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It's less a 'very weird movement' and more the average person pushing back against the AI hyperbole movement. And in this case less to do with claims of social impact and more the tendency of marketing collateral and forecasts to attribute operational improvements involving capex on new hardware and new processes for humans entirely to 'AI' because somewhere along the line someone did some statistical modelling with a computer which may even have involved an ML process.

> Take facial recognition for example (there are many many others, but this is very illustrative). The possibilities of revolutionizing society with facial recognition is legion. Imagine having a camera attached to your jacket which is hooked up to your phone and immediately gives a compete profile of everyone you meet. This tech is possible today. It probably won’t work with total strangers, but will with people you are likely to meet given your social circles.

I mean, I can namesearch the internet for people I meet via my social circles without [admittedly much improved] facial recognition AI: the innovation's all in the hardware, culture of broadcasting one's life via social media and search tech. Hell, I could and did check out people's more basic social profiles online two decades ago when Kurzweil was predicting that by 2020 AI would have pushed life expectancy over 100, eliminated financial crises, economic deprivation and road accidents and simulated human personalities so convincingly that human-robot relationships were a normal thing. The facial recognition is neat, to the degree that it's accurate, but probably less revolutionary for social profiling than the cultural shift towards putting more information online.

Similarly, AI startups are far from the only types of business where employees have ethical qualms about selling to the military and certain areas of law enforcement, and one of the biggest concerns employees have is what happens when bodies take action based on vastly overestimating the AI's conclusions...

Not just the average person but also the experts.

Having worked on a similar product to what you're describing, an always on camera embedded in a baseball hat that uses face recognition to catalog everybody you meet, I don't think it is going to happen any time soon. Primarily because it's not very useful. You end up with a bunch of data that you never look at again.

There's a reason why that stuff has remained a niche for people interested in trying to implement Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think".

Perceived pace of progress when seen from the inside of a field is significantly slower than the perceived pace of progress from the outside. That said, I will agree that the progress in AI and face recognition since 2011 has been phenomenal.

You don't have a job where such information is useful. I can assure you, such info in the hands of a cop (who already has a body camera) or salesperson (could use store cameras) would be quite powerful

Imagine getting a full Wiki-Bio profile of everyone you meet. How long would it take you to read it?

You can set up a useful automated virtual business card system without AI. There's no particular benefit to the facial recognition, and even less benefit to having a full profile to chew through.

What you really need is an AI with an awareness of social context, and for that be useful you need an entire biographical information collection, filtering, categorising, and sharing, which doesn't exist today.

But then there are privacy concerns. Do you really want complete strangers to know about your personal and professional resume (successes + failures) parking and speeding tickets and criminal record, sexual preferences, credit worthiness, major illnesses and minor health issues, and so on?

Of course Google, FB, and China's Social Credit system are working towards this already. And we'd better hope they fail, because creating this kind of personal biographical infrastructure without oversight gives corporations and governments the potential to exercise an unholy level of personal and professional control over individuals.

The point being - your supposedly "obvious" facial recognition application is in fact a demonstration of how thinking about these projects as if they're trivial hackathon demo pieces can lead to a culture of horrors.

The real issues with all AI are political, not technical. And the problems can only be solved by strengthening limits on the exploitation of personal information by corporations and governments. Because otherwise we're going to be living in a culture where the primary application of AI is personality control - no matter if it looks like advertising, or media, or art, or political debate.

Of course it can lead to a culture of horrors. That's my exact point! Revolutions are very scary things.

Black mirror episodes, some of them are very dead on and immediately relevant.

> There is a very weird movement right now underestimating the drastic power of ML/AI.

Generally consisting of people who know what they're talking about rather than marketers or science fiction fans.

Hong Kong's mask law has nothing to do with tracking people. It has to do with protesters committing violent acts while masked. All you need to do is track people is get them to carry a cell phone which can be tracked via its SSID, IMEI and ICCID.

Laughing at the idea of being afraid of BERT. Reminds me of Hofstadter thinking ATNs might soon achieve sentience.

Not so much as afraid as very excited about advances in NLP. Human computer collaboration is a very rich area of possibility.

The pace of advancements is unnerving though. May you live in interesting times indeed.