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How Do You Vote? 50 Million Google Images Give a Clue (nytimes.com)
Artificial Intelligence is now being used to scan millions of pictures taken by Google Street View to glean insights like income or voting patterns, The New York Times reports. In a Stanford project, computers scanned millions of pictures of parked cars to predict voting patterns and pollution. From the report: The Stanford project gives a glimpse at the potential. By pulling the vehicles' makes, models and years from the images, and then linking that information with other data sources, the project was able to predict factors like pollution and voting patterns at the neighborhood level. "This kind of social analysis using image data is a new tool to draw insights," said Timnit Gebru, who led the Stanford research effort. The research has been published in stages, the most recent in late November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the end, the car-image project involved 50 million images of street scenes gathered from Google Street View. In them, 22 million cars were identified, and then classified into more than 2,600 categories like their make and model, located in more than 3,000 ZIP codes and 39,000 voting districts.
Stole the election from Hillary and HE WILL NOT DESTROY US.
I think it's OBVIOUS how people voted.
j/k
This is the entire program: if (pct_prius > 1) {democrat=true;)
I hope they noticed my car, in front of my home, on election day. Like millions of others I vote by mail. Furthermore, there is probably an identifiable class of people who do that. A clear understanding of that segment of voters would interest those who pay for such studies more than the results of this ridiculous experiment.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Multivac will choose your next president.
Why settle for being merely evil?
The election was just over a year ago, but the vast majority of data mining "AI" got it wrong, including Google and Facebook.
So what's the point of making claims about the method used in the OP when it isn't tested and won't be tested for at least 3 years?
Does it account for all the nice cars being in a garage and invisible to street view? Does it account for people who donâ(TM)t own cars? Account for results in areas with gated communities, where âoestreet viewâ might not have been allowed? What of families with teenaged kids who park their beaten jalopies at the curb while dadâ(TM)s Mercedes and momâ(TM)s Volvo or Land Rover sits invisibly in the garage? Iâ(TM)m not saying thereâ(TM)s NO oysters in the stew, just that no one should go about assuming a high oyster content to this stew.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
This goes to show that Google knows more about us than we do ourselves.
This has to stop.
Google is indeed morphing into Big Brother.
{I will not go to Room 101 unless you drag me kicking and screaming}
I voted in the 2016 election and all I got was this Mulder & Scully shirt. Looking forward to 2020!
I think this story could have been bundled into the recent story about abuses of technology. We could be using computers to increase our freedoms and give us more and better choices, but over-controlled elections are NOT helping. Why bother to vote when the outcome has already been so heavily manipulated?
Let me focus on the specific problem of gerrymandering that this technology would obviously support (too well). Partisan redistricting has two principles, and both of them are based on predicting how people will vote next time. So far the main data has been prior voting patterns, but this will help YUGEly. Principle 1 is making your districts safe, which usually means a cushion around 5%. Principle 2 is wasting your opponent's votes in concentrated sacrificial districts, which is normally required because you would barely need to tweak the districts if you actually had more voters. The worse abuses of partisan gerrymandering are when actual minorities of the voters get to "win" the legislatures. (We've actually seen that in recent elections for the House of so-called Representatives, thanks to diabolical gerrymandering in such states as Texas.)
So let me switch angles to a possible computer-based solution in two parts:
Part 1: Guest voting. If you don't like your own district (for example because it is so gerrymandered that your vote is meaningless), then you would be able to reject your ballot and vote as a guest in one of the neighboring districts. The more they gerrymander the districts, the MORE options voters would have and the LESS predictable the outcomes of the elections.
Part 2: Allocate the voting power based on the actual outcome of the election. Easiest to make this clear with a simple example using three districts, A, B, and C. Assume half the voters of District A decide to vote as guests in Districts B and C, with one quarter going to each district. Then whoever wins A only gets 1/2 vote in the legislature, and the legislators from B and C get 1-1/4 votes each. The total of the 3 districts is still 3 votes in the legislature, but each voter gets truly equal voting power in the legislature. (Non-voters, too. Each non-voter gets the same 0% representation, but that's true now, too.)
An amusing side effect is that the winner still has incentive to actually represent ALL of the voters who voted for AND against him, because even those negative votes still contributed to his influence in the legislature. Also the voters are motivated to vote because they know they are increasing the voting power in whichever district they pick.
So let me be the first to admit that it will never happen. Certainly not via an evolutionary path, much as I prefer evolution to the alternatives. No "Fantasy" mods on Slashdot, eh?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Many times in rural areas you cannot see the houses or the cars parked near to the house from the one lane roads.
