Google's Visual Search

This afternoon I decided to play around with Google's visual search and decided I don't like it at all. The idea is that you can provide Google with a picture and it will search for similar ones. Furthermore it will classify your picture for you. If you go to Google and click on the "Images" link in the upper right corner, it will go to a new page that looks very similar to the standard search page. However there will be a camera icon in the search bar. Simply click on the camera and it will ask you to provide a picture or URL of a one. I pulled a picture of myself off my computer and sent it to the search engine. The picture was me wearing a blue shirt against a white background. Simple, right? Well Google classified the picture as a "Senior Citizen" and gave me a bunch of similar pictures of old bald guys wearing blue shirts standing against a white background.

First of all, I am not even 50. I think classifying me as a senior citizen is a bit harsh. This also indicates how the visual search engine works. It can't guess that I am looking for other pictures of myself on the Internet and assumes I want to see other bald guys in blue shirts in front of a very simple background. It just so happens that most of those also include senior citizens and so I got classified that way.

I did another search for someone a bit more famous than myself, Bruce Springsteen, and Google correctly identified him. Perhaps I am just not famous enough. I guess that is something else I should work on this year.

A Scary Thought for Halloween

This morning I answered a one-question survey about what is the most scary Halloween character. A number of the usual suspects could be chosen. As a child, a monster would have definitely have made the list. Now that I am an adult, the most scary things in my life are much different. I am scared of things like getting extra random screening at the security in the airport or having the IRS decide I didn't pay my fair share of taxes. I am also afraid of illnesses like cancer or Alzheimer's disease.

If I stop to think about monsters, the scariest one on the earth today is man. Think about the recent mass shooting in Las Vegas and it has totally stolen the spotlight from natural disasters like hurricanes Irma and Maria. This has me rethinking several of the projects I am researching at work. I am helping to build some really fun technology, but in the wrong hands, it could be used to do much more scary things than any mass shooting to date.

Artificial Intelligence is one of the subjects I am researching and still think it is pretty stupid. However there are some areas where great progress is being made. Pull out any of the latest smartphones and try to take a picture of someone. The first thing you notice is that someone's face gets highlighted so you can provide a name or tag to be used by Facebook or some other social media site. This means that a tiny device that fits in your pocket knows the difference between a person and a random object. Now couple that with acoustic analysis where a couple of speakers can tell the direction that person's voice is coming from. A number of toy-robot researchers are using this technology to create robots that look at who is talking in a group of people. All of that seems pretty harmless and fun, right?

Now let's take that same technology that can recognize faces and knows how to aim at a person. I don't want to elaborate any more as I don't want to give anyone any ideas. However my realization this morning left me with a sick feeling in my stomach and the thought that while it isn't quite SkyNet from the Terminator movies, it is moving in that direction. Perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the scary uses of Artificial Intelligence. Monsters are not the things scaring me this Halloween season.