“We but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.” - Macbeth
Closed circuit television (CCTV) has changed very little since its introduction in the 1960s – essentially passive systems that merely display whatever they’re aimed at. In fact, without a human at the other end, there was no real surveillance taking place.
That was always the flaw in George Orwell’s 1984 – it would take as many people to surveil as there are people to surveil. And the watchers would have to try to remain alert throughout the day as they watched people eat breakfast, brush their teeth, and wash their dishes. Then the ability to digitally store vast amounts of surveillance made the task of surveillance easier. But now that AI is here, it is proving to be the real game-changer. The new generation of CCTV security cameras are capable of autonomous surveillance and action. “Watched by AI guards,” boasts ArcadianAI, whose Ranger line of products operates on its own, proactively identifying what it sees as threats and subsequently alerting authorities. It’s largely thanks to recent “advances” in computer vision and vision language models, which speak of “objects,” a fiendishly clever euphemism for anything – bodies, body parts, events, contexts, movements, behaviors, colors, dimensions, distances, sounds, textures. In effect, anything that can be recognized and classified as its own distinct kind of pattern. Thus updated surveillance video now “thinks” about what it’s seeing. Case in point: An orchestral piece powered by AI video. It’s a bit of PR for Axis Communications to make the point that its CCTV systems can detect whatever its clients seek to find and, with that information, do previously unimaginable things. This moment represents a threshold of sorts: defining, recognizing, and interpreting patterns without limit. Using such technology for musical composition is innocuous enough, but what about scanning a scene for skin color, hair style, facial features, gait, ethnicity, gender, age… or failing to applaud… or using a secret handshake? Amid all the hype about AI’s possibilities, it’s important to step back and remember that there is nothing inherently moral about creativity – not in medicine, physics, management, or any human endeavor. Yet, here we are rushing headlong into a frenzied new era of possibility with no guardrails or ethical standards in sight. Comments are closed.
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