Is there an older account than Caesar's report on dividing and conquering? However the tactic is much older than Rome.
Putin divided and conquered the Democratic Party before he did it to America as a whole. Count me as one of the suckers who was conned into donating to Sanders before the New York primary when I should have donated to the Democratic Party in Michigan.
However Putin doesn't actually deserve much credit for merely harvesting the mindless mushrooms. He just noticed that we'd cultivated a huge crop of them by destroying the public education system. Too bad we did that ourselves with our own American divide and conquer strategy. Now we have a tiny number of good public schools, basically to dangle as hope for the parents who are sufficiently concerned to play that lottery. Most of the schools have become obedience schools you wouldn't send your dog to. The goal is not the creation of wise and thoughtful voters, but docile employees (and inmates) who will obey the ads selling toothpaste or political candidates.
Now for the punchline. I used to think public education was destroyed because stupid (or religious zealot) parents were most concerned with making sure their kids were as stupid as they were, but now I've realized they were just useful idiots. Follow the money. Public education was mostly funded by property taxes, and rich real estate investors (like #PresidentTweety) have always hated property taxes. One way to cut property taxes is by slashing the public schools to death.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
If Slashdot had a better mechanism for aggregating and displaying and filtering based on public reputation, then I would adjust my settings to render such trolls (possibly a paid professional?) invisible. (I think you're referring to 5161731? Probably just a fresh sock puppet, but I'd also tweak my setting to deal with fresh sock puppets.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Wouldn't it be easier and more accurate to simply look at voter registration records? Everything else is mostly a guess.
How hard is this predicting-votes-from-an-image anyway? Let's look for some clues.
A brand-new shiny F-250 Super Duty Turbo Diesel parked in the driveway to a ramshackle house?
The name of a roofing business painted on this truck?
A rusted 1990 Buick LeSabre with the hood up parked on the front lawn?
An NRA bumper sticker on each vehicle?
A Trump-Pence sign hand painted on a 4X8 sheet facing the roadway?
So how is this different than voting records that have
names addresses voting history and party affiliation?
The reality is cars, voting like TV news is a market and market
share and differentiation to keep the market is critical.
Some think that FoX vs. CNN is about morality and politics...
it is about market share.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Just look for the fucking Priusâ(TM). Iâ(TM)ll give you no guesses as to how they vote.
Now give me my grant money.
What about the cars that are parked in the garage out of site of street view?
My neighbor's renter's cars are parked in the street. A bunch of over-sized-gas-guzzlers and junkers on the street. Everyone with a decent vehicle in my neighborhood parks in their garage, out of site of street view. Whatever info they have about cars on the street is skewed to the rental demographic in my neighborhood. The street is full of cars but not those of home owners for the most part.
How sparse are US polling booths? It sounds strange to drive to vote, except of course in rural areas.
It might sound a bit tin-foil-hat, but it doesn't take much imagination to guess that this will be (or already is) used to screen job candidates. Soon enough, merely keeping your mouth shut at work, or even 24x7, about your possibly unpopular opinions isn't going to cut it. AI can tease out amazingly subtle patterns. Time to start being more careful about what you think.
I had signs all over my yard for Donald Trump (as did everyone else for a good mile radius from my house). I think it's pretty obvious. There was one house with a Hillary sign. He had one. Most of the Trump supporters here had quite a few signs all over.
Most Democrats I know were pretty 'meh' on Hillary. She can't accept that she sucks. Well, I guess according to Bill she didn't.
my car in front of the brothel does not prove anything. I did not hae sex with that woman!!!!!!
can be more easily manipulated and controlled. It's now impossible for us to stuff the 'big data' genie back in the bottle, so we need to start finding ways to either poison the data en masse or find ways of using it to our advantage. I hate the rape of our privacy that is now pretty much taken for granted, but the thing I hate more is that there is no reciprocity and therefore there's nothing even close to a level playing field. The concentration of huge masses of personal data in a few hands, both parallels and reinforces the concentration of wealth in those same hands, and it's past time we started finding ways of de-concentrating both data and wealth.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Isn't this just a subtle exit poll?
The relative number of sedans versus extended cab trucks owned in a neighborhood, can be correlated with political leanings.
Perhaps, substituting a survey of vehicles parked near a polling place makes for a better indicator still, because it reflects voter turnout?
https://news.stanford.edu/2017...