Can Artificial Intelligence prevent human violence?
I’m a child of the 80’s. I grew up watching science-fiction portrayals of Artificial Intelligence as the technological apocalypse where machines wage war against humanity, seeking to either destroy us or enslave us because of our inferior nature. Some of my favorites are Tron, Battlestar Galactica and The Terminator. In the end, however, none of these AI’s were smart enough to survive. Not that intelligent after all.
On the opposite spectrum, I also remember TV & movies that depicted a future where man and machine co-exist harmoniously (often humorously). Short Circuit, The Jetsons and Star Wars were a hit in our household. Slapstick robots were all the rage.
Looking back, one thing that was similar in both ‘bad AI’ and ‘good AI’ of that era is that they rarely co-existed. Most AI characters didn’t posses the emotional intelligence equivalent to a human and they couldn’t make difficult moral or ethical decisions. Hollywood AI was either bad or good, never both.
It wasn’t until I was 19 and read Ray Kurzweil’s The Age Of Spiritual Machines that my world-view of computer intelligence started to emerge. Several months later The Matrix was released. Those two provided potent philosophical fuel. For me, it was absolutely apparent that humanity’s future was dependent on AI. I saw the correlation between advances in raw computation and the benefit to automation in nearly every aspect of our daily lives. But I was skeptical we’d see an AI with human level intelligence in the time-frame Kurzweil predicted.
This fascination of AI and computers led me to a successful career in Hollywood creating visual effects for blockbuster films until I became an entrepreneur. I was fortunate in my life to have worked with so many talented directors and artists who understood the power of the motion picture and the necessary computer technology to create ground-breaking visual effects. Innovation was everywhere.
The one aspect of visual effects that constantly surprised me was the pace of technology advancement. The first year I started in visual effects, the entire studio of Rhythm & Hues had 1 Terabyte of available disk space. On the last film I worked on at Disney, it was closer to 1 Petabyte — 1,000x more.
Many of the projects I worked on explored man’s relationship with technology, especially our co-dependence. It’s a theme that’s been frequently present in my life since I’ve always had a natural affinity with computers.
Route 91 & Loko AI
I’ve been personally affected by gun violence and was exploring the AI space when the Route 91 Harvest Festival Shooting in Las Vegas happened towards the end of 2017. I remember the feeling of frustration and the feeling of powerlessness. It was a tipping point for me and I decided I couldn’t continue to stand on the sidelines and watch more senseless mass-shootings without doing something about it.
I grew up through Columbine, but there was something more callous that happened in Las Vegas. Shooting innocent people you don’t even know seemed like the lowest thing possible. This wasn’t the world I wanted to leave for our children and our future generations. It was, and continues to be, regular news to hear about another mass-shooting in America and I was just not okay with that anymore and had to act.
By leveraging my background in technology, I started Loko AI with the intent to create a powerful AI tool to help protect our communities and to help reduce crime rates. Loko detects, predicts and classifies human behavior to prevent crime and violence. If we can save even one life using our AI technology, then we can change the future and change the narrative for our communities in crisis.
Many months after Route 91, I read an article that mentioned how security budgets at Las Vegas hotels haven’t changed since. At first I was livid. “How can this be? Haven’t they learned anything?” But I came to recognize that throwing money at this problem isn’t going to solve anything without technological advancements. Security innovation is the only way because everything in the past has failed.
Era of Accelerated Computing
Mass-shootings in America are becoming deadlier. Firearm deaths by homicide have only increased over time¹. We have a complex relationship with guns, our Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. So it’s no surprise that 42% of Americans live in a gun-owning household².
What can we do to protect our communities, schools and churches from further violence without putting more guns on the streets? Part of the solution lies with advancements in AI computer vision.
We are in an era of accelerated computing. The 4th Industrial Revolution is unfolding before us with AI right in the vortex. In the coming years, there will be scientific discoveries in data science, machine self-learning and algorithm design that will lead to major breakthroughs across every sector. Soon enough, AI software will be able to create AI software on its own with minimal human intervention.
Computer vision is a fascinating field because it deals with semantic understanding of a scene. We break down a scene into individual parts and correlate what is happening to the different objects and actions recognized. Behavior recognition is complex because behaviors can take on different meanings and classifications depending on the situation.
Understanding of all these nuanced behaviors is critical to solving the classification problem. It’s what we are obsessed with at Loko — developing a complete human behavior prediction model using the latest advancements in GPU technology, High Performance Computing and IP security cameras.
By automatically detecting criminal acts in progress, security and law enforcement teams win back valuable seconds leading to faster response times and reducing the bottleneck of human operators.
Final Thoughts
As innovators, we must also be responsible custodians of AI and always aim for a balance between privacy and security. Currently there are over 30 million CCTVs in America. We are all used to being watched in our cities, however, most of these camera systems are aging and are used only after an incident happens. That’s just not good enough. We need technology to be more intelligent and better at keeping us safe. There needs to be more accountability and resources put forward to combat rising guns deaths.
In closing, to answer the question Can Artificial Intelligence prevent human violence? The answer is yes, we can. The work we are doing at Loko AI will revolutionize the security and surveillance industry. By using technology in this way, we change the outcome of the future and protect what matters most: human lives.
- National Vital Statistics Reports, July 26, 2018: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr67/nvsr67_05.pdf
- Pew Research, June 22, 2017:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/22/key-takeaways-on-americans-views-of-guns-and-gun-ownership/ - https://aiindex.org/2017-report.pdf
