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AI Mistakes Ad On a Bus For an Actual CEO, Then Publicly Shames Them For 'Jaywalking' (scmp.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the South China Morning Post:
Since last year, many Chinese cities have cracked down on jaywalking by investing in facial recognition systems and AI-powered surveillance cameras. Jaywalkers are identified and shamed by displaying their photographs on large public screens... Developments are also underway to engage the country's mobile network operators and social media platforms, such as Tencent Holdings' WeChat and Sina Weibo, to establish a system in which offenders will receive personal text messages as soon as they are caught violating traffic rules....
Making a compelling case for change is the recent experience of Dong Mingzhu, chairwoman of China's biggest maker of air conditioners Gree Electric Appliances, who found her face splashed on a huge screen erected along a street in the port city of Ningbo... That artificial intelligence-backed surveillance system, however, erred in capturing Dong's image on Wednesday from an advertisement on the side of a moving bus. The traffic police in Ningbo, a city in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, were quick to recognise the mistake, writing in a post on microblog Sina Weibo on Wednesday that it had deleted the snapshot. It also said the surveillance system would be completely upgraded to cut incidents of false recognition in future.
The article says the mistakenly-accused CEO's company later thanked the traffic police for their hard work, and "called on people to obey traffic rules to keep the streets safe."
"The Chinese government is currently working to combine the operations of more than 170 million public security cameras to strengthen its surveillance network's ability to track and monitor the country's 1.4 billion citizens. Research firm IHS Markit has estimated that the number of surveillance cameras in China could reach 450 million by 2020."
Making a compelling case for change is the recent experience of Dong Mingzhu, chairwoman of China's biggest maker of air conditioners Gree Electric Appliances, who found her face splashed on a huge screen erected along a street in the port city of Ningbo... That artificial intelligence-backed surveillance system, however, erred in capturing Dong's image on Wednesday from an advertisement on the side of a moving bus. The traffic police in Ningbo, a city in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, were quick to recognise the mistake, writing in a post on microblog Sina Weibo on Wednesday that it had deleted the snapshot. It also said the surveillance system would be completely upgraded to cut incidents of false recognition in future.
The article says the mistakenly-accused CEO's company later thanked the traffic police for their hard work, and "called on people to obey traffic rules to keep the streets safe."
"The Chinese government is currently working to combine the operations of more than 170 million public security cameras to strengthen its surveillance network's ability to track and monitor the country's 1.4 billion citizens. Research firm IHS Markit has estimated that the number of surveillance cameras in China could reach 450 million by 2020."
The article says the mistakenly-accused CEO's company later thanked the traffic police for their hard work, and "called on people to obey traffic rules to keep the streets safe."
And all along I thought we couldn't have it both ways.
Right now there is one camera for every ten citizens.
I was in Shanghai last month, and I saw a camera about every 100m or so. That might have been one for every 10 pedestrians on the street, but no where near one for every 10 people in the city.
Anyway, I always though that China dealt with jaywalkers by making it legal for motorists to run over them. Even in a marked cross walk, you are often risking your life in Shanghai traffic.
Typical primitive machine learning, it doesn't "figure out" anything. It goes like "Pixels... pixels... pixels.... oh! I have seen that arrangement of pixels before, looks like a 'face', better have a closer look."
So they train it to ignore 5 foot tall faces. Then it will catch the face of a motorist making a U turn.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
No Chinese would dream of that. Probably would not send them in jail, but would get the marked down badly in social credit. And maybe a fine. Certainly expulsion from the Communist party if a member.
China is not a joke. That is why people self-censor very carefully. The risks and penalties are everywhere.
Where, when the state causes you harm you have to thank them or find yourself checking in your "organ donor card" early.
Don't support, buy from, sell to, or tolerate China.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
It has to do with the history of how societies deal with homelessness and property in general. In the US, UK and Asia people without property are slaves and criminals and it's expressed through crimes like loitering, jaywalking, squatting and panhandling as well as picketing.
To give an example, in China, people who lost their homes during a conflict would march to the palace and setup tents demanding lands and homes in recompense. The palace couldn't just send soldiers to kill them (well, most of the time) since the social contract did in fact required the Emperor to provide for the people in those circumstances so they just expanded the palace court and made it The Forbidden City where only the royal family and its aid may enter. Eventually the new normal became that you're not allowed to request anything from the government without going through official, non-transparent channels which is why the Chinese government doesn't understand why everyone is so angry with them when they run tanks over demonstrators.
The US went through different steps as it criminalized how Native Americans migrated and didn't take permanent residence. Then when the slaves were "freed" they made a lot of laws criminalizing homelessness to make it hard for the blacks to leave to the cities. Then around the industrial revolution people were becoming homeless and unemployed and were picketing government offices and business so that had to have been made illegal too... All the way to the 60s where they started shooting down college students who were demonstrating against the war that sent their generation to die for a cause not their own.
In Europe it was pretty much headed the same direction until WW2 rendered huge parts of the population homeless and jobless so the laws and social norms had to have been loosen. Not to worry though. With the Muslim immigrants, Europe is heading back on track and is already making new laws to legalize the very existence of the under-classes.
TL;DR: Give it time. You'll have it too.
I was in Shanghai last month, and I saw a camera about every 100m or so. That might have been one for every 10 pedestrians on the street, but no where near one for every 10 people in the city.
Yup, those were the cameras you saw. You might also ponder whether the biggest city in the world is a representative sample. (And that's not even counting all the smart phones.)
But the important thing is to keep saying positive things about China and it's government, assuming you wan't to keep visiting. You know they're reading your posts, and you know they know who you are.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.