Computer Vision News - December 2016

Paragios: Everything is a question of progress. We are getting closer and closer. We now have more clues and we are trying to adapt educational and computer vision systems according to the brain. As I said, it’s a very complex engine and a highly efficient device . I can give you a very simple example. My brother and I went to the same school and we had the same instructors, but we don’t have the same way of thinking. We don’t have the same capacity. CVN: ...which is actually good so that we can be a bit different from one another. Otherwise we would be 7 billion robots in the world. Paragios: It might happen. CVN: When will there be more robots than people? Paragios: Robots will become something that we use in our daily lives in 10 to 15 years from now. What scares me is what will be the position of humans in the world. It’s great to build a virtual reality mask which gives you the impression that you are on a sunny beach if you cannot afford it, but it’s better if you can be on a real sunny beach. Technology has a huge impact on society. That might cause huge problems in the future. We need to think about how we integrate our technology progress with the way of life of humans. CVN: What are the dangers if we don’t pay attention now? Paragios: There is already a huge gap between the different parts of society. Either you are privileged or not. I think technology is actually going to increase this gap. There are people that are going to be able to afford these kinds of tools. Then there are people whose jobs will go away. You have to think about how society is impacted. CVN: There is already a lot of wealth, but it is completely unevenly distributed. Paragios: Exactly - I think that is what’s going to happen. It’s already the case, unfortunately. The way that society is progressing, it will be even stronger in the future. Robots and technology should be there to improve the lives of all humans, rather than focus only on the few people who can afford that. They should focus on the whole society and be beneficial to the majority of people living on earth. CVN: Do you see your students’ mentality evolving and giving less importance to the human side and more importance to the machine side? Paragios: Our students in the past wanted to build a career with international companies and explore the possibilities. Now their dream from the very beginning is to make big money as part of a startup, by simply applying some very stupid machine learning tool to make big money. The positions of humans in the future is something that we’re not paying a lot of attention to. We are excited about technology because we are scientists, which is good. We should go back and think about ethics and try to have a better understanding about how this technology affects our lives . 6 Computer Vision News Guest Guest “ Robots and technology should improve the lives of all humans, rather than focus only on the few people who can afford that”