Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - work is just beginning.
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
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Quotes:
Article:
we’ve begun to realize that as systems became tougher and more difficult to penetrate technically, the bad guys have been turning to the users. The people who use systems tend to have relatively little say in them because they are a dispersed interest. And in the case of modern systems funded by advertising, they’re not even the customer, they’re the product.
When you look at systems like Facebook, all the hints and nudges that the website gives you are towards sharing your data so it can be sold to the advertisers. They’re all towards making you feel that you’re in a much safer and warmer place than you actually are. Under those circumstances, it’s entirely understandable that people end up sharing information in ways that they later regret and which end up being exploited. People learn over time, and you end up with a tussle between Facebook and its users whereby Facebook changes the privacy settings every few years to opt everybody back into advertising, people protest, and they opt out again. This doesn’t seem to have any stable equilibrium.
The Threat - A Conversation With Ross Anderson
All of the major tech players, companies from other industries and startups whose names we don’t know yet are working away on some or all of the new major building blocks of the future. They are: Artificial intelligence / machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics and drones, smart homes, self-driving cars, and digital health / wearables.
All of these things have dependencies in common. They include greater and more distributed computing power, new sensors, better networks, smarter voice and visual recognition, and software that’s simultaneously more intelligent and more secure.
I expect that one end result of all this work will be that the technology, the computer inside all these things, will fade into the background. In some cases, it may entirely disappear, waiting to be activated by a voice command, a person entering the room, a change in blood chemistry, a shift in temperature, a motion. Maybe even just a thought.
Your whole home, office and car will be packed with these waiting computers and sensors. But they won’t be in your way, or perhaps even distinguishable as tech devices.
This is ambient computing, the transformation of the environment all around us with intelligence and capabilities that don’t seem to be there at all.
I expect to see much of this new ambient computing world appear within 10 years, and all of it appear within 20.
if we are really going to turn over our homes, our cars, our health and more to private tech companies, on a scale never imagined, we need much, much stronger standards for security and privacy than now exist. Especially in the U.S., it’s time to stop dancing around the privacy and security issues and pass real, binding laws.
And, if ambient technology is to become as integrated into our lives as previous technological revolutions like wood joists, steel beams and engine blocks, we need to subject it to the digital equivalent of enforceable building codes and auto safety standards. Nothing less will do. And health? The current medical device standards will have to be even tougher, while still allowing for innovation.
The tech industry, which has long styled itself as a disruptor, will need to work hand in hand with government to craft these policies. And that might be a bigger challenge than developing the technology in the first place.
We’ve all had a hell of a ride for the last few decades, no matter when you got on the roller coaster. It’s been exciting, enriching, transformative. But it’s also been about objects and processes. Soon, after a brief slowdown, the roller coaster will be accelerating faster than ever, only this time it’ll be about actual experiences, with much less emphasis on the way those experiences get made.
Mossberg: The Disappearing Computer
Tech was once always in your way. Soon, it will be almost invisible.
Now, the truth is that knowledge consists of conjectured explanations — guesses about what really is (or really should be, or might be) out there in all those worlds. Even in the hard sciences, these guesses have no foundations and don’t need justification. Why? Because genuine knowledge, though by definition it does contain truth, almost always contains error as well. So it is not ‘true’ in the sense studied in mathematics and logic. Thinking consists of criticising and correcting partially true guesses with the intention of locating and eliminating the errors and misconceptions in them, not generating or justifying extrapolations from sense data. And therefore, attempts to work towards creating an AGI that would do the latter are just as doomed as an attempt to bring life to Mars by praying for a Creation event to happen there.
...One implication is that we must stop regarding education (of humans or AGIs alike) as instruction — as a means of transmitting existing knowledge unaltered, and causing existing values to be enacted obediently. As Popper wrote (in the context of scientific discovery, but it applies equally to the programming of AGIs and the education of children): ‘there is no such thing as instruction from without … We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment. We use, rather, the method of trial and the elimination of error.’ That is to say, conjecture and criticism. Learning must be something that newly created intelligences do, and control, for themselves.
