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I.K.bot

Ivan Kirigin's views on Robotics & Culture: future. perfect. progress.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Cameras everywhere, please

World Tribune.com -- Spy cameras to track spies in Korea's mine-infested DMZ::

I love these stories about the exploding spread of surveillance cameras in all sorts of hairy places. They are cheap, and will be multiplied in value in the short term as computer automatically track events, so a human operator can look at many feeds. Eventually the ratio won't be 3-1 cameras to operators, but 30-1 and then 3000-1, with many decisions made automatically.

With military situations like this, there will be a human in the loop for some time. For less deadly matters, like traffic violations, the humans are already gone and won't be coming back.

People concerned about privacy should pay attention to the facts that this is all in the public domain and that people (not computers) are malicious.