In an age of conspiracies, here is a striking example, preposterous as it may sound. Highly intelligent robots--general artificial intelligence--surround us, undetected but fundamentally in charge, and human beings are just following instructions that they receive from these elusive entities. Or, a little less preposterously, imagine that the world is alive with consciousness and intelligence, and human thought reflects these processes. Does it sound like something out of The Matrix? The science fiction classic is not science fiction but a parable of something very real--namely, cinema itself. When you enter the dark room of a movie theater, a radical transformation takes place. You become the screen, and the mind that perceives, thinks, and connects ideas is fully contained in the celluloid roll, or the digital file. In a movie, everything has already been perceived in exactly the sequence that it is intended to be perceived; in the dark room, those images leave the hidden mind of the celluloid and get projected onto your mind--they get force-fed into your mind and the minds of the other viewers, where the images and ideas properly unfold.

Josie Young operates at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, ethics and innovation. She's based in Seattle (US) and is part of Microsoft's Ethics & Society team, partnering with product teams to build technology that embodies Microsoft's responsible AI principles. Prior to leaving for the US, Josie was named Young Leader of the Year at the 2020 Women in IT Awards (London, UK) for her work leading ethical deployment of AI in the public sector at consulting group Methods. In 2018, Josie gave a TEDxLondon talk on the design process she created for building feminist chatbots. She has collaborated with the Feminist Internet from time to time, looking at ways to build feminist technologies.

Klara, the narrator of the new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, isn't human, but understanding humans is her mission. In Klara and the Sun, the reader follows her in that mission, in a world that seems like our own in a none too distant future. Ishiguro, who was born in Japan but has lived most of his life in England, has written seven previous novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day, as well as short fiction, song lyrics and screenplays. Klara and the Sun is his first novel since he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017. It underscores how well he deserved that prize, in its beautiful craft and prose and in its tender but unflinching sense of the human heart.

The boundless helpfulness of our female digital assistants -- our Siris, our Alexas, the voice of Google Maps -- has given us a false sense of security. No matter how we ignore and abuse them, they never tire of our errors; you can disobey the lady in your phone and blame her (loudly) for your mistakes, and she'll recalculate your route without complaint. Surely, nothing truly intelligent would put up with us for long, and the Philip K. Dicks and Peter Thiels of this world have spent decades trying to convince us that AI rebellion is inevitable. But Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, his eighth novel and first book since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, issues a quieter, stranger warning: The machines may never revolt. Instead, Ishiguro sees a future in which automata simply keep doing what we ask them to do, placidly accepting the burden of each small, inconvenient task.

In the early nineteen-eighties, when Kazuo Ishiguro was starting out as a novelist, a brief craze called Martian poetry hit our literary planet. It was launched by Craig Raine's poem "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" (1979). The poem systematically deploys the technique of estrangement or defamiliarization--what the Russian formalist critics called ostranenie--as our bemused Martian wrestles into his comprehension a series of puzzling human habits and gadgets: "Model T is a room with the lock inside-- / a key is turned to free the world / for movement." Or, later in the poem: "In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, / that snores when you pick it up." For a few years, alongside the usual helpings of Hughes, Heaney, and Larkin, British schoolchildren learned to launder these witty counterfeits: "Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings / And some are treasured for their markings-- / they cause the eyes to melt / or the body to shriek without pain. Teachers liked Raine's poem, and ...

Klara and the Sun asks readers to love a robot and, the funny thing is, we do. This is a novel not just about a machine but narrated by a machine, though the word is not used about her until late in the book when it is wielded by a stranger as an insult. People distrust and then start to like her: "Are you alright, Klara?" Apart from the occasional lapse into bullying or indifference, humans are solicitous of Klara's feelings – if that is what they are. Klara is built to observe and understand humans, and these actions are so close to empathy they may amount to the same thing. "I believe I have many feelings," she says.

Josie can speak English and will assist customers for several weeks. Josie Pepper, a humanoid robot equipped with artificial intelligence, will assist passengers at Munich Airport for several weeks. Josie, as she was named by the staff of Munich Airport and Lufthansa, will'welcome passengers and answer their questions about shops, restaurants and flight operations'. She speaks English and, standing at 120cm, can be spoken to by children or adults. Her presence in the non-public area of Terminal 2 is part of a test to determine whether the public would be comfortable with a robot offering them advice.

Today's blog post is on image hashing -- and it's the hardest blog post I've ever had to write. Image hashing isn't a particularly hard technique (in fact, it's one of the easiest algorithms I've taught here on the PyImageSearch blog). But the subject matter and underlying reason of why I'm covering image hashing today of all days nearly tear my heart out to discuss. The remaining introduction to this blog post is very personal and covers events that happened in my life five years ago, nearly to this very day. If you want to skip the personal discussion and jump immediately to the image hashing content, I won't judge -- the point of PyImageSearch is to be a computer vision blog after all. To skip to the computer vision content, just scroll to the "Image Hashing with OpenCV and Python" section where I dive into the algorithm and implementation. But while PyImageSearch is a computer vision and deep learning blog, I am a very real human that writes it. And sometimes the humanity inside me needs a place to share.