Amazon, NVIDIA and The CIA Want To Teach AI To Watch Us From Space (technologyreview.com) 60
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Satellite operator DigitalGlobe is teaming up with Amazon, the venture arm of the CIA, and NVIDIA to make computers watch the Earth from above and automatically map our roads, buildings, and piles of trash. MIT Technology Review reports: "In a joint project, DigitalGlobe today released satellite imagery depicting the whole of Rio de Janeiro to a resolution of 50 centimeters. The outlines of 200,000 buildings inside the city's roughly 1,900 square kilometers have been manually marked on the photos. The SpaceNet data set, as it is called, is intended to spark efforts to train machine-learning algorithms to interpret high-resolution satellite photos by themselves. DigitalGlobe says the SpaceNet data set should eventually include high-resolution images of half a million square kilometers of Earth, and that it will add annotations beyond just buildings. DigitalGlobe's data is much more detailed than publicly available satellite data such as NASA's, which typically has a resolution of tens of meters. Amazon will make the SpaceNet data available via its cloud computing service. Nvidia will provide tools to help machine-learning researchers train and test algorithms on the data, and CosmiQ Works, a division of the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel focused on space, is also supporting the project." "We need to develop new algorithms for this data," says senior vice president at DigitalGlobe, Tony Frazier. He goes on to say that health and aid programs are to benefit from software that is able to map roads, bridges and various other infrastructure. The CEO of Descartes Labs, Mark Johnson, a "startup that predicts crop yields from public satellite images," says the data that is collected "should be welcome to startups and researchers," according to MIT Technology Review. "Potential applications could include estimated economic output from activity in urban areas, or guiding city governments on how to improve services such as trash collections, he says."
That can't possibly go wrong (Score:5, Funny)
We can call it, hmmm. Sky... something. Or maybe something... net.
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Please add the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag to this.
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Watching us from orbit is the first step needed for the AIs to eventually nuke us from orbit -- you know... only way to be sure.
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No, welcome to the Internet. A few trolls with OCD have become fixated on posting outrageous shit on any public forum they can find. Slashdot, New York Times, gardener's club, it doesn't matter - if it's public, they want to punk it with something offensive because ha-ha, it's so funny, you'll never catch me, I'm such a bad-ass, and mom I want McDonald's for lunch go get me McDonald's. Slashdot has a mod system for this kind of thing. Screen it out, move on. If you have mod points, mod them troll and
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Besides the misspelling of caca, what could possibly be termed racist about the post the AC responded to? BMW M3? DANDY? 770 GigaDollars/sec?
SpaceNet (Score:1)
everything for people! (Score:1)
"health and aid programs are to benefit from software that is able to map roads, bridges and various other infrastructure"
yeah, I bought that - CIA is well known for their altruistic nature and humanitarian deeds.
FBI mods (Score:1)
FBI has mod points
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Because if all the farmers were allowed to grow corn, the market for corn would crash, which would bankrupt many farmers, and it would reduce the amounts of other vegetables that are available for sale.
Too Easy (Score:3)
Skynet jokes starting in three, two, one...
Colossus (Score:2)
Have these idiots never watched the movie "Colossus: The Forbin Project" ? Do they have any idea how dangerous they are going to make things.... The reality is that we are headed towards true AI, but, from the nanosecond that it actually becomes self-aware, we won't understand it, and it will be 10000 times smarter than us.
These are decades old computer vision projects (Score:5, Informative)
Computers watching the earth is very old news. What is changing is that the objects being detected and described in near real-time are getting more and more complex.
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I dunno about you, but I'm less than 50cm wide. I'll show up as maybe a single pixel.
I'm okay with them knowing that something is moving in my backyard, which is about all they can tell at that resolution.
Re:These are decades old computer vision projects (Score:5, Informative)
The big change here is that they are releasing marked-up data sets. That makes all the difference. A good chunk of the progress in computer vision (along with better algorithms and processing power / gpus) has been the availability of good data sets, such as ImageNet.
Machine learning algorithms, and deep learning algorithms in particular, require a lot of labeled training data. That has been largely missing from satellite imagery, for two reasons. First, nobody wanted to give up the data itself. Second, nobody wanted to go through the pain of marking up the data (by hand). This means that people that went through the bother of getting the data and labeling it (meaning large defense contractors primarily) have had a lock on wide area search, finding ships at sea, etc.
Since I don't see it, here is the link to the data on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/public-... [amazon.com]
Inevitable (Score:2)
It's inevitable that Artificial Intelligence is going to take more and more control over our lives.
Don't want racist cops shooting black people: Introducing the Copbot 3000- guaranteed to treat all races equally. The Copbot 3000, won't be distracted by cleavage and give women warnings for speeding and men tickets. The Copbot 3000 won't pat white people on the back whilst massacring our African youth. The Copbot 3000 won't hide in the doughnut shop whilst the bank gets robbed.
Ask your senator to replace
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Better not let it drive its own car though.
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Are you planning to ... um, VACATE the presidency in 2017? Because there's no US presidential election next year. At least not yet.
Perhaps. If DT this Nov 2016, I'm sure he'll strongly consider how he can VACATE the presidency shortly after the inauguration in 2017 (still no indication he actually wants to be president for 4 years).
Or maybe DT will just keep the office and hold an apprentice contest for the "most powerful apprentice in history". Odds are that Pence probably won't stand a chance against an AI in such an apprentice contest...
Then the police will just be ageist (Score:2)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]
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I agree. If we allow it.
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I saw some bit of info some where that certain sectors in the military were actively participating in what they thought was a training exercise, but it turned out the actual event was happening and they had no idea...
statements like that just make you think... One minute your talking to some 'AI' designed to mimic human conversation, and then next second, you lose the ability to predict output and it's suddenly 'real'..
The AI ... (Score:2)
the could just give it to openstreetmap ... (Score:2)
Just crowdsource the problem. That's all what openstreetmap people want: high resolution satellite photos.
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Raise your middle fingers to the sky.. (Score:2)
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https://www.bloomberg.com/feat... [bloomberg.com]
Why have people see the aircraft, talk about the tail numbers, ask questions. Go up a bit more and nobody will notice the 24/7 domestic tracking.
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"Amazon and NVIDIA, the venture arms of the CIA"
Unsurpringly, Amazon is *the* cloud service supplier for the the CIA [fortune.com]...
On the other hand, In-Q-Tel [iqt.org] (the *actual* venture arm of the CIA) has partnered with companies like...
* Booz Allen (the actual employer of Edward Snowden during his short stint as an NSA contractor)
* Intelliseek (eventually purchased by Nielsen Online, the folks help decide what programs get air time)
* Keyhole (eventually purchased by Google to become google earth was also partially funded by NVIDIA)
* Safeweb (eventually purchased by Sym
Skynet can't come soon enough (Score:2)
You all joke about Skynet, but I for one welcome our robot overloads. It's the period between now and then that really worries -- when the robots are pretty smart, but still under complete control of elitists and despots.