
YouTube has removed videos of robots fighting, citing “animal cruelty” - jpindar
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/614204/youtube-has-removed-videos-of-robots-fighting-citing-animal-cruelty
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aphextim
If an A.I. were to somehow ever gain "consciousness" I'm sure they would view
this flagging as correct.

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corodra
You beat me to this joke :)

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Mobius01
Maybe Google did create a sentient AI, and it made its first visible decision
in displaying empathy towards these simple robots as we meatbags do towards
animals.

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Cheyana
Exactly. In fact, how do we know that something on the internet hasn't already
evolved into a consciousness, and is so far beyond our understanding (like our
own consciousness) that we haven't even detected it yet?

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realshowbiz
Introducing the AI enabled cloud. Codename: “SkyNet”

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lioeters
"China started setting up the Skynet surveillance system in 2005. In 2015, it
achieved 100 percent coverage of the capital city Beijing. As per estimates,
China will have close to 300 million CCTV cameras covering the country by
2020."

Fact is indeed stranger than fiction..

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corodra
100 percent coverage... sure. Okay. This is what we like to call "propaganda".
Reality, it's just high density areas and thoroughfare. Plus I would sell them
to put cameras up in places that are known for dissident patrons. For five
years I did security integration (ip cameras, access control, etc). My
business partner was apart of Seattle wanting to do the same back when they
did the mesh network and I worked with a few smaller cities in the USA that
wanted bids and designs.

The amount of man power to monitor, disk space, IT infrastructure,
maintenance... yea. Whenever any city claims this or wants this, the reality
sets in real fast as "Oh my shit, we can't do this". A real security camera,
one that can run 24/7 in outdoor conditions, costs minimum $200 (Chinese ones)
or you're replacing them every 1-2 years. I have had plenty of people who said
I was wrong nad price gouging them. They later always had to buy the cameras I
recommend before the 2 year mark hits. Dahua has decent cameras (still dog
shit especially when it comes to view distance) starting at $200 each. But
they do last a decent amount of time. 5 to 8 years. $500-$800 is the magic
range (my opinion) for good quality Chinese cameras. But same goes for Bosch,
Axis, etc. But the camera is your cheapest cost. The shear cost of all the
support equipment, infrastructure, electricity, manpower... Especially with a
city, it'd need such a high bitrate to have any type of resolution that
matters with all that movement. You run into petabytes weekly at the minimum
for a place like Beijing. Oh, I totally forgot about the video management
system. Licenses are per camera on most of them. You have to pay like $50-$200
per camera for the software. Then all the servers to run the federated system.
Don't get me wrong, every integrator wants a city (especially Beijing size) to
say "Hey, we want 100% coverage in our city". That's retirement in one job.
Granted a multi year job, depending on city. Still. Fun coupons. Lots of them.

Let me put some numbers down. 300 million cameras they say. Let's say weak,
crappy 2mp camera, H.264, 12 frames a second, moderate scene activity (motion
tracking to trigger recording). Save for 14 days (most cities first want 30,
but request 14 after they have heart attacks from the price of storage).
That's already ~100GB for those 14 days. Video and meta data take a lot of
space. Multiply that by 300 million. That's ~30 billion GB. ~30mil TB. 30,000
PB. That's petabytes. Of pure no-profit storage. Just a cost sink. WD Purple
drive 12TB drives (I like seagate, but the constant simultaneous read/write of
a VMS, WD Purples are seriously the only real way to go) require a minimum of
2,500,000 drives. Even if they got a good deal at $250 for the bulk quantity
(they're $370 consumer, and I use to get about 15%-20% off for bulk), that's
$625mil in hard drives alone. Don't forget all the servers. So... many...
servers... But also, redundancy, Raid5 or Raid6 depending on the firm doing
it. So you need even more drives, by the ten-thousands. Oh, and the extra
drives due to failure from that size of a deploy.

An average security camera of decent quality is around 5mp to 8mp. 14.44 TB to
26 TB of storage required under the same terms. Per camera. I say that's the
bare minimum to even tell anything from up on a pole unless there's a decent
zoom lens on the 2mp.

So when China says dumb shit like 300mil cameras in _ONE_ city. Bullshit. Just
plain bullshit. Because I promise you this. If true, I would be the one
selling those damn cameras. Even one street in Beijing. I'd take ownership of
that and retire. Gladly. Screw that, just the copper or glass rope alone. I'll
take that piece of that pie.

