It was a bad take, but there is a much more interesting direction in which to take this.
First, in a sense it IS fakery, and it IS making the police feel. Just not quite how the author said.
It's making them feel tantalized, like they have almost what they want, almost the good tech that they are dreaming of, and they are toying with it as they imagine what else they could do here in this UI if only the tech was better. The cameras of a decade from now (a decade in the future), the AI of a decade from now, the software of a decade from now, the networking bandwidth of a decade from now, etc… Hand on the control zooming imagining what else is almost in their grasp, soon, soon.
Anyone who has worked in tech has seen how things go from rough skeletons, to competent prototypes, to smooth products, to wicked assemblages of devastatingly effective tools and capabilities, over time.
We should not dismiss the fuzzy zooming mess as uninteresting or mere self-justifying fantasizing on the part of government employees; it portends much more than we can see right now of what they want from such a system.
A lot of comments have criticized this take.
It was a bad take, but there is a much more interesting direction in which to take this.
First, in a sense it IS fakery, and it IS making the police feel. Just not quite how the author said.
It's making them feel tantalized, like they have almost what they want, almost the good tech that they are dreaming of, and they are toying with it as they imagine what else they could do here in this UI if only the tech was better. The cameras of a decade from now (a decade in the future), the AI of a decade from now, the software of a decade from now, the networking bandwidth of a decade from now, etc… Hand on the control zooming imagining what else is almost in their grasp, soon, soon.
Anyone who has worked in tech has seen how things go from rough skeletons, to competent prototypes, to smooth products, to wicked assemblages of devastatingly effective tools and capabilities, over time.
We should not dismiss the fuzzy zooming mess as uninteresting or mere self-justifying fantasizing on the part of government employees; it portends much more than we can see right now of what they want from such a system.