How close are we to creating artificial intelligence? – David Deutsch
Global Cyber War I - I believe we are in the midst of the first truly global cyber war. Perhaps it’s been warming up since the 2nd decade of the 21st century - but it’s well underway. Participants include many actors beyond nation states and include criminal organizations, Corporations & Institutions, Oligarchies, non-state and even individuals. In many ways the digital environment - as a general purpose technology providing a platform of near costless coordination - truly enabling self-organization along ‘brands’ and causes.
This is a long read - but outlines some key developments.
Tainted Leaks: Disinformation and Phishing With a Russian Nexus
Key Points
- Documents stolen from a prominent journalist and critic of the Russian government were manipulated and then released as a “leak” to discredit domestic and foreign critics of the government. We call this technique “tainted leaks.”
- The operation against the journalist led us to the discovery of a larger phishing operation, with over 200 unique targets spanning 39 countries (including members of 28 governments). The list includes a former Russian Prime Minister, members of cabinets from Europe and Eurasia, ambassadors, high ranking military officers, CEOs of energy companies, and members of civil society.
- After government targets, the second largest set (21%) are members of civil society including academics, activists, journalists, and representatives of non-governmental organizations.
- We have no conclusive evidence that links these operations to a particular Russian government agency; however, there is clear overlap between our evidence and that presented by numerous industry and government reports concerning Russian-affiliated threat actors.
Here’s a good signal on the rapid development of Blockchain capability and its alternatives and how the world’s major financial institutions and many other large corporations are taking it very seriously.
The National Bank of Canada Just Joined An Alliance to Develop Ethereum
On Monday, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance announced 86 new members that will work together to develop business applications on the Ethereum blockchain, including Toyota, Deloitte, Samsung SDS, and the National Bank of Canada.
Ethereum is an alternative to bitcoin, which still dominates the cryptocurrency world. But while bitcoin has become a haven for speculators trying to win big by trading coins, Ethereum's promise is that its blockchain—the public ledger that records all transactions—is chiefly a platform for developing apps, powered by economic incentives. One often-floated use case for blockchains in the financial industry is as a settlement layer to instantly close transactions without middlemen.
The alliance, which was founded in February of this year, is a global foundation with more than 100 members which include financial institutions like JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, and Banco Santander. Its goal is to develop business applications with Ethereum. Membership in the alliance grants organizations the ability to participate in meetings and events, as well as to make contributions to technical documents and white papers.
Here’s a signal about an application of the Blockchain. Another article with clear explanations and a graphic to help understand just what ‘distributed ledger technologies’ are.
Why blockchain should be global trade’s next port of call
This paper examines the suitability of blockchain and blockchain-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) to the port, harbour and terminal industries. DLT has the potential to drastically change the world of asset transfer, asset movements and security of data movement. Testing of various DLT applications has already started – first in 2009 with the emergence of Bitcoin in the financial services industry, then subsequently in various other fields, including within the supply chain.
Anyone working in the port, harbour and terminal industries needs to understand the potential impact and implications of blockchain – in business, in respect to government interactions and along the supply chain. The technology has the potential to change the way parties operate and interact along the value chain as well as to open doors for new players. Some intermediaries might be impacted, others may be left out of the game.
This is an excellent article - a must read for anyone interested in the future of the digital environment - in the complexity and nature of its inevitable high dimensional nature. This introduces two very useful metaphors (rhizomatic vs arborescent) - which may initially seem more obfuscation than clarifying - but at the end I think what is revealed is that our current dichotomy of Hierarchy versus Network - is more misleading than helpful.
My rhizomatic frankenstack
1/ Consider the difference between an onion and a piece of ginger. The ginger root is the motif for what philosophers call a rhizome. The onion for what they call an arborescence.
2/ With an onion, you can always tell which way is up, and can distinguish horizontal sections apart from vertical sections easily by visual inspection.
2/ With a piece of ginger, there is no clear absolute orientation around an up, and no clear distinction between horizontal and vertical.
3/ According to the linked Wikipedia entry (worth reading), a rhizome "allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation."
4/ If you tend to use the cliched "hierarchies versus networks" metaphor for talking about old versus new IT, you would do well to shift to the rhizomatic/arborescent distinction.
5/ Both onions and ginger roots show some signs of both hierarchical structure and network-like internal connections.
6/ The difference is that one has no default orientation, direction of change, or defining internal symmetries. Rhizomes are disorderly and messy in architectural terms.
