“Someone’s Watching You” and today no one’s quite sure who.
Orwell said it was Big Brother.
Yet he was clearly personalized and marked out…thus, one knew ‘who was watching you.’
Partitioning the proletariat in collective stations, a personal Big Brother makes a distinct and itemized touch.
[Clip: (mumbling on the phone)]
And your phone call too may be ‘monitored’…for training and quality purposes.
It was Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” that foreshadowed a ‘depersonalized Big Brother’ which is all the more frightening.
You just didn’t know who was behind those surveilling eyes.
[Clip: (eerie music)]
Fast forward and you’re on covert camera.
[Clip: “Meet ‘EyeSee,’ the latest high tech weapon in the retail wars featured at the recent Association For Retail Environment Showcase. She uses facial recognition technology to gather information on its customers. So here’s how the “I See” Mannequin works. Let’s say a customer walks through the store and sees a dress that he or she likes. As the customer is observing the dress the Mannequin is observing the customer making note of everything from their age range, their gender, even their race.”]
Now she’s growing ears and can hear everything you say.
It’s a Peeping Tom world all the way from Tel Aviv. [Clip:]
[”In the suburbs of Israel’s financial centre Tel Aviv a team of engineers is at the forefront of a technological revolution.” “We have invented a simple way of transforming a photo into text.” “They’re teaching machines to read faces.” “The face recognition model can measure the distance between your eyes, the width of your lips, the distance from your lips to your nose, etc. At the end of that process we are left with a simple text, which is the basis of our recognition.” “The software has the power to identify one face from millions in under one second.”]
Here’s the future scene, not long coming.
You’re looking at firearms at a gun shop.
Dressed as a hunter, a mannequin with eyes and ears holds a rifle.
While you’re admiring that rifle, unbeknownst to you, the mannequin takes a picture of your face and transforms it into a permanently-stored text ID.
You want that rifle, a clerk gets it, you buy it.
A week goes by, and a digital camera picks up your face at a rally.
Unbeknownst to you, a confederate flag is waving in the background, and all of it posted on social media.
AI in the Cloud cross references your facial text ID at the rally and the gun shop and sets off a police warning across the country.
When you return home, three cops are waiting for you outside.
It’s a Future Surveillance World and only the ѕуηαgσgυє knows for sure.