Recently jobless, I took to trolling the internet for good inspiring stories and I fortunate to bump into a long form on George Hotz inventing a self-driving car. George is of internet fame when he was the first to successfully hack an iPhone and then made a mess of Sony. That’s then.
There are many ways to skin a cat, at least if you can kill the cat first. But then automating self-propulsion isn’t a piece of cake. Planes have been flying themselves for over 84 years but all because danfo drivers don’t fly. Come to terra firma, somewhere around Abule Egba, and it’s a different ball game.
The best known name in the game is Google and they have been plugging away at this for years. Meanwhile African bad boy, Elon Musk recently released a patch that allows a Tesla to drive itself on the highway.
Summary, it costs zillions of dollars and millions of years to do build a working self-respecting self-driving car. Really?
George has turned all this on its head. In October of this year, he invested $50,000 ($30K of this was for a brand new Acura ILX 2016) and presto out came out a decent self-driving automobile. In 2 months? You must be kidding me.
This is where it starts to get interesting.
George’s approach is totally different from others. Instead of programming every conceivable rule and regulation of how to drive and what to expect (let Google come to Obalende!) he taught the car driving like the way I could teach my niece. Many things have made this possible – advent of deep learning, cheap computers, sensors, etc.
The bit I love is his bet against Musk.
So what has AI got to do with losing your job? Well, truth is AI can be taught to do many things. They already power simple things around you – SIRI, Cortana, Google search, image recognition, etc. What happens when it can be a perfect secretary, equity trader, physician, customer service officer, proofreader – correcting my numerous typos?
There is a lot it can do or may not do. The scariest for me though, would be when AIs can invent other AIs. Then, I’m sure that damnation would be an understatement.
Month: December 2015
Your mouse will give you up
I really dislike gbeboruns and I’m not alone. Traditionally snitches or rats have always met grisly ends in the mafia world. Ok, I’m not mafia but you get the gist?
I’m a very private person or maybe I just pretend to be but then who cares. In fact it’s so bad that most of my shady friends have NDA clauses by default (if you have such with me, now you know how you are internally classified). Ok, enough rambling.
To imagine that my computer could easily give me up, I mean my emotions, to random people is really pathetic.
Let’s cut to the chase.
Some scientists just discovered that your mouse movements can be a telltale sign of your emotions at any particular moment. It can even track the way your mood swings.
It’s not that difficult to do, the lamest JavaScript coder can track mouse x/y coordinates and with AJAX, just slip stream it to some backend services; there are well developed APIs for that.
While SEOs have always analyzed heat maps showing where mice love to play on a web page, this is the first time it’s being analyzed for the emotions of the users holding the input devices.
Like everything technology, it can be used for good and evil.
The Good
Banks, websites, 4Chan, Nairaland, etc. can track your mouse movements to determine if the pages are relevant, or just annoying. Take that mouse feeds from many visitors and you have a large data set to optimize from.
Systems may be able to know if you need assistance and push help/chat to you right away. Hi Visitor, do you want to know how doh dah works?
The Bad
Google and others may be able to develop advanced algorithms that can turn mouse movements into digital motional fingerprints to identify users. Could be used to authenticate or, em, deliver relevant ads.
Website or news could use it to filter news and content. Serve this for angry guys or that for loving lasses.
The Ugly
NSA may use that to track you around. Know everywhere you go, what you read and maybe one day just hack your brain.
The Salvation
I’m cock sure someone is going to have a software or system that can abstract or smoothen out mouse movements into an anonymous mess without sacrificing usability and then we patiently wait for the next hack.
The Beautiful
Tell a website visitor it’s a beautiful sunny day out there, don’t just read the news.