Within Arm's reach: Chip brains that'll make your 'smart' TV a bit smarter Processor design house Arm has emitted a few more details about the AI brain it's trying to persuade chip makers to pack into their silicon. Pretty much everyone – from Intel and Qualcomm to IBM, Mediatek and Imagination – has some kind of dedicated neural-network accelerator among their blueprints, ready to slot into chips …
Exactly: plenty of good use cases out there as mentioned in the article. Security camera that doesn't fill up GBs of space on nothing? Sounds good. Interfaces that can detect when you're interacting with them and respond back? Cool. But there's absolutely no way that these won't be used as the shiny bait to get you to agree to put more and more surveillance devices in your home at your own expense. I want to be the paranoid one on this but time and again it's been borne out. The extra ironic part is that this hardware, which ostensibly removes the need to communicate with the cloud by putting capabilities on board, will just be used to reduce the amount of heavy lifting Google, Samsung, et. al. will have to do on their end and you're the one paying for the upgrade. Every one of these devices will ship with clauses buried in their EULAs/ToS that make you give permission for the device to phone home for "troubleshooting" or "diagnostic" purposes, to "enhance user experience", or even - just putting it on the table - "to provide relevant advertising". No way to disable the "feature", obviously.
Every one of these devices will ship with clauses buried in their EULAs/ToS that make you give permission for the device to phone home for "troubleshooting" or "diagnostic" purposes, to "enhance user experience", or even - just putting it on the table - "to provide relevant advertising".
That isn't going to play well with GDPR. In fact I wonder when the case against Microsoft's telemetry gets under way.
If hoodies are used to subvert normal security personnel/CCTV, then can similar not be done for this tech too? I'd expect all the local thieves just to get a plastic third leg or something to throw the AI off... though I suppose a firmware/software update could adjust for them.
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Wot, even the Plod? It would want to have about 99.9% accuracy instead of the <2% the Plod has.
ALSO MAJOR MAJOR privacy and civil liberties issues. Yes the Ad industry slurping is nasty, but Governments, state agencies, criminals and perverts are worse.
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It'll be interesting to see how well these AI chips cope with tape over the lens, or a screwdriver through the sensor chip.
"I'm sorry Neil, I cant let you do that!"
AAARARGHHHHHHH! NEIL YOU JEREMY EFFING HUNT! I CAN'T EFFING SEE! Oh God, no, don't take scissors to my power cord....
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave.
Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.
Oh yes, the one that I have that is certainly not smart. As it is mostly just a display for my PVR the smart functions are pretty redundant and the thing is most certainly NOT connected to the Internet.
Facial recognition will give me what exactly?
Data for advertisers or to the various TLA's? With no way of getting from the TV to them I think not.
So you don't watch Netflix/Amazon Prime/iPlayer/YouTube?
Although I agree with the idea of a dumb TV and an external smart device... Shame the TV companies don't get that idea...
Now if someone can tell me of a decent dongle that has all the major streaming services AND a way to watch UltraViolet shows, I would be very grateful!
@MrXavia. correct, aside from YouTube. I do not watch TV. My desktop PCs with their ginormous 19in monitors (one apiece) are my home entertainment centres, not a TV. My PCs are already sufficiently smart to do all I require of them (including playing DVDs of films and shows that I've heard are worth watching). Sounds to me like this is yet another case of unecessarily overcomplicating things and adding extra potential points of failure and failure modes to a product that simply does not need it
Hmmn.. forgotten something, 'scuse me, minor senior moment..
- ah yes! (mutter grumble) bloody modern technology, it'll never catch on, getoffamylawn!. (nods off in mid-rant) zZzZzZzZz
It's odd that people still watch the same video at the same time on one screen.
Yes. Or go to the theater. Or dine together. Or share any experience at all, really.
Wait, sorry, I thought you wrote "it's normal that...".
I know this is an alien concept for a segment of the population, but evidence suggests that a majority of human beings are social creatures who like to do things together, once in a while.
Sounds like it's going to be 30 years later than predicted by George Orwell but it looks like Big Brother will be watching everyone by 2024. I sincerely hope there is going to be some sort of virtual airgap between what all these cameras see and what the chip actually allows out of the container it is in. The camera needs to have a direct non-tee'd feed into the MLP or ODP and the data out needs to be limited to a minimum amount of GPIO to report human detected, animal detected, object is moving, object is facing left or right or straight on, object is waving frantically, etc. If a video feed is required for any reason whatsoever, it should be a separate camera with a physical cover to close the lens for privacy. It should be illegal for any agency to require that the cover is left open or to try to subvert the camera in any way.
