An intelligent machine capable of anticipating your next move minutes in advance sounds like the stuff of nightmares – but is now a reality.
Researchers have taught an AI to recognise patterns in people’s actions, allowing it to accurately predict the next move in a sequence minutes in advance.
The software, which was built by a team at the University of Bonn in Germany, was taught to anticipate actions by watching hours of cooking videos.
Dr Jürgen Gall believes the intelligent software will eventually be able to prophesize your actions ‘hours before they happen’.
If the team manages to fine-tune the algorithm to be able to anticipate actions that far in advance, it’s possible to imagine a slew of real-world application, from home automation gadgets, to Big Brother-esque surveillance.
To teach the AI to accurately predict actions before they take place, Dr Jürgen Gall and his team focused on cooking videos.
Using pre-recorded videos of people preparing a meal, the researchers were able to teach the machine to recognise each action being performed on-screen, including cutting tomatoes, adding salt and flipping a pancake.
In total, some 40 videos were used to teach the AI.
Each of these recordings was around six minutes long and contained some 20 different actions.
After four hours, the algorithm was able to recognise the sequence of events needed to prepare a dish, which is far from trivial given the variety in approaches and recipes in the pre-recorded clips.
‘Then we tested how successful the learning process was,’ explained Dr. Jürgen Gall.
‘For this we confronted the software with videos that it had not seen before.’
Like before, the machine was told what was happening in the video for the first 20 or 30 per cent of the clip.
The algorithm was then asked to predict the next action before it took place on-screen.
The machine flagged-up its ‘observation’ before the action, drawing on its knowledge of the recipe and its understanding of how similar sequences have played out before.
The AI was able to correctly anticipate actions in the near future with surprising accuracy.
Dr Gall said: ‘Accuracy was over 40 percent for short forecast periods, but then dropped the more the algorithm had to look into the future.’
For activities which were more than three minutes in the future, the algorithm was only able to accurately predict the outcome in 15 per cent of cases.
Researchers only considered the prediction correct if both the activity and its timing were correct.
Gall and his colleagues want the study, which will be presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Salt Lake City on June 19, to be understood as a first step into the new field of activity prediction.
According the researchers, the algorithm performed noticeably worse when it was forced to recognise the actions in the first part of the video, instead of being told.
In future, Dr Gall wants the algorithm to be able to forecast actions much further in advance.
‘We want to predict the timing and duration of activities – minutes or even hours before they happen,’ he claims.
The researchers anticipate the algorithm will have initial applications in smart home appliances, where it could dramatically improve automation.
For example, AI-powered kitchen appliances could pass over ingredients as soon as you need them, or pre-heat the oven in anticipation of the next step in the recipe it has identified.
However, it is possible to imagine the AI being used in security systems to create advanced surveillance akin to the fictional Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984.
The University of Bonn study was developed as part of a research group dedicated to the prediction of human behaviour and financially supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Dr Jürgen Gall and his team are working hard to make sure you’re expendable, and that your job will still get done long after you’re tossed into a mass grave.
The Doc wants to make sure Skynet is up and running by 2030 if not sooner.
And by the way, being right 40% of the time or less for 3 minutes or less is nothing to brag home about. Percentages like that are actually really weak in that aspect. This article is merely a way for the Doc to get more funding and/or for others to promote fearmongering.
True, the results aren’t very impressive — especially since all that was being predicted was the next step in a cooking sequence. The possible actions there are very limited.
Still, the people working on research like this deserve to rot in hell.
“Researchers have taught an AI to recognise patterns in people’s actions, allowing it to accurately predict the next move in a sequence minutes in advance.”
https://youtu.be/zDmvCNfvt5w?t=1
Technology can and has been a benefit to mankind, tools, who doesn’t appreciate them.
We the people must make sure they are not used to evil ends and we need to eradicate those that are using them to evil ends. Weather manipulation machines come to mind, but there’s plenty more.