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DARPA Unveils System Using Human Brains For Computer Vision
MrSeb writes with news about our coming cybernetic overlords. From the article: "After more than four years of research, DARPA has created a system that successfully combines soldiers, EEG brainwave scanners, 120-megapixel cameras, and multiple computers running cognitive visual processing algorithms into a cybernetic hivemind. Called the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS), it will be used in a combat setting to significantly improve the U.S. Army's threat detection capabilities. There are two discrete parts to the system: The 120-megapixel camera, which is tripod-mounted and looks over the battlefield; and the computer system, where a soldier sits in front of a computer monitor with an EEG strapped to his head, looking at images captured by the camera, wedding out false threats. In testing, the 120-megapixel camera, combined with the computer vision algorithms, generated 810 false alarms per hour; with a human operator strapped into the EEG, that drops down to just five false alarms per hour. The human brain is surprisingly fast, too: According to DARPA, CT2WS displays 10 images per second to the human operator — and yet that doesn't seem to affect accuracy."
This is scary to me, being wired up and used as a machine. Though I suppose it's actually no worse than other kinds of human slavery, and probably quite a bit better than some.
What's the next step? Jars. Lots and lots of jars.
I recall reading an article (or a mention of an article, or something) about an experiment where a pigeon was trained to peck a button when shown a photograph containing a human. The accuracy was pretty good, but there was one photo that it would peck for that didn't have any people in it. Or so the researchers thought until they used a magnifying glass to find one person off in the background... :)
A trained neural network can be more accurate and faster than one would think