or as an add-on to their Great Firewall turnkey systems.)
I remember viewing a few of those old video segments (drone- and plane-based platforms) and feeling pretty nervous.
[+] [-] lozenge|7 years ago|reply
Yeah right. The sensitivity/specificity requirements for this to be useful would be insanely difficult or impossible to reach.