AI Can Work Out A Neighborhood's Political Beliefs Using Google Street View

Artificial intelligence (AI) can obtain unbelievably accurate insights into a neighborhood's inhabitants – from their income and level of education to their ethnic background and political beliefs – just by looking at images from Google Street View. If, for example, you wanted to see whether an area voted Republican or Democrat, the AI algorithm would be able to correctly tell you with over 80 percent accuracy, namely based on the types of vehicles riding on the road. The deep-learning algorithm was developed by a team of computer scientists based at Stanford University. Their study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Throughout this process, it used an object recognition algorithm to clock tens of millions of houses, landscape features like shrubberies, and – most importantly – vehicles.