As hundreds of millions of Chinese begin traveling for the Lunar New Year holiday, police are showing off a new addition to their crowd-surveillance toolbox: mobile facial-recognition units mounted on eyeglasses …
The eyeglass-mounted camera is equipped with facial-recognition technology capable of “highly effective screening” of crowds for fugitives traveling under false pretenses …
The devices have already helped railway police at Zhengzhou’s East Railway Station capture seven people wanted in connection with major criminal cases, and 26 others who were traveling using other people’s identities…
It would not surprise me if one day this was paired with AI, and trained to spot almost-imperceptible body-language tells, that betray things from espionage, to terrorist surveillance activity, to criminality, to merely the type of individualist mentality that states hate. If people can be trained for body language analysis, AI can probably do it ten times better. It would be interesting if China already has it, and it also flags non-Asians at airports, and triggers enough attention to figure out who they are and why they are in the nation, for security purposes.
If the Chinese have it, we probably have it, we just aren’t rolling it out as publicly. And everything which is elite level spookdom today will eventually be democratized, and available to the masses. So watch for this to be the norm in twenty years.
It will make for interesting times. People will be able to create lists of people they see around them, and flag any with unusual online profiles, specific traits like single relationship status for singles looking for dates, or even similar tastes and hobbies. If you try to stay off the matrix, and don’t have a social media profile, you may get flagged as unusual, and that will get you a whole other file with the government, and make any paranoid (or aware) citizens suspect you are a spook yourself (Of course all spooks will actually have perfect plain vanilla profiles).
More and more, the only answer I see is to slip off the grid and head into wide open natural areas, without technology or large numbers of people.
Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because it is a brave new world
>> If the Chinese have it, we probably have it, we just aren’t rolling it out as publicly
I heard an interesting talk about chinese tech… as combined with state control… they share better than western countries do.
That means “private” innovation is (forcibly) shared with the government, and inter-state secrets (stolen IP) are shared by the government back to “private” tech. It’s “fascist” in the “Nation First” sense, and sounds pretty effective to my ears.
I think much of the rumors that the west is BEHIND in tech (as well as infrastructure) are likely true… particularly as private companies like Google increasingly waste their time with their diversity crusades… and non-western countries like China operate without those handicaps.
We shall see.
The cashless society predicted decades ago has arrived in Chinese cities. About 90% of the population of certain major metropolitan areas conduct all their transactions with their WeChat wallet, which is directly linked to their bank cards. WeChat, in addition to being the primary form of communication for most people (it’s based on WhatsApp but then morphed into its own thing) is also being piloted as an acceptable form of ID. The same way people link their bank cards to it, they can link their state ID to it, and present their phone in lieu of their ID card.
That the mark of the beast will be on the hand and head has me rethinking smart phones. What are the two body parts they make contact with?
Oh Shit.
”More and more, the only answer I see is to slip off the grid and head into wide open natural areas, without technology or large numbers of people.”
The best way to counter this completely is for us to run out energy like oil. The faster it is burnt out the less energy to create this technology.
And…between Smart Dust and AI, being that off-grid gets you a file all your own. Whee.
No doubt, but it makes you troublesome to approach.