As if you didn’t have enough to worry about in life, now you have “big brother” not only watching your every move, but predicting your intent, and what you are going to do, before you decide to do it.
“He knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you’re awake”. This goes far beyond Santa Claus.
Highly sophisticated computer surveillance software will be controlling the security cameras.
Instead of people looking at a bank of video monitors, computers can monitor every camera at once, unblinking, they never need to eat, sleep, take a break, or go to the bathroom. This effectively eliminates the human element of security monitoring from the equation who are unreliable in this respect.
A government backed and funded project is being worked on by top researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. A paper outlines the concept: Intended to be used for both military and civilian applications, the cameras would be able to watch individuals in parking lots, looking for illicit behavior and suspicious activity.
The uses for this technology are threefold. In civilian use, police departments can predict shootings, paths suspects take, and more. Government anti-terror efforts can also monitor individuals loitering around airports. In military efforts, surveillance can watch for snipers, and bombs placed at strategic points.
Amazing advances in video recognition technology allow cameras to recognize objects instantly. Apple uses this process in the manufacture of the iPhone 5, and Google’s self driving cars are able to recognize objects in the environment and steer the car clear of any collisions. Casinos in Las Vegas use facial recognition to identify every individual walking through their doors against a database of known miscreants who have been ostracized to the famous ‘little black book’ who work the system.
The next step is bringing complete autonomy into the equation and predict what the subject on the video is going to do or where they are going to go next. This is called forecasting. Just as weather forecasting predicts weather and hurricanes, this software will predict where a person is going by anticipating which physical trajectory is most likely.
As research continues, software and hardware also evolves, maturing, becoming… cognizent? Self aware maybe? Hello Skynet. 🙂
What do you think?
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J. D. Redmond ~ “Dr. Tech” ~ http://www.DrTech.co
