The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Thanks to deep learning, computer vision is now everywhere, working so well it can classify dynamic real-world street scenes with visual input equivalent to twenty-one full-HD screens, or about 2.5 billion pixels per second, accurately enough to weave an SUV through busy city streets. Your smartphone recognizes objects and scenes, while vision systems automatically blur the background and highlight people in your videoconference calls. Computer vision is the basis of Amazon’s checkout-less supermarkets and is present in Tesla’s cars, pushing them toward increasing autonomy. It helps the visually impaired navigate cities, guides robots in factories, and powers the facial recognition systems that increasingly monitor urban life from Baltimore to Beijing. It’s in the sensors and cameras on your Xbox, your connected doorbell, and the scanner at the airport gate. It helps fly drones, flags inappropriate content on Facebook, and diagnoses a growing list of medical conditions: at DeepMind, one system my team developed read eye scans as accurately as world-leading expert doctors.

Eyes Everywhere: Machine Vision’s Quiet Conquest