I Ran Object Detection on My Laptop, and Saw Everything Is Possible

A few weeks ago I installed a small local AI model on my laptop. It watches a live camera feed and works out what is happening in it. I turned the webcam on in the dark. In near total darkness it recognised me and the objects in the room.

Detection on a live feed in near total darkness, on my laptop.

That such things exist, I have known for a long time. Something else opened my eyes. The accessibility. I installed it in one prompt. Free. It runs entirely on my machine and sends data nowhere. And the quality. This is not a tool locked in a laboratory with a budget. It is available to anyone, right now, at this quality.

Anyone today can build an intelligent camera system and automatically analyse whatever they need on a live feed. They can program it and fine tune it themselves, with the help of AI.

That is the idea. Not that AI can do remarkable things. We know that. But that the capability is in anyone’s hands. Free, local, in one prompt.

That the ability to give AI not only eyes and ears, but also arms, legs and wings, is within anyone’s reach. In other words, that anyone who truly wants to can put capabilities like this intelligent AI vision into their existing hardware, teach a machine to move on its own and assess its surroundings. The result could be a drone that sprays a field against pests, or a security system for your own home.

More and more I realise that everything is already possible today. And if I do not know how to do something, it only means that I do not yet see far enough to see it.

Text Was Only the First Layer

Anyone who thinks AI is only about generating text or images should finally wake up. Everything that is digital, or can be digitised, is automatable and will be automated. Whether today, tomorrow, in a year or in two. It is decided.

The barrier to automation is not whether the task is done on a computer. It is whether the thing that performs the task has a computer inside it. If it does, AI will be able to control it.

When someone today connects AI to an analytics tool, it feels to them like the summit. It is not. It is the lowest layer. It is software, and software is text.

Above it sits an agent, which does not wait for an instruction at every step. It is given a goal and chooses the steps itself. And above that, the machine. A camera, a drone, a robotic arm. Physical hardware running on ones and zeros is only another layer of the same thing.

I will not pretend that every layer is equally easy. It is not. The further from text, the harder it gets: hardware, safety, regulation, physical risk. But at the same time it becomes more and more accessible by the day. What two years ago required a team and a budget, I did in five minutes, in one prompt, on a laptop.

If you decide to automate some process, it does not matter whether it is automating your newsletter or growing cucumbers. You can. You only need to choose the process, tell the right AI tool about it, and it will guide you.