This is mind-blowing, and a bit scary:
After less than eight months of development, the algorithms are helping intel analysts exploit drone video over the battlefield.
Earlier this month at an undisclosed location in the Middle East, computers using special algorithms helped intelligence analysts identify objects in a video feed from a small ScanEagle drone over the battlefield.
A few days into the trials, the computer identified objects — people, cars, types of building — correctly about 60 percent of the time. Just over a week on the job — and a handful of on-the-fly software updates later — the machine’s accuracy improved to around 80 percent. Next month, when its creators send the technology back to war with more software and hardware updates, they believe it will become even more accurate.
It’s an early win for a small team of just 12 people who started working on the project in April. Over the next year, they plan to expand the project to help automate the analysis of video feeds coming from large drones — and that’s just the beginning.
“What we’re setting the stage for is a future of human-machine teaming,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. John N.T.“Jack” Shanahan, director for defense intelligence for warfighter support, the Pentagon general who is overseeing the effort. Shanahan believes the concept will revolutionize the way the military fights.
So what it is doing is developing recognition abilities. It starts with “AI, find me every car…,” and progresses to “AI, find me every sky blue 1998 Toyota pickup with an M2 mounted in the bed in Mogadishu.”
But once it is plugged into every surveillance feed in the nation, from satellites to street cams, to store surveillance systems, it will eventually be, “AI, find me Vox Day, at a time when he is predictably most vulnerable to poisoning between 2 and 3PM on a Saturday.” If it develops the ability to predict outcomes of direct action, it will get scary.
It will literally one day be like the TV Show Person of Interest, only instead of a benign Machine in control of the system, all of those powers will be laid at the feet of a fallible human.
The future is going to be amazing, but never before in history will it be as imperative to pick a leader who embodies the highest ideals of human virtues. To do that, we will need a population which demands the highest ideals in its leaders.
That will create a curious knife’s edge of evolution. If we kill all the rabbits in the Apocalypse, we might get a Trumpian leader who will himself take measures to stop the rabbit’s return. But let us slip up once and we could get a Merkel who will have unbelievable tech at her disposal as she sets about eliminating the wolves and replacing them with exactly the types of rabbit idiots who will welcome her tyranny. Imagine Stryzok and McCabe with that power at their disposal.
All it will take is one bad rabbit leader. After this coming Apocalypse, when we re-establish K, it will be the cycles of r/K on steroids as we begin the next technology-supercharged decline into total r-selection.
Tell others about r/K Theory, because you are being watched… by a machine
r/K theory: The fermi-filter.
If people will indeed learn nothing form the last 100 years, then -sorry to say- perhaps we don’t deserve to survive…
Some of the algorithms really are impressive. Most digital cameras have IR filters, but near IR photons will still leak through (because they’re closer to the visual spectrum). Many digital photos can be manipulated for this effect- adding an IR layer to the visual layer of a picture. Image analysis can then do an almost X-ray vision type effect.
This isn’t just used for prurient purposes, but can be used to find weapons hidden underneath clothing. Scanners at Airports do the same thing, but with much, much more gear (essentially using microwaves). Of course, with the right IR filter (or with the filter removed) the effect can become much more pronounced. Anything with an excess of photons and a lack of thickness (think bikinis on the beach at noon in the summer) is virtually the same as air to these algorithms. Specialized IR lamps, strategically placed, can add to the effect and data can be interpolated with any visuals. Video probably can’t be done yet though, easily at least, as the amount of processing power for real-time or near real-time analysis is hefty. It really is a creepy world we’re living in sometimes.
I jokingly asked Vox Day on his blog recently if he was Anonymous Conservative. Your reference to him here means that: 1) You’re him, 2) You’re not him, but you heard about this from him or from his blog and you’re trolling me, or 3) It’s coincidence. I’m guessing it’s #3, but I could go spread the rumor just for fun! Nah, that’s not really my style.
Is is coincidence. I spotting this on FR, I think.
If I had Vox’s skill, r/K would already have been global.
I’ve been reading your blog since last summer, but recently I’ve noticed an increasing pessimism in your writings. May I ask if there’s something in particular driving that change, which wasn’t as clear earlier?
