AI For An Eye -- How Computer Vision Is Learning To 'See'

Creating eyes is not the same as creating vision. Hand in hand with the general thrust to push more Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our lives is the drive to give computers the ability to'see' what's happening in the world around them. It's important to realize that, for the foreseeable future, those inverted commas around the word'see' will always be there. We can give computers enough intelligence to start categorizing objects scanned in the world around them, but until we start developing semi-organic human-machine cyborgs, technology's ability to'see' will only ever be an abstracted extension of the core processor in the computer itself. "Just like to hear is not the same as to listen, to take pictures is not the same as to see," wrote computer scientist and director of Stanford Vision Lab Fei-Fei Lim in reaction to the current developments in this space at the intersection point between human sight and the growing field of computer vision.