The Playing Field

Sport and culture through the lens of science

Teaching the iPhone to Drive

The coming singularity in machine vision.

 *This article co-authored with Los Alamos neuro-physicist Michael Ham

This is a story about a coming singularity. 

For those unfamiliar, the term “singularity,” comes from astrophysics, where it’s technically the spot in a black hole where matter is crushed to a tiny point with infinite mass and no volume; and metaphorically an event horizon—a point beyond which we cannot see. 

In the 1950s, mathematician John von Neumann, applied this metaphor to technology, writing: "[The] ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."

Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near and the term’s greatest popularizer, referred to the singularity as the point in time when computers become smarter than humans.

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The singularity we’re describing is nothing quite this dramatic, but no less revolutionary. Very soon, arguably within the next five years, we will cross a line and computers will begin to see better than humans.

What does this mean? Well, right now computers are mostly trapped in a digital universe—they can’t yet make direct sense of our analog world. Some sort of human intervention is still required.

The iPhone’s Siri is an example. By talking to your iPhone, Siri converts an analog input (your voice) into a digital response, but the process—while amazing—still requires a human.

In machine vision, other than in extremely cumbersome systems like LIDAR—the main eyes for Google’s autonomous car—the ability to do without human involvement doesn’t yet exist in any realistic capacity.

By realistic, what I mean is that the LIDAR system is a) very expensive b) rather cumbersome. In other words, it doesn’t fit in your iPhone.

But if the iPhone could process the data from its camera with the same accuracy as a human, it could drive your car. In short, this is the visual singularity. 

And we’re getting closer. Both license plate detection and facial recognition are computer vision tricks that already work. But they’re limited algorithms—they do one thing very well, but not lots of things. You can’t plug your iPhone into your Roomba and tell it to clean up the dirt, but not the Legos.

Two forces are changing this and, as it turns out, these are the same two forces that drive all singularities.

The first is exponential curves. Moore’s Law, Butter’s Law, etc. The same acceleration in computational horsepower that drove Siri’s breakthrough is powering machine vision’s evolution. The difference is that speech detection is a megabyte problem, while machine vision is a gigabyte problem. But, as our computers continue to get faster, this problem goes away completely.

The second is data—a critical mass of data. 
















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