7/ The diagram above shows a partial view of my personal frankenstack: a mess sprawling over wordpress, slack, mailchimp and dozens of other technology platforms.
8/ As a free agent solopreneur with a weird mix of activities, my frankenstack is probably more complex than most, but not as complex as some power-users I know.
9/ If you work in a large organization defined by an enterprise IT system, your frankenstack is likely more arborescent than mine. More onion-like.
10/ But this is not going to last much longer. Already, bleeding edge enterprise IT platform architecture is acquiring the rhizomatic characteristics of the consumer web.
11/ Why is the rhizome a better mental model for IT infrastructure than either hierarchies or networks? The answer has to do with the curse of dimensionality.
12/ All of us today live informationally high-dimensional lives. We manage many complex information stocks and flows that merge and mix in a labyrinthine permissions/security matrix.
13/ Hierarchies and networks are both clean, legible architectural patterns. Applying them to high dimensional situations is highly burdensome and largely useless…...
This isn’t the singularity - but it a signal on the way. Sort of a genetic algorhythms for machine learning algorhythms
Google’s New AI Is Better at Creating AI Than the Company’s Engineers
At its I/O '17 conference this week, Google shared details of its AutoML project, an artificial intelligence that can assist in the creation of other AIs. By automating some of the complicated process, AutoML could make machine learning more accessible to non-experts.
The AutoML project focuses on deep learning, a technique that involves passing data through layers of neural networks. Creating these layers is complicated, so Google’s idea was to create AI that could do it for them.
“In our approach (which we call ‘AutoML’), a controller neural net can propose a ‘child’ model architecture, which can then be trained and evaluated for quality on a particular task,” the company explains on the Google Research Blog. “That feedback is then used to inform the controller how to improve its proposals for the next round. We repeat this process thousands of times — generating new architectures, testing them, and giving that feedback to the controller to learn from.”
So far, they have used the AutoML tech to design networks for image and speech recognition tasks. In the former, the system matched Google’s experts. In the latter, it exceeded them, designing better architectures than the humans were able to create.
This is a long read - 31 minutes - however it is an extraordinarily clear account via metaphor of how computers store memory. This may sound (as the title suggests) Geeky to the extreme. However, understanding this has very practical implications for all aspects of our lives that involve keeping a ‘record’ (law, policy, code, etc.) up to date as well as not forgetting the past lessons. What is beautiful about this article is that the ‘ungeeky’ reader can begin to see how the conceiving of the Blockchain became an inevitable solution to the problem of memory and dynamic autonomy to make changes in records.
How Your Data is Stored, or, The Laws of the Imaginary Greeks
If you don’t work in computers, you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about how data gets stored on computers or in the cloud. I’m not talking about the physical ways that hard disks or memory chips work, but about something that’s both a lot more complex and a lot more understandable than you might think: if you have a piece of data that many people want to read and edit at once, like a shared text file, a bank’s records, or the world in a multiplayer game, how does everyone agree on what’s in the document, and make sure that nobody overwrites someone else’s work? This is the problem of “distributed consensus,” and in order to discuss it, we’ll have to discuss bad burritos, sheep-tyrants, and the imaginary islands of ancient Greece.
It turns out that the original scientific paper about one of the most important methods used to solve this problem was written in the form of a lengthy discussion of how the part-time parliament of the imaginary ancient Greek island of Paxos managed to pass laws, despite nobody ever reliably showing up at the legislature. It was a wonderful metaphor for how a bunch of people can agree on what to write to a file, even though they might be unreachable or distant for a time — and the paper is both one of the funniest serious research papers ever published, and one of the best explanations of a complicated algorithm I’ve ever seen. And since this metaphor worked so well to explain one part of this problem, and because it’s a lot more fun than talking about file systems, I’m going to use it to explain all of it to you.
An interesting signal about the accelerating shift in energy geopolitics. The most fundamental aspect everyone should hold in mind - is that renewables promise an essentially ‘zero marginal cost’ energy. Even if natural gas is very cheap - you have to keep buying gas - once you have renewable infrastructure energy is essentially free.
China continues green push with world’s largest floating solar farm
The 40-megawatt solar facility in China’s Anhui province is built on flooded coal mines
China has connected a vast, floating photovoltaic (PV) farm to the local power grid, flicking the switch on the largest facility of its kind in the world.
