Spies in the sky: how worried should we be about the arrival of AI-enabled smart lamp-posts?
The new breed of camera-equipped streetlights has the potential to fight crime and track down missing persons. Or will it just take Britain one step
The new breed of camera-equipped streetlights has the potential to fight crime and track down missing persons. Or will it just take Britain one step closer to a surveillance state? How would you feel if your neighbourhood lamp-posts could recognise your number plate, and also your face? Maybe you wouldnāt mind, given how long weāve had automatic number plate recognition and CCTV.
What about if that lamp-post could power itself through its own solar panels, and perhaps find another use for any extra power generated ā that would be good, right? This is what Conflow Power Group (CPG) in Warwickshire claims for its iLamps, the first of their kind in the UK. What if lamp-posts had the potential to incorporate new AI capability ā gait analysis, suspicious behaviours ā that you havenāt even heard of?
This is what the organisation Big Brother Watch worries about. And what if the home secretary had explicitly said she believed in a āpanopticon stateā that is, a state that could watch you at all times (as Shabana Mahmood already has) ā and what if she still had a job when the lamp-post eyes got their updates?
Or what if the next home secretary was even keener on hyper-surveillance (hard to imagine), and the street apparatus was already in place? What about all the data this would harvest ā who would own it? Continue reading...
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