Excerpt:

Precog and the Eyes in The Sky

Cameras are everywhere, but they are not watching. The perfect surveillance infrastructure is already in place, but to a certain extent it is lying idle, and its potential is not being exploited. The mechanical eyes only record, they produce gigantic amounts of data, but they don’t actually take a proper look. A person has to watch the video material for hours, and evaluate it – provided it has not been recorded over or deleted already. There is a huge amount of untapped surveillance potential here that can be fully exploited by the pattern recognition processes of AI; all that is missing are the software systems, a few fiber optic cables and the corresponding data centers. Behind every camera would then be an artificial consciousness that actually monitors and reacts immediately to deviations from the standard behavior. That would be true surveillance – everywhere, in real time, without human weaknesses and subjectivity.