An AI Accurately Guessed Race and Voting Patterns by Counting Cars on Google Street View

A robust, timely census is vital to democracy. Most crucially, they influence how resources and political power are doled out: Cities use census data to set budgets and the Constitution mandates a national census to apportion congressional seats. But taking a census is both expensive and slow--the annual American Community Survey (ACS) represents data collected over a five-year period, creating one hell of a lag. A team of Stanford AI researchers believe we can use computer vision to speed up the process, a radical approach to a centuries-old practice. In a new paper, the researchers described how they fast-tracked census data collection by using object recognition on 50 million Google Street View images from 200 cities.