AI can figure out a place's politics by analyzing cars on Google Street View

Google Street View images are filled with cars. That is a simple and pedestrian truth, and one which artificial intelligence researchers have taken advantage of to do something surprising. By analyzing car type, they were able to make predictions about the demographic information of the people in the cities they studied. For example, the team, largely from Stanford University, analyzed whether they saw more pickups trucks or sedans in a given city. With a greater number of pickup trucks, the urban area had an 82 percent chance of voting Republican, and with more sedans, there was an 88 percent chance it voted Democrat. Artificial intelligence systems shine when crunching staggeringly large amounts of data and then making predictions about what they see in it.