How a 1960s Discovery In Neuroscience Spawned a Military Project

Harperdog writes "This is pretty fascinating: The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article about a DARPA project that allows researchers to scan satellite photos, video, etc., and have a computer pick up differences in brain activity to tell whether an image has been seen...images that might flash by before conscious recognition. From the article: 'In a small, anonymous office in the Trump Tower, 28 floors above Wall Street, a man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.'"

Comments

Re:dude

[blackest_k]

The cheapest robot is the human being, and if you ever worked on a factory floor you would know that is usually true. A shift doing one simple action over and over again to the pace of a machine.

To give one simple example a flow wrap machine for a crisp/chip factory doing a multipack. The production process is already automated as much as possible. A bulk loader trailer (a lorry trailer with a conveyor in the bottom of it feeds potato's into a flume the PLC turns the conveyor on and off as required controlling the flow of potato's into the system. the flume takes the potato's to a 3 stage peeler which are abrasive rollers with progressively finer rolls. next the grader halver
which just passes through potato's of an appropriate size or cuts them down in size. the next stage is a number of spinning drums with razor blades which cut the chips/crisps followed by a bath to remove starch and into a fryer. On exiting the chips/crisps are run down a belt and made to jump onto a second one above this are camera's and a series of air jets the cameras are looking for burnt bits when they spot a burnt crisp the air jet blasts the burnt chip down between the 2 belts onto a cross belt and then feeds back to the first belt since the airjet will take some good chips of as well as the burn't ones so the waste is kept down. So far two people have jobs largely changing the blades on the chipper and monitoring the oven. producing about 7500kg of chips an hour.

the next stage is to flavour stations and packing which is fed by a series of vibrating conveyors (which are stainless steel troughs not belts). At a flavour station flavouring is added and a multi-head weigher collects the chips into bins and that calculates the weights needed to get your 25g bag eg two bins have 8g and 17g so these are opened together the packets are a sheet of plastic foil which is folded and seamed and crimped and cut. the top of one bag becomes the base of the next bag and when the chips are dropped the bag isn't made until part way through the fall.

The sealed packet then hits another conveyor which weighs the bags to check they are in specification and rejects the ones that are not (very few in practice) then either onto a rotating table where the human puts 48 in a box. or to the robot which unfolds the carton tapes it lines up 8 bags picks them up puts them in making 6 layers and seals it (if it only picks up 7 it rejects them which can be a big problem) and then the human stacks the cartons. That packing robot is an expensive piece of kit costing roughly 10 years worth of wages of a human packer, but can run 24/7 usually 24/5.

Back to multipacks a flow wrap machine has a sectioned belt so flavour A goes in 1 flavour B in 2 and flavour C in the third. the multipack is essentially a large packet with a simpler machine feeding it. it's old technology really (you can do a similar process to making the actual bags with a bigger multihead weigher) , but to feed that machine you have a bunch of operators who just put bags into the sections pick up drop pick up drop repeat for 8 hours 5 days a week pretty mind numbing soul destroying work but it's a job. You actually automate yourself to do it, more muscle memory than thought, pacing the machine. they do at least move stations every 15 minutes but you pretty much know how many laps you do before each break and per shift.

Thing is there are a lot of jobs like this just as soul destroying so the guy processing 5 images a second is his job any worse than this type of repetitive pick up and drop job?

The camera system on the crisp line essentially identifies black pixels and uses that to determine when product is burnt, a steam peeler (super heated steam blasts new potato's for about 30 seconds) uses a similar camera system to identify potato's with skin still attached. again its dark where it should be light. Systems maybe are better at recognising features these days but it always will be hard, maybe detecting a human detecting a feature is easier, does it have to be h

Re:See (ha) THIS is what should've been in the Mat

[jkflying]

In the original script the Matrix was actually *run* on the human brains, but execs thought that would be too complicated for the masses, so they changed it to 'harness the electrical and heat energy'. Which makes no sense, as electric eels would have been a much better candidate than keeping around a possibly hostile, intelligent race.