The 40-megawatt facility is located in the city of Huainan, in Anhui province – an area known for its fossil fuel mining industry. In a neat twist, the floating solar farm is based in a flooded former coal mining area, turned into a lake after heavy rain and ground subsidence.
China is spearheading the adoption of solar power. The country’s solar power output increased by 80% over the first three months of 2017, managing 21.4 billion kilowatt-hours over the year’s first quarter. As well as the floating solar farms, China is also home to the world’s largest land-based solar plant, covering 27-square-kilometres in Qinghai province.
The decrease in cost for solar technology has much to do with the sudden growth of farms like these, but there’s also a sense of China seeking to establish itself as a green superpower. It is still facing many issues with carbon emissions and the breathing health of its urban populace, but projects like the one in Huainan are an encouraging sign that China could build its infrastructure around renewable energy.
Oh the irony. Here’s a educational policy that all carbon dependent countries should pursue.
A Chinese company is offering free training for US coal miners to become wind farmers
If you want to truly understand what’s happening in the energy industry, the best thing to do is to travel deep into the heart of American coal country, to Carbon County, Wyoming (yes, that’s a real place).
The state produces most coal in the US, and Carbon County has long been known (and was named) for its extensive coal deposits. But the state’s mines have been shuttering over the past few years, causing hundreds of people to lose their jobs in 2016 alone. Now, these coal miners are finding hope, offered from an unlikely place: a Chinese wind-turbine maker wants to retrain these American workers to become wind-farm technicians. It’s the perfect metaphor for the massive shift happening in the global energy markets.
The news comes from an energy conference in Wyoming, where the American arm of Goldwind, a Chinese wind-turbine manufacturer, announced the free training program. More than a century ago, Carbon County was home to the first coal mine in Wyoming. Soon, it will be the site of a new wind farm with hundreds of Goldwind-supplied turbines.
India is the other key nation to watch - as it struggles to become a fully developing nation by providing the energy necessary to its citizens and industries.
India is attempting to do something no nation has ever done: build a modern industrialized economy, and bring light and power to its entire population, without dramatically increasing carbon emissions. Simply to keep up with rising demand for electricity, it must add around 15 gigawatts each year over the next 30 years.
Why India Keeps Making Grand Claims About Its Energy Future
India appears to be embracing coal and moving away from coal all at once—what’s going on?
Lately we’ve had a mixed bag in terms of India’s energy outlook. On the one hand, the country appears to be a terrific environment for green energy investment, and has made bold predictions about its plans for cutting emissions. On the other, its power minister, Piyush Goyal, recently said that India shouldn’t feel obliged to stop burning coal and that “it’s America and the western world that has to first stop polluting.”
Now, India is canceling close to 14 gigawatts’ worth of new coal-fired power plants, and warning that existing plants totaling another 8.6 gigawatts in generation capacity could soon be too expensive to keep running. What’s going on?
... if newly inked deals for some huge solar facilities are any indication, solar power is plummeting faster in cost than anyone thought possible. A blog post last week by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said that energy prices agreed to for new solar plants had fallen nearly 50 percent in the last year, to under 4 cents per kilowatt-hour.
As the IEEFA post acknowledges, coal is likely to remain a big part of India’s energy mixture for at least the next two decades. But things are changing fast, and those changes are heavily favoring renewables. In December, India released its 10-year national electricity plan, which included the goal of lowering coal and natural gas to a combined 43 percent of the country’s energy capacity by 2027, with a total of 275 gigawatts of installed renewables in the same time frame.
And here’s another signal of this change in global energy geopolitics.
These "Printed" Solar Panels Were Made for Energy-Starved Regions
These panels are in the final testing phase before being released to the public.
On Monday, a team of researchers in Australia unrolled a field of the first solar panels printed using a standard printer, solar ink, and thin, laminated plastic. And we mean literally unrolled: These solar panels are flexible enough to be rolled into a tube.
The panels are developed by Paul Dastoor and his team at the University of Newcastle, who have also created the solar ink and printing method over the last five years. The demonstration of the rollable solar panels covers an area of about 1,000 square feet, which Dastoor says is one of the largest solar tech demonstrations in the world in the announcement. Although the panels are not yet commercially available, this is one of the final tests before the rollable panels are released. And the $1 per square foot cost makes up for the fact they they’re not as pretty as a Tesla solar roof, particularly for the military.