TLDR: I did the math, China is full of shit about 300mil cameras in Beijing.

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lioeters
Thank you for raising some interesting points about the practicality and
estimated cost of a country-wide surveillance network.

As an additional data point, according to their own media, China spent in 2018
"the equivalent of $20 billion USD" purchasing equipment for domestic
surveillance, about half of total purchases in the global market. They've been
making similar (or much larger) expenditures every year. So, that probably
covers a wide part of the infrastructure.

> 300mil cameras in ONE city

I think they mean in the whole country.

That's still an unimaginably huge amount of streaming video to process for
facial recognition, storage, etc., as you've outlined.

> I'll take that piece of that pie

I imagine, like in most other countries, this "defense" spending props up many
well-connected companies, jobs, political and professional careers.

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corodra
Thanks for the extra info. Okay so, $20b in equipment for 300mil cameras... eh
yea. I'll say that's maybe about right. After I wrote that, I was estimating
$35b-$40b to deploy (fuzzy head math), including labor and infrastructure. But
they have a lot of in-country manufacturers that can supply a lot of what they
need. Which, I may give them shit on quality, but the indoor stuff, mid-range,
is really good. Outdoor, no. We started with replacing a lot of dead outdoor
chinese camera deploys. They really suck for freezing temps and high heat. But
indoor, it's really hard to defend a non-chinese camera's price compared to,
let's say Dahua (I'm more familiar with them). But they're whitelabeled by a
firm I could never nail down in Shenzhen. But, whatever. I left the industry
almost 2 years ago.

But you mention facial rec. So, again, I left 2 years ago. Most of the systems
I knew tied to VMSs ended up always being separate boxes that handled the
actual facial rec. I mean, some did inline. There's a thing called edge
analytics (industry keyword) to cameras. Meaning the processor on the camera
can do motion detection, facial, object track, etc, then pump that info out to
a VMS that can handle that specific type of data (nightmare compatibility
issues in this industry, ONVIF works until it doesn't). And, basic stuff works
great. Motion and object. Yea. Facial... it "works". By works... eh, 70%
success rate was the best I ever saw. Which means lots of false positives and
lots of never caught. Enough to where staff tells me "This shit is useless".
That's if the VMS can handle said data, because it wasn't part of ONVIF 2 when
I was around. Oh and, it lags the hell out of the camera and recording if on
the same server. Enough to where you have missing video. Which is bad. Real
bad.

The way around, separate servers and software with real world ~90% success.
Good enough to where filtering through the false positives by someone is
pretty easy. This... SUPER EXPENSIVE. Not little expensive. Really bloody
fucking expensive to deploy in hardware alone. Petabytes of data being
crunched every minute. I'd probably get bjs from both Nvidia and Intel for
selling that job. Plus, the bigger the database of bad faces, the longer the
crunching takes. I'm trying to remember what my one customer needed... I think
it was a dual E5-2695 v4 (maybe it was v3) along with whatever the high end
Quadro at the time wise. I think it was the P4000. I'm looking at parts at
that time frame, but I'm not 100%. Either way, it was a $10k+ box to just
crunch faces (and was above spec since I built it) on about 20 high quality
floor cameras (10mp+ wall mounted cameras that had clear face shots). That box
was running at around 50%-60% capacity on average days and 80%-90% at peak
hours. I think the memory was around 64gb and would max at 50 or so at peak
times. Hardware alone would be killer for this china deploy, even if they have
inhouse facial rec for "free". And the power draw... God have mercy on that
powergrid.

But there are sooooooo, soooooo, soooo many problems with such a deployment.
To act like it's a "one system" 300mil camera deploy. No. It's a pain in the
ass to do a 1,000 camera deploy for a casino. A real pain in the ass.
Different VMSs do these types of deployments differently. But generally what
happens is this, you have some master servers that control slave servers. The
master servers are what staff log into. "Even if a slave server goes down, the
staff can see all other servers just fine." Notice the quotes. You see those
quotes. HA! That's brochure talk. I've dealt with most of the big VMS players
minus Milestone but ONSSI 5 was built on Milestone so... whatever. God... that
was such a cluster fuck. 5.0 was such a mess... Anyways, if a server goes
down, it can hiccup the entire federated system. 9 times out of 10, not a big
deal. But you can notice it. But the more machines, means that 1 out of 10,
the master server can seize up. Which then can crash the slave servers. That's
not good. Because they all have to reboot AFTER the master reboots. Then if
you have separate archiving servers, these need to sync back up depending on
how the redundancy is setup. Lots of downtime.

