How to catch a time traveller using technology in 2020

The year is 2075, time travelling tourism is in full swing and people from all over the future world are experiencing the past or as we like to call it, the present. Unfortunately, people in 2020 aren’t ready to welcome visitors from the future. Government paranoia kicks in and solutions are needed to utilize existing technology available today to try and catch anyone trying to breach our present time. How are we going to track this individual to ensure that they do not change the timeline we are currently on and potentially cause a butterfly effect that will end the world as we know it? (Duh duh duh!)

We look to the technology we already have available to us in order to find any individual trying to breach our time to stop their potential dastardly touristy ways! So just how could technology available to us today, enable us to stop pesky time travellers from running riot in our timeline?

Onboarding people from your time into one database.

In any country, there are ways of identifying a human, the first piece of identification is handed to your parents when you are born in the form of a birth certificate. But this doesn’t cater for your face, aging and a range of other factors. This is just a piece of paper linked to a number with your personal details, we need more than that to catch this slippery time travelling bandit.

We look towards the technology giants of the world. In this case, China. China are a mega force of information protection and all citizens have to use facial identification in order to sign up for internet services or to get a new mobile number. This means that anyone that wants to own a phone or sign up to use the internet, will have to register their face at some point, this allows the government to have a pretty hefty database of faces that is linked to their mobile devices. To make it even more stringent, people in China are banned from transferring mobile numbers to other people. Unless you are living off the grid, you will most likely be in this database. This standardization is the foundation for us to catch that pesky time traveller as it will enable us to identify every technology using individual and point out the individuals that aren’t in our database. But how will a database of faces allow us to do this with current technologies?

 Captain! We need to put in an Infrastructure!

Now that we have our nifty database with all these beautiful faces. We need to make sure we have our cities and towns setup with the correct infrastructure.

AI driven cameras

Any modern city is jacked up with cameras to monitor crime or suspicious behavior. These range in quality from your granny’s webcam to super cameras that are capable of identifying individual faces in crowds of tens of thousands of people. AI cameras are changing the game and allow us the ability to identify an individual by their walking style. China are again at the precipice of this technology as they strive to protect their country. They have developed an Artificial intelligence-driven 500 megapixel camera to pick out anyone in a massive crowd of people. These cameras utilize artificial intelligence to find and “learn” about human behavior on the street. This will enable us to track and understand human behavior. (Or the behavior of a sneaky time travelling tourist)

Cloud based computing, security and storage

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet. With a massive database of sensitive information, we need to protect that information, be able to scale up storage needs quickly based on volumes running and back that information up in the event of downtime or failure. GPU cloud computing is now a reality in modern technology which will allow our system to have deep learning capabilities which will support our AI enabled cameras to function optimally.

Networking infrastructure

We will require a high bandwidth, low latency network that can cater for AI and deep learning capabilities as the camera picks up and transfers massive amounts of data on multiple individuals to various points for learning and analysis.

Big data processing

Big data is the term used for extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions. Now that we have our kick ass cameras (Trademark pending), we need analytics on big data to run through all the faces and reference these faces against our face database to determine a number of things that may lead us to a suspicious time bender.

 Right captain! We are equipped for war!

There are a few more infrastructure constraints that we will have to consider but this is the core of the system we want to create. Now we can start to use this technology to do a multitude of things in order to catch out that pesky time traveller using our kick ass cameras that is linked to our sophisticated system. But in order for us to track people digitally, we will have to make their non-digital data, digital.

 Capturing a Digital footprint

A digital footprint is a trail of data you create while using the Internet. It includes the websites you visit, emails you send, and information you submit to online services. We all have a digital footprint. In order to align every face to a digital footprint, we want to take their tasks that are done non-digitally (like shopping, eating, driving) and make that digitally available for analysis. Now we can track movement of an individual going in and out of any store, bar, restaurant, barber or any business. This gives us a good view of human behavior that can be logged digitally for our smart analytics fundi’s and AI to dissect. We can track the routes an individual takes on a daily basis, when they waver and when they do something out of the ordinary which isn’t normally part of their daily, weekly or monthly routine. The amount of data you hold on an individual would be incredible.

But how do we use this to catch a time travelling bandit? We start by breaking this down into two categories of data. 

Categorizing the data

Do we know who this person is?

Our AI cameras are scouring the streets to find out who everyone is, what they do, where they go, how they walk and a multitude of other things. The first point of call is checking every person walking in sight of our kick ass cameras to determine if we know who this person is. If the answer is yes, we can track these people to see their daily patterns and routes. We can track if they appeared in the same location at an impossible time difference (JHB at 14:40 and Cape Town at 15:00) or has this person been spotted in two locations at different ages, the first where he looks 22 and the second where he looks 44. (Hard day at work ey?) What a nightmare to cater for twins or young fathers that look just like their kids right? (We will put that down to an anomaly for now that will be dealt with on an Adhock basis)

 We don’t know who this person is! Raise your weapons troops!

This person is not in our ultra-cool, super sophisticated face database system. So who are they? A ping to the monitoring agent occurs telling them of an unknown human in the area. Can we find information of this unknown individual at an Airport, train or bus station? Can we confirm their entry into our country, town or city? No! They are an unknown entity rolling freely on our streets Captain! Now, we can’t just jump on anyone that is unfamiliar to our face database, can we?

“Take a breath Captain! Remember the power of our system!”.

Now we can cross reference this new face against multiple private and public databases, we cross reference this individuals image against Google image search to identify if there is an article from the past with a picture that shows this persons face (Or a likeness). We take our database of baby photos and run this through ageing software to determine what match is closest to this person walking around our city. We have a match, Jason Smith, born in 2018 now suspected to be a 56 year old time traveller.

Data is the key Captain! Data is the key to protect our future.

Realistically, if time travel were possible in 2075, the future leaders and the present leaders would have stringent laws and only open this up to a small group of people and there would most likely be ways to go undetected. But we aren’t looking to be realistic, we are panicking and getting ready to fight these time travelling bandits!

We have come far in this journey to identify potential time tourists, we have setup a massive system with the capability to find pesky time benders which is key to our survival! But, we have unknowingly also setup a mega ecosystem to identify people in our city, track crime, track consumer trends from shopping to consumer habits. We have the ultimate watch tool to keep people honest. We can now implement rewards for good citizens so they benefit from being good! We are a super power for market trends and consumer behavior which will enable us to sell goods that people want on a person to person basis. But mostly, we are here to find time tourists and keep them from destroying the world as we know it.

Data is the key, acquiring and digitizing that data while applying AI to dissect masses of information is the way the world is going. The future is a mountain on the horizon, a mountain of data. He who holds that data and has the ability to dissect it, wins.