For years we’ve all worried automation will eventually lead us all to the unemployment line, but we might have even bigger concerns than whether or not the machines will take our jobs. The robots are also coming for our hobbies! And how can any of us expect to compete with a machine whose sole function is to find Waldo?
“There’s Waldo” (which we came across at Laughing Squid) is designed to seek out the famous red-striped character of the Where’s Waldo? books. “Controlled by a Raspberry Pi using the PYARM Python library for the UARM Metal,” its arm scans a page full of hundreds of faces using an OpenCV. Those faces then get sent to the Google Auto ML Vision service, where it compares them “against the trained Waldo model.” If it finds a match of at least 95%, the robot arm then physically points to Waldo, and “if there are multiple Waldos in a photo it will point to each one.”
They say the fastest There’s Waldo has ever found that tricky scamp is 4.45 seconds, so you know what that means: they took our hobbies!
But don’t despair just yet, not because we won’t all be replaced by machines eventually, but because these singularly focus robots won’t enjoy the job. Just wait until this one finds out his entire existence is defined by one meaningless task. We know exactly how he’ll feel.
Maybe our new hobby can be laughing at all the meaningless tasks we gave the robots to do.
Are you worried about the robots even taking over our insignificant tasks? Tell us why in the comments below.
Featured Image: redpepper