Import AI 419: Amazon’s millionth robot; CrowdTrack; and infinite games | Import AI

There is so much in this one article that is amazing that I am struggling to pick anyone thing so I'll just quote the first part. Read the whole article you won't be disappointed.

Why this matters – scalable authoritarianism: One of the things that makes authoritarianism expensive is the overhead that comes from building out and running a large-scale police state. One of the things AI does is make it much, much cheaper to do large-scale surveillance. Datasets like CrowdTrack are a symptom of the way AI is making it cheaper and easier to do surveillance that the dictators of the 20th century would have fantasized about but always been unable to fully fund. “Our dataset can be used for tasks like visual grounding, captioning, and appearance feature extraction,” the researchers write.