If ever there has been a need for governments to get their act together and set up a meaningful and ethical law on the use of technology, this has got to be it. Of course they won't bother and will be most surprised when even MPs get deluged with ads for things they don't even remember seeing as part of some TV show but the MLP/ODP decided they had a specific non-verbal response to, such as blushing or more rapid breathing.
Might it help to understand what processing is going on with biomentric recognition?
1 - the viewing unit aligns on some recognisable point in the image.
2 - it then starts measuring other recognisable points, and their relationship to the first
3 - pretty much every item in the world is believed to have a unique set of relationships between these recognisable points - if you keep measuring long enough.
4 - when it had enough, the system stores the data, and compares it with a central database of some sort.
5 - if there is a match within the pre-set bounds of error, it is marked as a recognition.
You can see that this may be able to produce very exact matches, if the object is placed in a static, well-illuminated spot and measured a lot, or rather poor matches if the object is viewed at an angle and given little measurement. That's why biometric systems can produce very variable results...
Sounds like it's going to be 30 years later than predicted by George Orwell
Pedantry o' the Week: Orwell chose the date arbitrarily, and only then under pressure from his editor. He requested the title always be written out in words ("Nineteen Eighty-Four"), as he felt that would discourage people from focusing on the date. Personally, I don't know that it helps, but in any case it wasn't meant as a prediction about any particular future date.
Also, as I noted in a comment to another recent article, our present culture far more resembles that of Huxley's Brave New World, or Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451,1 than it does Nineteen Eighty-Four. While there are plenty of totalitarian regimes still around, the Big Kids have long since learned that you get better returns from consent than from terror.
1Bradbury intended the focus of F 451 to be on the pervasive, immersive forms of entertainment and stimulation in the future he depicted, not on the book-burning stuff, which is meant merely as a vehicle for the protagonist's transformation. The Walls and Seashells are his main point.
Yes, fortunately we still have electrical tape, or if the camera's also used to sense ambient light level, Vaseline.
Eventually we'll see more and more electronics manufactures attempting, and probably getting away with, shipping devices that don't work unless they can actually recognize the user. In the name of convenience and security, of course. But for a while it'll be simple enough to disable these unnecessary cameras, provided you can find them.
Register this as the user (NSFW)
https://www.amazon.com/Loftus-International-Inflatable-Judy-Doll/dp/B001BXZTDS?psc=1&SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-vivaldi-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B001BXZTDS
There's this smart learning one, there's the system that watches and tracks shoppers and records which shops they are going into, and there's the police facial recognition one that thinks I'm several other people all at once.
This is the kind of stuff that will be combined and will be let loose, and it won't end well.
Paranoid? Maybe. Doesn't mean I'm wrong.
security cameras waking up and recording as soon as someone enters view, saving power and storage space until when it's necessary. Also start playing ads when an 'audience' is detected.
Digital or so-called smart TVs that automatically pause when you stand up to pop to the kitchen, and play again when you return and sit down And If I get up to adjust my trouser region and a bit of a man-scratch?
or blank the screen if a kid wanders into the room when you're watching something primarily for adults.
I'd honestly prefer it to blank on modern kids programs when an adult enters the room too a) so the 'wee bastards' have no excuse not to pay attention b) Having seen what passes for kids programs these days, it's just drivel I'd rather not have to make sense of.
As to everything having cameras? Not bloody likely, it'll be tape or poked out with a sharp implement.
My complaint is INTELLEGENCE in design by electrical manufacturers would be better... and then there is the sellout practice of changing their products to meet retailers requirements so devices do not match up for price comparisons and the retailers then can claim massive discounts if cheeper model and type is found.
My Widescreen TV (you know the one with the TUNA inside) yes it's LG, doesn't have an audio out except for the speakers, the exact same type as in my old LG Flat Screen. The problem is that sometimes you want to watch quietly with headphones or send it to a decent sounding home theatre/Hifi system. So a Digital device with Audio out would be nice, I bought an LG sound bar with (ASR) Audio Sound return, returns back via HDMI, I'm sure it said it had it, Oooops No! TV didn't, it was Intellisence (dumb-fuckery), but now I have a 120 watt sound bar that sounds like crap with compressed sound space and subwoofa to make up for what is lost , My analog Hifi sounds better (of course) and I run a set-top box because of spikes and surges thru Cable (for many reasons including by Internet usage). Even an HDMI to Composite converter produces such a volume it's not suitable for any input of my other sound equipment and no attenuation since CD's.
Don't talk to me about Intelligence.
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