Artificial intelligence is giving surveillance cameras digital brains to match their eyes, letting them analyze live video with no humans necessary. This could be good news for public safety, helping police and first responders more easily spot crimes and accidents and have a range of scientific and industrial applications.Sometimes that means a human watching live footage, usually from multiple video feeds. Most surveillance cameras are passive or to provide evidence if something goes wrong. Your car got stolen? Check the CCTV. AI has propelled the field forward hugely in recent years, there are still fundamental challenges in getting computers to understand video. And the biggest of these is a challenge for cameras we don’t often think about anymore: resolution. AI is great at identifying what’s going on in a video at a fairly high level (e.g., someone is brushing their teeth or looking at their phone or playing football), it can’t yet extract vital context. Take the neural network that can analyze human actions, for example. It might be able to look at the footage and say “this person is running,” but it can’t tell you whether they’re running because they’re late for a bus or because they’ve just stolen someone’s phone. For experts in surveillance and AI, the introduction of these sorts of capabilities is fraught with potential difficulties, both technical and ethical. And, as is often the case with AI, these two categories are intertwined. It’s a technical problem that machines can’t understand the world as well as humans do, but it becomes an ethical one when we assume they can and let them make decisions for us.But it also raises serious questions about the future of privacy and poses novel risks to social justice