To make the panels, Dastoor’s team puts a water-based electric ink into a printer cartridge and prints out the panels onto thin sheets of plastic. The solar ink is very sensitive and uses semiconducting molecules within the ink to catch energy from the sun and transfer it through the cell to a battery. Dastoor says he expects a commercial printer to be able to make kilometers worth of printed panels in a single day.
This is a great signal about the possible changes in both distribution paradigm (distributed versus centralized) and production of energy. Power sharing as a new form of building social fabric (pun intended).
Also a very significant signal is that the distribution of power (electrical) is accounted for by the use of a Blockchain technology.
LO3’s flagship product, the TransActive Grid meter, works like a digital ledger, keeping track of who buys energy and how much they consume. It allows people to purchase electricity directly from their neighbor with the solar array. Consumers use an app on their phone to interact with the meter. The meter uses a blockchain, the technological breakthrough behind BitCoin, to validate these purchases.
In Brooklyn, you can now sell solar power to your neighbors
In Brooklyn, you can buy honey collected from an urban bee hive. You can buy lettuce grown atop an old bowling alley.
And now, you can purchase free range, gluten-free, fresh, organic solar power right off your neighbor’s roof.
Brooklyn startup LO3 Energy is revolutionizing the way homeowners buy and sell electricity. They are making it possible to auction rooftop solar power directly to your neighbors, creating a market for homegrown clean energy.
To understand why this is such a big deal, let’s take a look at the way power utilities have historically operated. Traditionally, a centralized utility would sell electricity to numerous homes and businesses. There was one seller and many buyers.
Rooftop solar has disrupted that model. Now, in many parts of the country, you can install solar panels on your roof, generate your own power, and sell the surplus power back to the grid. In this model, both you and the grid buy and sell power.
This is a strong signal -given the rate of implementation of renewable ‘Zero Marginal Cost Energy’ - providing strong arguments for why we are in a phase transition in global geopolitics.
India will sell only electric cars within the next 13 years
Every car sold in India from 2030 will be electric, under new government plans that have delighted environmentalists and dismayed the oil industry.
It’s hoped that by ridding India’s roads of petrol and diesel cars in the years ahead, the country will be able to reduce the harmful levels of air pollution that contribute to a staggering 1.2 million deaths per year.
India’s booming economy has seen it become the world’s third-largest oil importer, shelling out $150 billion annually for the resource – so a switch to electric-powered vehicles would put a sizable dent in demand for oil. It’s been calculated that the revolutionary move would save the country $60 billion in energy costs by 2030, while also reducing running costs for millions of Indian car owners.
... it’s been calculated that the gradual switch to electric vehicles across India would decrease carbon emissions by 37% by 2030.
We are entering a new world of prosthetics - physical and mental - connecting more biologically and interfacing with the brain more directly.
Researchers Connect First Click On Arm Prosthesis to Nerves
...the first patient in the Netherlands received his click-on robotic arm. By means of a new technique, this robotic arm is clicked directly onto the bone. A unique characteristic of this prosthesis is that it can be controlled by the patient’s own thoughts. Worldwide, there are only a handful of patients with such a prosthesis.
In April 2010, Johan Baggerman lost his arm in a serious accident. Seven years later, he is one of the first patients in the world with a click-on robotic arm. In the case of a click-on robotic arm, the arm prosthesis is connected directly to the arm stump. Through an opening in the skin, the patient “clicks” the prosthesis onto a metal rod in the bone. Because the prosthesis connects directly to the skeleton, a prosthesis socket is no longer necessary. This ensures that it does not slip off, avoids skin problems, and makes it very easy to put on and take off. This method has already been applied to the leg for a longer period and is now being applied for the first time in Netherlands to the arm. The main difference with the click-on leg prostheses is that the new arm prosthesis can communicate with the patient’s nerves, allowing the patient to control the prosthesis with their mind.
Here’s another signal of accelerating progress in the merger of AI and robotics.
Meet the Most Nimble-Fingered Robot Yet
A dexterous multi-fingered robot practiced using virtual objects in a simulated world, showing how machine learning and the cloud could revolutionize manual work.
