> I stopped doing CV research because I saw the impact my work was having. I loved the work but the military applications and privacy concerns eventually became impossible to ignore.
But maybe a better question is: “What are we going to do with these detectors now that we have them?” A lot of the people doing this research are at Google and Facebook.I guess at least we know the technology is in good hands and definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal infor-mation and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactly what it will be used for?? Oh. Well the other people heavily funding vision research are the military and they’ve never done anything horrible like killing lots of people with new technology oh wait..... [1] I have a lot of hope that most of the people using com-puter vision are just doing happy, good stuff with it, like counting the number of zebras in a national park, or tracking their cat as it wanders around their house. But computer vision is already being put to questionable use and as researchers we have a responsibility to at least consider the harm our work might be doing and think of ways to mitigate it. We owe the world that much.In closing, do not @ me. (Because I finally quit Twitter).
[1] The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google.
Very few grad students have a chance of showing their first result on TED and getting 19k citations. Consequently, they usually can't get away with criticizing their sponsors and peers' ethics post-factum, regardless of what they think of them.
One of his other comment on reddit related to stopping CV research:
"pjreddie 30 points·2 months ago· edited 2 months ago
I've never been in a car that was using my tech to avoid killing people but I have had a 3 star general rave about how my work was being deployed in war zones and how army research groups love my software.
Edit: to say that i'm not arguing against CV research as a whole, i'm just saying i don't want to do it anymore because of the impact i saw my work having"
> I stopped doing CV research because I saw the impact my work was having. I loved the work but the military applications and privacy concerns eventually became impossible to ignore.