Many of us were raised in a time that looked forward to the future, to the age of angels, to the days of miracles and wonder, to the time when most of our economical problems would be solved by new and amazing technologies. Many of us actually arrived in the future. Here it is. We find ourselves in it. And it is disappointing. We no longer cure anything, as the money is in lifelong treatment. Corporations have abandoned R&D and spend their surpluses on generating more surpluses from stock buybacks. Only billionaires travel to space. And a whole generation of brilliant mathematical minds has not been spent on filling the remaining gaps in the Standard Model, our deepest understanding of the universe and its history, but in constructing models for Wall Street traders. And we do not have robots. We have instead machines that make us do the work at supermarkets. Because these machines are prone to five-finger discounts, one of the hot new technologies of our age is a camera/image system that detects theft.
The system compares what it sees with what is sold. As items pass over the scanner, they are checked along with the cart and even under the cart. The resulting data is processed in real time and notifies managers when theft happens.
The program also watches “staffed checkout systems” for indications of “sweethearting” (when cashiers let their friends or relatives walk away with unpaid items). We are told all of these surveillance techniques will make our “trip to the store more fun and less of a hassle…” This is not the future we so waited for.
