How The “surveillance Ai Pipeline” Literally Objectifies Human Beings

A new preprint study that analyzed more than 20,000 computer vision papers and 11,000 patents spanning three decades has found that the vast majority of computer vision research leads to technology that surveils human beings. The study found that computer vision papers often refer to human beings as “objects,” a convention that both obfuscates how common surveillance of humans is in the field, and objectifies humans by definition. The study also found that the number of papers with downstream surveillance patents increased more than five-fold from the 1990s to the 2010s.