Who is paying attention to all the cameras?

The case of the comedian who strolled into Prince William’s 21st birthday party on June 21 illustrates the point that surveillance cameras are only as much use as the people supposedly manning them and paying attention to them. That night, the members of the Metropolitan Police and of the various Royal Security organisations who were supposed to be doing this weren’t. Had our joker been a real suicide bomber he might have landed us all with King Edward, so I heard on the TV today.

The thing is, criminals of the more usual in-out don’t-make-a-fuss sort have already worked out that merely being photographed doesn’t matter if no one is paying attention to the photographs until they’ve done their criminal deeds.

I believe that the spread of surveillance cameras means that there will soon be a whole new class of people in the world, the surveillers. We will become aware of these people rather as we recently became aware of call centre operatives, for there will have to be a lot of them to keep up with the flow of pictures. One thing’s for sure. They’ll know a lot more stuff than they’ll officially be allowed to tell, and there’ll be lots of arguments about what their rights and responsibilities will be, and who they will have to report to.

I suppose it is possible that “expert” computer programmes will enable CCTV security to be entirely automated, to the point where robots will spot trouble and act against it, but it seems unlikely. Too much to go wrong, I would have thought. (Comments on the immediate likelihood, say in the next two decades, of such expert systems would be most welcome.) I wonder, will the day ever come when a human can be arrested and charged by a robot? Maybe not. But computers will have work to do in observing what they think might be unusual or anomalous events, which require serious human attention.

An extra dimension of interesting could be added to such matters by the fact that, what with modern communications racing ahead the way they are, the people looking at the pictures (assuming computers don’t muscle in on this job) won’t even have to be in the same countries as the cameras, any more than call centre people have to be now. People who became skilled in the art of watching television (I reckon I’m pretty good at this myself) could win national awards for export achievement.

The Baby Boom is getting old, and is going to be very hard to keep in nice fat juicy pensions like they (we) are now expecting, and they (we) will have a lot of votes. We will, I anticipate, be demanding undemanding jobs to top up our pensions. Snooping on other people with CCTV cameras would be just the thing. The 21st century equivalent of peeking at the passing scene through net curtains.

Not a very pretty picture. Not a definitely nice world. Please understand that I am describing the way I think things are heading, not recommending it or approving of it.