From the Mind's Eye to the hole in your forehead

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Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the “nom de plume” of Cassandra, born in 2005.

Every Thursday, starting from September 9th, we will offer you an ancient prophecy of Cassandra, to be reread today to reflect on the future, alternating recent articles selected from the latest releases.

Today's piece is consistent with past ones on artificial intelligence such as Your self(but) killer And ED-209 is waiting for us around the corner. It's an article from almost ten years ago but, as often happens with Cassandra, it reads as if it were written yesterday.

This article was written on November 5, 2012 from Cassandra

From the Mind's Eye to the hole in your forehead

As a prophetess in times of war Cassandra has always been hypersensitive to the military applications of information technology, and in particular to situations in which human judgment is replaced, even only partially, by that of a machine.

It was the case of the first cries of the automated killer drones , and even before that automatisms applied to situations that decide the good and the bad of life and death.

This is why he believes it is important news , much commented on by the international press and the Italian one, of a promising research carried out at Carnegie Mellon with i DARPA funding that is, of the American army, aimed at predicting people's behaviors starting from video surveillance footage.

Mind's Eye : “the Mind's Eye”, or better said “Using Ontologies in a Cognitive-Grounded System: Automatic Action Recognition in Video Surveillance”, i.e. “The use of ontologies in a knowledge-based system: Automatic recognition of actions in video surveillance footage”.

Now those who haven't rushed to Wikipedia to know what it means” Ontology ” (a computer term, not a philosophical one), both because they already know the meaning and because they ignore it and only want to grasp the general meaning of what they read, they will have to be satisfied by Cassandra at the same time. Difficult task…

In short, this is research aimed at building computerized systems that take as input the video footage of a complex scene, and produce as output a textual description of the actions that are taking place and within certain limits of their " meaning “.

A system of this kind would allow, indeed, it will certainly allow, to film a battle, a crowd at a concert or a demonstration and isolate group or individual actions, but not as images ("Here is a man with his hand in his pocket in the middle of the crowd ”) but as action and meaning in a certain context (“Here is an assassin who is about to take out his gun and shoot the President”).

Now Cassandra's hope is to have first aroused healthy hilarity, followed immediately afterwards by an even healthier perplexity.
“But will it be true?”

The right question instead is: “But do they really want to do it?”.
The answer is easy: “Yes”.

Since it can be done (at least within certain limits), it certainly will be done: already now there are various situations, some military but many more involving social control, in which such a technique will be used as soon as it is vaguely functional.

And what does “vaguely functional” mean? Will there be a man to filter the alarms? Will it filter them effectively?
For the many reasons already stated in the aforementioned previous article the possibility that these precautions will be used effectively is practically zero.

And what types of reactions will be triggered by the declared suspicious moves of a gentleman with a baggy raincoat and hands in his pockets? Will it just send an image on a monitor with a caption saying what it's doing?
What if an important politician was visiting at that moment? Then maybe an alarm on the leatherheads' smartphone will seem like a good idea.
And what will the aforementioned agent do? Will he be more or less cautious having received the alarm from a computer instead of an operator?
Will the chances of the aforementioned man in the raincoat ending up with a hole in his head be greater or less?
And those who in retrospect turn out to be a family man who is sensitive to the cold and overweight?

All situations in which human judgment is replaced, even partially, by that of a computer have the undoubted advantage of costing less and being faster. But this is also their main danger.

Will there be more terrorists who will have a hole punched in their heads before they push the button? Perhaps.
But the question that should interest citizens most is actually: "Will there be more or fewer holes in innocent heads?".

Hard to say. With the first recognition systems probably yes, with other more advanced ones who knows.

The problem to worry about will be the discharge of responsibility, not the important "false positives" (read "holes made in the head of innocent people") of the systems.
It will give the "green light" to certain types of errors.

No one will be fired or prosecuted for not blocking or clearing the “red light on the monitor”.
And another step forward will have been taken in the direction of making software law and constraint not in cyberspace, where it already is, but in the material world.
A step towards the dehumanization of the human being, enslaving him to techno-control systems, an increasingly popular sport among those who manage powers of various types with the excuse of offering "security".

Marco Calamari

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