AI can eliminate human trafficking and help find missing children.
On one side we fear AI taking over the world but lets not forget that an ideal coin has two sides. And this is just a small part of the other side. Allow me to explain.
Imagine you have a 4 year old son, he goes missing, or maybe he lost his way or he was kidnapped by the bad guys. Next step, you don’t panic (ideally you would in 2017). You go to the police, your Google Photos app has plenty of your son’s photos with enough labeling done by Google to recognize his face, you share this particular mapping or you can say facial identity of your son with the police. In technical terms, it would be a mathematical matrix that help algorithms identify your son in any picture that is processed by the algorithm, you will understand this part later as we go ahead with this discussion. The next thing that the police do is update this facial identity in their database. Now let us assume that every citizen has a small size app being installed on their phones called Eliminate and is maintained by the cops, as a responsible citizen, every time a citizen sees a child begging on the street, or a child who has lost his/her way, the citizen takes a picture using the Eliminate app and the photo is sent to the police server along with the GPS coordinates of where the photo was clicked. Remember about the mathematical matrix that I mentioned about earlier? Now that same matrix is matched with the photo that was recently received, if it matches, voila, the cops have to just rush to that particular GPS coordinate. Or in a case where a photo of the child is already in the database as some citizen would have already spotted the child and it’s last location is being recorded along with the latest photo then the facial identity shared by the parents would instantly match and the police can start searching for the child in it’s last known location. We just helped you find your missing son.
But unfortunately, everything that you read is just my imagination as of today.
Now, let’s look at the bigger picture, you can see children and women begging on the streets, what if they aren’t there by choice, what if they are because they are forced to beg and nobody is there to help them unless an NGO rescues them, what if their family is looking for them but in this highly populated country the police isn’t able to find them, what if they have been moved to a place that they don’t belong to and thus there is miscommunication between respective police departments and they are not found by their families, what if? what if? what if? I could certainly go on with various questions that start with a probability. Imagine you could help them meet their families, imagine you could help that child begging on the street go back to his parents, imagine you could help that girl go back to her school, her family, imagine you could help that woman go back to her parents to whom she might be the only support and was tricked by some mafia promising her a well paying job in the city but was made to beg on the streets or could be any other illegal activity. Imagine you could change lives of all these people by just sparing some space on your phone, by clicking photos for a cause rather than clicking to upload on Instagram or Facebook entertaining and feeding your friends’ newsfeed with photos from your fantastic life and spare some bandwidth from your 1GB per day quota for a noble cause.
I hope this thought of mine is a seed that can germinate and grow into one of the most important uses of AI and helps eliminate human trafficking completely and help find missing children, the latter being a never ending issue that shouldn’t be misused.
