Dana Liebelson on what artificial intelligence could do to surveillance: In June 2012, a Google supercomputer made an artificial-intelligence breakthrough: It learned that the internet loves cats. But heres the remarkable part: It had never been told what a cat looks like. Researchers working on the Google Brain project in the companys X lab fed 10 million random, unlabeled images from YouTube into their massive network and instructed it to recognize the basic elements of a picture and how they fit together. Left to their own devices, the Brains 16,000 central processing units noticed that a lot of the images shared similar characteristics that it eventually recognized as a cat. While the Brains self-taught knack for kitty spotting was nowhere as good as a humans, it was nonetheless a major advance in the exploding field of deep learning. The dream of a machine that can think and learn like a person has long been the holy grail of computer scientists, sci-fi fans, and futurists alike. Deep learning—algorithms inspired by the human brain and its ability to soak up massive amounts of information and make complex predictions—might be the closest thing yet. Right now, the technology is in its infancy: Much like a baby, the Google Brain taught itself how to recognize cats, but its got a long way to go before it can figure out that youre sad because your tabby died. But its just a matter of time. Its potential to revolutionize everything from social networking to surveillance has sent tech companies and defense and intelligence agencies on a deep-learning spending spree.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 22:30:00 +0000
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