Inside a brightly decorated lab at the University of California, Berkeley, an ordinary-looking robot has developed an exceptional knack for picking up awkward and unusual objects. What’s stunning, though, is that the robot got so good at grasping by working with virtual objects.
The robot learned what kind of grip should work for different items by studying a vast data set of 3-D shapes and suitable grasps. The UC Berkeley researchers fed images to a large deep-learning neural network connected to an off-the-shelf 3-D sensor and a standard robot arm. When a new object is placed in front of it, the robot’s deep-learning system quickly figures out what grasp the arm should use.
The bot is significantly better than anything developed previously. In tests, when it was more than 50 percent confident it could grasp an object, it succeeded in lifting the item and shaking it without dropping the object 98 percent of the time. When the robot was unsure, it would poke the object in order to figure out a better grasp. After doing that it was successful at lifting it 99 percent of the time. This is a significant step up from previous methods, the researchers say.
While this is a weak signal - it is a signal of a major possibility of a phase transition in how we understand ourselves and the world around us - an extension of mind, body and senses.
“If you look at what’s happening with sensors, you’ll see that many different disciplines have to come together. Ubiquitous sensing has so many aspects — chemical, biological, physical, radiological,” he says. “With all this sensing research going on, we need a place to coordinate our synergies.”
The future of sensory technology
MIT.nano hosts its first major research symposium.
We are entering the age of ubiquitous sensing. Smart sensors will soon track our health and wellness, enable autonomous cars, and monitor machines, buildings, and bridges. Massive networks of small, inexpensive sensors will enable large-scale global data collection — impacting the distribution of agriculture and water, environmental monitoring, disaster recovery, disease-outbreak detection and intervention, and the operation of cities. With this change in mind, MIT is creating a singular hub to unite experts as they develop a new generation of sensors, and sensing and measurement technologies.
On May 25-26, SENSE.nano will debut, marking the first “center of excellence” powered by MIT.nano, the 214,000 square-foot research facility taking shape in the heart of MIT campus. The center will empower people in the MIT community, engage industry leaders, and educate the public
Almost a decade after the memristor was first discovered - it looks like they have finally created a chip and system that can use its power. This is another signal of a changing computational paradigm and another item to file under “Moore’s Law is Dead - Long Live Moore’s Law”.
"The tasks we ask of today's computers have grown in complexity," Lu said. "In this 'big data' era, computers require costly, constant and slow communications between their processor and memory to retrieve large amounts data. This makes them large, expensive and power-hungry."
Bioinspired memristor chips that see patterns over pixels
Inspired by how mammals see, a new "memristor" computer circuit prototype at the University of Michigan has the potential to process complex data, such as images and video orders of magnitude, faster and with much less power than today's most advanced systems.
Faster image processing could have big implications for autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, says Wei Lu, U-M professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Lu is lead author of a paper on the work published in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology ("Sparse coding with memristor networks").
Lu's next-generation computer components use pattern recognition to shortcut the energy-intensive process conventional systems use to dissect images. In this new work, he and his colleagues demonstrate an algorithm that relies on a technique called "sparse coding" to coax their 32-by-32 array of memristors to efficiently analyze and recreate several photos.
Memristors are electrical resistors with memory -- advanced electronic devices that regulate current based on the history of the voltages applied to them. They can store and process data simultaneously, which makes them a lot more efficient than traditional systems. In a conventional computer, logic and memory functions are located at different parts of the circuit.
For Fun … or Not?
In the world of increasing surveillance - the Philip K. Dick story (and film starring Keanu Reeves) “A Scanner Darkly” anticipated this web site’s effort. EVen if you’re not interested - the images are worth the view simply to see how current face recognition software can be ‘fooled’.
Camouflage from face detection.
CV Dazzle explores how fashion can be used as camouflage from face-detection technology, the first step in automated face recognition.
The name is derived from a type of World War I naval camouflage called Dazzle, which used cubist-inspired designs to break apart the visual continuity of a battleship and conceal its orientation and size. Likewise, CV Dazzle uses avant-garde hairstyling and makeup designs to break apart the continuity of a face. Since facial-recognition algorithms rely on the identification and spatial relationship of key facial features, like symmetry and tonal contours, one can block detection by creating an “anti-face”.