I’ve been pessimistic for a while, in part due to inside information. I read it myself years back and dismissed it as ridiculous paranoia, bordering on pathological. No doubt if I explained it to you, you would do the same.
You have to see it firsthand, or there is no believing it. But my suspicion is we are closer to something horrific than anyone would believe. Had Hillary won, I suspect things would have been as bad as any time in history within the next eight years.
I am not sure Trump can undo it, or that he will, but I expect he will stall it. But when the wheels on the economy come off, watch out. Government wants everyone to be quiet little lemmings. Those who are not will have a rough ride.
May we know AC?
I’ve seen demonic like people, and want to that evil you have encountered. Maybe I’ll been able to do something about it.
What makes me pessimistic isn’t evil in the sense of paranormal. It is just how freedom degrades when rabbits at the top have no restraints, economic, or legal, or otherwise. In retrospect, not expecting it is insanity, because leadership rabbits are leadership rabbits the world over. But we are raised to think it will never happen here.
Had Trump not shown up, I would have been completely unsurprised to see the US one day fall to a coup, with a lot of political activists on the right rounded up and imprisoned, to be ultimately executed en masse. Things would go downhill from there. Already, we see how with Hillary, there are leaders who can do anything, and no law applies to them. They are completely above any consequence, and they are not just a little evil, and they would find it very satisfying to take us out.
I even strongly suspect we have seen particularly influential people taken out because they were a threat. Sharyl Attkisson was almost thrown in prison with classified docs planted on her computer, for reporting on things the machine didn’t like, and you see how many people are in trouble because of that. Breitbart, Scalia, Seth Rich, and Michael Hastings’ passings all look sketchy, but that is the new normal, and nobody looks at it too closely, especially in the media. That is a path we are sliding down, and although you can slow it, nothing can really reset the balance except Apocalypse. Until then, we are just on the path.
We are probably still on that path, just Trump has pushed off the date, and maybe made all involved a little more cautious, and a little more willing to let the machine chug away and hunker down when events threaten, rather than do anything harsh. But I still expect a huge upheaval at some point, and it will not be pretty.
Tantalizing…or maybe it’s too dark and I don’t want to know what exactly it is you’ve seen.
Great work on the blog. Some really mind blowing stuff and the writing itself is excellent. Thank you.
“To do that, we will need a population which demands the highest ideals in its leaders.”
That’s where i don’t hold much hope.
I believe that there are some people who, like the little girl, only live to destroy. To see people suffer gives them great joy. I also believe a lot of these people have vast money, power and influence. It causes me quite a bit of anxiety. While some times maybe I overdo it. it might really be that it’s just as bad as my imagination says it is. I think we will have a huge melt down and…I’m not prepared, I will not be and there’s probably nothing I can do about it. I read this guys blog every so often. He’s not some nobody. He’s predicted an enormous amounts of financial stuff. he believes in cycles based on certain numunistic values that reoccur. He has databases going back to ancient times that he says keep following these same patterns. He was in jail for a long time. The government wanted his database and he refused to give it up so they jailed him for some business he had with a Japanese firm where the firm complained that they didn’t have any problems with him. Jailed him anyways. They even made a movie about him. Anyways he says Nov 2018, down, down, down. Here’s his graph for the Economic Confidence Model.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/understanding-cycles/did-the-economic-confidence-model-pick-the-trump-tax-reform/
I cant say he’s exactly right but I believe in cycles and they seem to have some sort of timing. You might want to look in on his blog from time to time and see if what he says lines up with what you think. It could very well be that the r/K cycle is tied up with the rise and fall of societies.
I believe in cycles too, and think there may be some underlying materialistic cycle we don’t know about, like the solar system passes through an area of the galaxy filled with field lines of some sort that somehow affect solar activity, or something like that, and whatever that macro-cycle does, everything else flows from it, from climate change, volcanic activity, seismic activity, crop output diminishment, pathogen spread, uptics in anxiety that produce war and trigger economic issues, and so on.
And moreover, I almost think that like deer which head for high ground when a tsunami is incoming, we know something is on its way.