There’s good reason to be concerned about Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. It’s replacing human jobs (see 1, 2). It’s being used for highly disputed applications (see 1, 2, 3, 4), including often unwarranted surveillance and data collection in “Smart Cities.”
Some cities (New York and New Orleans) have already become “Smart” – maybe yours has too. If your community is installing 5G, it may be for “Smart City” efforts (see 1, 2).
Opposition to “Smart Cities” has been ongoing (see 1, 2, 3). Unfortunately, improved surveillance software has been developed to make tracking citizens even easier.
Computer vision researchers develop city-scale smart tracking platform
Surveillance cameras already dot or blanket major cities, but it’s not necessarily easy to continuously track a person or object moving through multiple locations and cameras. Now researchers from the Indian Institute of Science are applying advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to this complex challenge, creating a software platform called Anveshak — Hindi for “investigator” — that simultaneously manages the specifics of tracking and the larger issue of working within a city’s limited computing resources.
Anveshak has the big-picture ability to know the locations and overlap points of 1,000 camera feeds, as well as possible paths an object (such as a stolen car) or person could take through those feeds, critical details in limiting what would otherwise be an unfathomably large quantity of video data coming from multiple cameras. The system creates a “spotlight” on the tracked subject, dynamically adjusting the size of that spotlight based on known gaps in camera coverage; for example, four cameras might be monitored for the subject’s arrival in situations of ambiguity, decreasing to only two cameras where their coverage is better and the subject’s route more obvious. Where computing power is limited, Anveshak can automatically cut video quality to reduce bandwidth rather than stalling or stopping tracking activity.
Electromagnetic Radiation emissions from 5G, AI, Bluetooth, and other wireless technology are biologically and environmentally harmful as well. More tech = more toxic E-Waste too. Sounds like the only winners are Big Tech and the entities that want access to all our personal data.
Activist Post reports regularly about unsafe technology. For more information, visit our archives.
