Beware The Autons: "Big Brother" Store Mannequins

Fresh off my post about the Human Rights Watch white paper "Ban Killer Robots," we have a story about store mannequins who apparently can "watch" you and record all your visual information as you shop.

Italian company Almax have created mannequins -- dubbed the playful pun EyeSee -- that "feeds data into facial-recognition software like that used by police. It logs the age, gender, and race of passers-by.” A camera planted in one eye of the EyeSee records all the necessary information, and unlike overhead cams, Almax says their creations are more effective because "it stands at eye level and invites customer attention."

Almax started selling these mannequins last December, and has since placed them in a number of shopping outlets in the U.S. and Europe.

Reading this story, I cannot help but don my nerd hat and be reminded of the deadly Autons from "Doctor Who" -- disguised as store mannequins, they were manufactured by aliens under the human company "Auto Plastics."

Of course, there couldn't possibly be any sinister applications of these dummies here that I could think of -- in this Bloomberg article it's stressed that the EyeSees are being used purely to gather marketing data and assist the store in targeting purchases to the appropriate demographics. Just like Facebook and everything else.

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Human Rights Watch: "Ban Killer Robots"

"As this report shows, robots with complete autonomy would be incapable of meeting international humanitarian law standards. The rules of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity are especially important tools for protecting civilians from the effects of war, and fully autonomous weapons would not be able to abide by those rules."
--"Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots"

Doing their part to slow down the coming Robopocalypse, the group Human Rights Watch has issued an unprecedented 50-page document asking governments around the world to "pre-emptively ban fully autonomous weapons because of the danger they pose to civilians in armed conflict."


Called "Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots," the document (which can be downloaded in full here) pretty much solidifies many decades-worth of trepidation over our artificially-created "friends" -- a sentiment that, for the most part, has only gotten "aired" through the veil of sci-fi novels and movies. Let's face it -- a serious researcher or organization writing a paper called "The Case Against Killer Robots" even a few years ago would have been laughed at as a kook.

But with the rise of drones, this has all changed. Maybe it's because the triangular-shaped drones don't quite have the personality of Rosie from "The Jetsons" or Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Though a SNL animated skit that just aired this weekend envisions a way to market drones as more "cool":

Will the dystopian world envisioned by robotics engineer Daniel H. Wilson in his heavily-promoted 2011 novel "Robopocalypse" -- featuring lead villain "Archos" (compare to "Archon") come to pass? Of course, Human Rights Watch in their study refers to robots programmed to kill -- not ones who can actually think on their own. But not to worry, says Futurologist/Candidate For Immortality Ray Kurzweil:

"The reason that brain reverse engineering has not contributed much to artificial intelligence is that up until recently we didn’t have the right tools. If I gave you a computer and a few magnetic sensors and asked you to reverse-engineer it, you might figure out that there’s a magnetic device spinning when a file is saved, but you’d never get at the instruction set. Once you reverse-engineer the computer fully, however, you can express its principles of operation in just a few dozen pages.

"Now there are new tools that let us see the interneuronal connections and their signaling, in vivo, and in real-time. We’re just now getting these tools and there’s very rapid application of the tools to obtain the data."

However, though he sees a human-like AI to be an increasingly possible happening, he believes that is more likely that we will merge with the robot:

"But the most salient scenario is that we’ll gradually merge with our technology. We’ll use nanobots to kill pathogens, then to kill cancer cells, and then they’ll go into our brain and do benign things there like augment our memory, and very gradually they’ll get more and more sophisticated. There’s no single great leap, but there is ultimately a great leap comprised of many small steps.

"In The Singularity Is Near, I describe the radically different world of 2040, and how we’ll get there one benign change at a time. The Singularity will be gradual, smooth. "Really, this is about augmenting our biological thinking with nonbiological thinking...we'll get to the point where bio thinking is relatively insignificant...it’ll take time before we realize how much more powerful nonbiological thinking will ultimately be."

Of course, there's no way that such technology would ever be used by an unscrupulous government in such a way as to override one's basic humanity.

The funny thing here -- if there's indeed anything funny about all this -- is that we are truly and actively on the road to such situations, scientists staring down the barrel of the possible "assimilation" of humanity or "overthrow" by artificial intelligence with all the enthusiasm and forethought of Herbert West in "Re-Animator."

By the way, in case you're interested: "Robopocalypse" is set for a big-budget movie adaptation in 2014, directed by Steven Spielberg, who seems to really be hip on these trends.

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Predictions In The Era Of Timewave Zero

I had thought about writing a follow-up to the "Predictions About The Comic Book Industry I Made 5 Years Ago" piece, but then I figured it was very tactless to just make a stark list like that and then say, "well I'm done here, have a nice day." Instead, here are some conversation-starters.

Contemplate how much technology has changed from 100 A.D. to 1800. Do the same for 1800 to 1900. Then contemplate how much it's changed from 1900 to 1930. Now contemplate how much it's changed from 1930 to 1950. Then 1950 to 1970. 1970 to 1980. 1980 to 1985. 1985 to 1989. 1989 to 1992. Now compare how much technology has changed from 2010 to 2012.


Now calculate how much it will further change in five more years. If you honestly believe that regardless of these rolling shifts in our technological paradigm, comics will still be more or less the same -- or that any of the everyday actions and notions and goals and methodologies or systems of exchange will remain in an arrangement that you find familiar -- then you are simply wrong.

(Look up: Singularity, Timewave Zero)

I can really just stop here. Mini-forecasts about things like which character is going to do what, or whether comics will stay vertical vs. horizontal in format, page counts, digital interfaces, corporate takeover, blah blah blah. These are tiny tiny things, relative trivia. You need to think bigger than that.

I was also going to say a bunch of idealistic stuff, but why even bother? I'm just going to ride the wave; if I see you there, I'll say hello.

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