The tractors are in the fields. It’s been going strong for a few weeks now. In several places, we can see new shoots emerging. Everything is due this spring. The vegetable garden has been finished for around ten days. It was so hot earlier this week that rosemary and lavender, which are close relatives, are on fire and perfume the air.
I came back from a nursery with rolls of geotextile fabric; it makes it easier to maintain flower beds and crop windrows by slowing down weeds a little (also a bit like the idea that some people have of borders). Instead of turning right for the house, I continued a few hundred meters further and went to see what was left of Roxham Road. Although we come across RCMP cars patrolling the area every day, the little asphalt cul-de-sac is deserted, fenced off, and even if it looks abandoned, when you look a little, a ten cameras keep watch on both sides of the border. It’s awkward. Strange and fatal reality.
While we’re taking a social detour, here’s another: the subscription costs US$29.99 per month. Two guys in a restaurant. The friend shows me an application installed on his smartphone.
It is called PimEyes. You discreetly point your device’s camera at anyone, up to a distance of ten meters, and in a few fractions of a second, dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of photographs of a stranger appear. , with origin and provenance.
We can thus learn, through social networks and the web, the employment, the occupation, the leisure activities, the good moves, and the bad ones perhaps (certainly), of an individual that we have never seen before.
We are far from the “Separated at birth” section of The Press paper (once upon a time, they say distant things: my twin being the American soldier who killed bin Laden). In this illustrated case, we imagine a human finding similarities through his memory and wanting to make people smile. We rather smile at the effort, which has become obsolete in a few years. It was in prehistoric times, a dozen years ago.
In the case of PimEyes, we have gone a little further, we can guess. I don’t know if that’s worrying. It seems that we have arrived there. We are talking about it because it seems that we are also using this technology to “hunt” the bad guys from Hamas. And as in all things bad is good, says the proverb, it is better to be on the good side of providence (wink), especially when the International Criminal Court is involved. That being said, the twist sales of the software is oriented like this: it is to check the malicious use of its own image. It scores no worse in the realm of advertisers or certain people spins of politicians.
There is an artificial intelligence program called Lavender. A sort of cross-checking of information and identity recognition to track targets, among other things, and which could – we keep this in the conditional – have been used in the tracking of certain people, and have been involved in certain blunders. We curse the person who thought of the name of a flower to name it.
It doesn’t matter what tools or how. I imagine a field mouse, with its conscience, which is grabbed by the claws of an eagle and says to itself: this is life. Shit happens. But for the human project, it’s a bit harsh.
The values of the strongest are still the algorithm of our nature. Stemming from this inequality, we build, fuel and nourish hatred and rage for centuries to come.
Delicate subject if ever there was one. Again and again that of this terrible misfortune between the oppressors and the oppressed. Nelson Mandala, in A long way to freedomsaid something like: “…in their relationship, the oppressed and the oppressor are both dispossessed of their humanity…”.
I can identify anyone, for 30 dollars a month, within a 10 meter radius around me. Everything is fine. We are going forward. The science is fabulous, but there is nothing settled on the moral front, as usual.
I had one hand buried up to my wrist, planting the eggplants and potatoes. An abnormally hot earth. I was good. I continued the strange gesture of holding one hand down for several seconds, hoping to feel something there. But no. Then a few glances around, hoping that no one saw me, anonymous, through a gentle wind that smelled of flowers. Lavender is said to have anxiolytic properties. Once everything is better, we’ll put it everywhere, OK?