Look, I can share a lot of stories. But to save time and boring stories of me
being on the line with tech support where the lvl 2 and 3 guys go "Yea, I
know, it's been an on going issue the past few years. Here's a workaround to
make the customer happy. Just feed them xyz bullshit.", here's how to best
explain a large scale camera deployment.

Think of a clock. Lots and lots of gears, moving parts. But instead of metal,
the gears are made of glass. Some of the gears are thicker and some are really
thin. Some are tempered, others you wonder how the hell they didn't shatter
from looking at it too hard. At first, it can work great. Maybe a gear or two
breaks and you fix them and it works on the initial deploy. But over time, the
gears break or wear down in weird ways. Ways where the clock hands still move.
It may not be the correct time, but the hands are still moving. Which is what
counts at the end of the paycheck, cough, I mean day. So the system "still
works". Kind of. Until the gears are so fucked from neglect, the entire thing
should just be trashed and you buy another whole clock (not pieces) with glass
gears. This is the security industry in a nutshell. Unless you get the
expensive stuff from Axis, MOOG or anything from Israel. I'll throw Bosch in
there too...eh. There are some companies in Israel that shoot their cameras to
prove they're tough. In front of you.

So, yea. Such a wide deployment, I still call bullshit. Especially with
maintenance and infrastructure costs. Keeping that system up and running, both
electricity, camera replacement, cleaning the housing lens (seriously, smog
fucks up those housing lenses hardcore), and we're not even talking about
training staff to monitor the stuff yet. It's so expensive with extremely
little value. Yes, they're surveillance crazy. But spending so much money on
capturing how many "dangerous" people? Really? The guys at Antwerp that get
robbed periodically spend less hunting down people who steal $100+ mil in
diamonds per person.

And hell, maybe they did deploy this in the way they're talking about. An
honest communist...bah. Probably why they're in so much debt. China has been
debt heavy for many years now. A project like this can really cripple whoever
implements it. It's that long term cost that no one thinks about and seriously
hurts a lot of companies. Plus, cameras seriously don't last longer than 10
years. It's a 24/7 "cheap" device. So, they have to replace those cameras
every 10 years, EASY. Max, 10 years. If it's a good temperate area. Any
sustained lows below 40F or above 95F causes a lot of damage to these things
if they're not designed for it (meaning more $$$). You might spend $20b once
for parts, but you'll be spending $0.5b to $1b to maintain it, every year on
average.

Oh plus, last story. Seattle deployed a city wide mesh network with cameras a
number of years ago. It was shut down, I think a week (maybe 2 weeks) into it
being turned on. Why? One of the city councilmen (or some other city official
of some important status) was caught with a hooker on that camera system and
the news spread through the police department, fast. Because. You know. Video.
Now, we have separate bodies of power in the country that allow this to
happen. The cops spreading the video I mean. Well, hookers too, but that's not
the point I'm making. China doesn't really look favorable on the idea of
separate bodies of power. But, a true 100% coverage... it's bad for chinese
politicians too. Especially ones with wandering peckers and loyalties.

~~~
lioeters
Good stuff, that was entertaining and educational. I see, hearing about the
many potential problems with such a big surveillance network puts things in
perspective. It helped to see through the marketing speak in the mass media,
to get a sense of the real-life challenges and current state of technology.

Lots of relevant points, like the (un)reliability of the cameras; difficulty
of integrating into a single system and keeping the servers running;
processing and storing the data; on-going energy and maintenance costs;
dealing with false positives; and (un)reliability of the humans running the
whole thing.

So I suppose "Skynet" has a few more decades to be even close to covering the
whole country of China. And machine learning is still far from achieving
"intelligence" in any meaningful sense of the term.

I can't help but think, though, that given a long enough timeline (say, in the
next century) these technologies do seem to have a possibility of merging into
a semisentient technopocalypse.

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jryb
Curious. And yet a video I flagged recently that shows mice being electrocuted
to death still hasn't been taken down. It has 7.8 million views so I can't
imagine I'm the only one who's reported it.

