[lioeters]

Good stuff, that was entertaining and educational. I see, hearing about the many potential problems with such a big surveillance network puts things in perspective. It helped to see through the marketing speak in the mass media, to get a sense of the real-life challenges and current state of technology.

Lots of relevant points, like the (un)reliability of the cameras; difficulty of integrating into a single system and keeping the servers running; processing and storing the data; on-going energy and maintenance costs; dealing with false positives; and (un)reliability of the humans running the whole thing.

So I suppose "Skynet" has a few more decades to be even close to covering the whole country of China. And machine learning is still far from achieving "intelligence" in any meaningful sense of the term.

I can't help but think, though, that given a long enough timeline (say, in the next century) these technologies do seem to have a possibility of merging into a semisentient technopocalypse.