Vision Kit – An image recognition device that can see and identify objects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azQzwI9-GHU

Skip to 0:40 for human tracking demo

Humans will always make mistakes, and not that two humans can't make the same mistake, but each mistake is individual. A bunch bots stamped with the same code using the same hardware will be capable of making the same mistake for each bot due to the same bug.

All of those things are important, but none of them are a priority for the people who have the "AI with a gun" programmed.

In two words: scale and miniaturisation. A rifleman has inherent limitations -- he cannot move unaided beyond his walking speed, cannot be made to weigh on the order of a kilogramme, and he must sleep and eat and shit. He cannot lie in wait indefinitely, and he cannot fly either. He has, in the godawful vernacular of the defence-contracting industry, SWaP (size, weight, and power) issues. His face is as vulnerable to bullets as yours or mine, and a 12.7mm (.50 BMG) round will walk through his body armour anyway. He is human, and the harm that men with guns can do is thus limited.

Stuart Russell uses the example of micro-UAVs with AI-based targeting software and each armed with a single-use shaped charge (for anti-personnel use or breaching doors) -- 10^6 of them will devastate a city, with extremely little human/logistical support needed. A million riflemen could do a bunch of killing, but they will be slower, easier to stop, easier to detect, and will require a lot more support and infrastructure to remain effective.

What do we call weapons that allow very few men to kill millions without placing themselves in any hazard, again? Russell (rightfully, in my judgement) classes this sort of use of AI as "scalable WMDs". Lethal autonomous weapons shouldn't be compared to a "soldier with a gun"; appropriate comparisons are more along the lines of "flying landmines with face recognition".

For one thing, this board in particular apparently has a direct connection to the camera. I'm not sure if you can do anything but live video from the directly-connected camera (in my case, I want prerecorded video / video from IP cameras). Maybe it can but it's not immediately obvious anyway.

The $75 "Movidius Neural Compute Stick" uses the same chip and does everything via USB so that's more promising. But it's a binary-only API that's totally focused on neural networks (and only available for Ubuntu/x86_64 and Raspbian/arm7). In contrast, I believe you can easily send Hexagon arbitrary code. Its assembly format is documented and upstream llvm appears to support it. So if I want to do background subtraction via more old-school approaches, the Hexagon is probably useful where the Movidius stuff is not. And I have yet to learn anything about neural networks so that's a significant factor for me at least.

Really neat hardware but I wish it were more open.

Of course, neither would a camera that's made out of cardboard and runs on a Raspberry Pi. But for prototyping, this seems like it could offer a good start.