The no blinking eye
from Behind the digital curtain Hosted by Sergio Sanchez
Iran, 2023. A woman is driving her car. Her headscarf slips, just for a second, while she's loading grocery bags into the back seat. There's no police officer nearby. No patrol car. But within seconds, a text message hits her phone. "Your vehicle has been placed under systematic confiscation for fifteen days, for violation of mandatory hijab laws." No human being saw her with their own eyes. No person wrote that message. A camera photographed her, a facial recognition algorithm identified her, another system pulled her phone number, and within seconds, with zero human review, her car was gone. Between April and June of 2023, the Iranian government sent almost one million of these automated text messages to women. One hundred thirty three thousand of those messages ordered a full vehicle immobilization. They confiscated two thousand cars. And every single part of that, start to finish, was carried out by a machine that never gets tired, never blinks, and never needs to file for overtime. Welcome back to "Behind the Digital Curtain." I'm Dr. Qubit, and today we're not talking about the algorithm that decides what you see. We're talking about something even more uncomfortable. The eye that decides it's watching you, all of you, all the time, without ever blinking. Because here's the brutal difference between a human cop and an AI powered camera. The human cop gets tired, gets distracted, goes and grabs a burger, works an eight hour shift and then goes home to watch TV. The camera doesn't. The camera never goes home. The camera IS the home.
Embed this episode
No transcript yet.