AI, Brains, Neural Networks [Artificial Intelligence Thread]

Check out this cool video explaining the history of deep learning and neural networks! People first really started to understand the brain in the late 1800s. After discovering neurons in the brain people realized their similarity to other electrical signalling equipment of the time like relays.



For years these artificial neural networks were purely theoretical. But in the 1950s the first working AI model was created (it could differentiate squares from circles). The machine had knobs between each neuron that were manually adjusted by hand to train the network.

There is still thermal facial and gait recognition.

Printed Masks Fool Airport Facial Recognition Technology

This video is an hour long, I'd recommend watching at 2x speed if you don't have time for that sort of thing

Google's Deep dream was one of the first generative models that made headlines. It started as a network for classifying images, but they were able to sort of run the system in reverse and have it hallucinate nightmarish faces in existing pictures. The original model was made for an image recognition contest. That ImageNet ran in 2014. ImageNet made a dataset of just under 15 million images, which it doesn't own the licenses for.

With new technology, the line between research and commerce is razor thin, and big companies often use this fact to just manifest destiny whenever they want and make us live with the consequences. Scraping millions of images and sticking them in a public dataset is a huge ethical question mark, even in an academic context. But once an economy springs up around these datasets, they're hard to get rid of.

This is a lesson we've learned over and over. Companies rush to market with leaded gas or asbestos insulation, and by the time we understand what they've done, entire swathes of the planet have brain damage and lung cancer.

Google mastered this principle with AdSense, a surveillance system that probably knows your heart rate and body temperature right now and will use it to sell you some gross Coke.