Ask HN: Is the machine seen in "Person of Interest", within grasp of making?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5582996

by Systemic33 • 13 years ago

1 3 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Person of Interest is a TV show about a machine that absorbs all information from every type of source (CCTV, Internet, TV, Radio, Phones, etc) and from this data, finds plots to kill people, or commit terror, etc. See the Wikipedia for the show here [1], and the trailer here [2].

What I'm wondering, is if we have reached a point where this is technically possible and maybe feasible.

What kind of technology would you think is necessary, existing and non-existing, to build a machine of this type.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCM14jNOYcQ

mouseroot• 13 years ago

the main flaw in that show is that it assumes that the machine has access to all these devices at any point when the truth is most of those devices are on a closed circuit or not even on the global internet but instead a local intranet the same is true for shoes like NCIS where they can just pull up any video feed at any point in time is just too unrealistic, however in the near future more and more cameras and CCTV's will be put on the internet where ANYONE can gain access to them, so while its not impossible its just very unlikely (not to mention that most of the devices that are on the net and accessible are of such low quality and streaming so that if something did happen in front of them you would need a recording and a court order to obtain such data) so Possible? maybe Feasable? not really imagine sucha machine getting hacked (even in the show they say thats not possible but everything can be hacked)

Systemic33• 13 years ago

I see your point about substantially missing data sources, but i was more thinking in terms of building a machine that is capable of all this processing and building of a database that can see the patterns that indicate a harmful intention; the software part so to speak.

hardwaresofton• 13 years ago

I think it's pretty common knowledge that the Government is investing a lot of money into being able to do just that -- that should be enough.

I would think that doing something like this is less about the technology available, but thinking up an intelligent way of doing it. If you imagine a world where you have all the data at your finger tips: let's say you obtained every camera's footage, every phone's phonecalls,etc for a mile radius for a month before,during and after some disaster. Shouldn't be too hard to imagine.

The problem is: what are you looking for? How do each of the moments that you detect link to each other? What patterns are indicative of someone who is plotting something?

Those are very difficult questions, and that's what makes the problem difficult. Tackling a problem like that requires knowledge of voice recognition, NLP (Natural Language Processing), ML (Machine Learning -- If you don't want to put in every possible scenario yourself), and much much more. The rate of data creation (and thus data processing) would also be very high.

How to do this well is the difficult part.

If you still don't believe me: boil it down to just one source. Phones. Lets say you had a wiretap on every home in which a hitman was hired to (and succeeded in)killing a neighbor. It might be a good thing to run a simple text search on the word "kill", or "hit", and you'll catch the low hanging fruit (by this, I mean the people who are bad at hiring hitmen/commit crime), but it becomes more complex when you get more serious about catching people who aren't stupid enough to say exactly what they want to do, then you have to find patterns, assuming they are there.

Ask HN: Is the machine seen in "Person of Interest", within grasp of making?

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