Susan ordered some Swedish ginger snaps from the World Market, and they arrived yesterday. She opened the box under the watchful eyes of Kedi and Maia. After she had retrieved her cannister of cookies, the cats began exploring the box. They were entertained for a good while – exploring the packing materials in the box and popping the bubble wrap with their needle-like kitten claws. I took this picture with my new iPhone 13.
Today, I opened the picture app on the phone, and I looked at this picture. I was surprised to see what seemed like a little pawprint icon on Kedi’s image. Below the picture was an annotated pawprint icon that said “Look Up – Cat.” The damn phone’s pattern recognition algorithms identified Kedi as a cat! I clicked on the “Look Up – Cat,” link, and up popped “Siri Knowledge” with entries for Tortiseshell and Domestic short-haired cat. So, the picture app not only identified Kedi as a cat but as a short-haired tortie!
When I was a CS student back in 1969, taking a class in Artificial Intelligence, I would have guessed that pattern recognition would advance someday to enable robots to “see” and for military applications such as analyzing satellite imagery of conflict zones in order to identify troops and war machines. I never would have guessed that it would be used to identify cats and dogs and the like.
People as old I have lived through a very interesting and dramatic technological revolution. Our grandchildren will be challenged to imagine that their world wasn’t always so.