A dummy camera and a cutout figure of police are used to deceive people for having integrity in the streets.
During my childhood, my father’s purse was stolen several times in public spaces. In the big shopping malls and many other public places, such a crime rate is very low nowadays. This is because there are many security cameras. So some people are just placing the non-functional dummy cameras too to create fear among offenders of being caught.
In the present world and in the future with advanced technologies in place, integrity becomes a necessity. Technology demands integrity among people. The people coming late to the office are prevented through the use of biometrics instead of a signature.
I was in Shenzhen the electronics capital of the world to attend a conference. In the downtown one evening, I was walking in one of the streets. I saw a couple walking with a dwarf pet dog in front of me. The dog stopped and started excreting in the middle of the road. I stopped for a while behind them. I saw the lady took out a paper napkin and picked the shit and placed it in a paper cover. I was surprised to see this, as I have never seen such an act by anyone before. Next day I shared the incident with a person, a regular visitor to the city, he had shown me the big cameras placed on the poles and buildings in every street. He said that every citizen’s behaviour is also being monitored by the Chinese Government. It is called ‘social credit system’ that ranks citizens based on their behaviour, and rewards and punishments depend on the scores of each person. The facial recognition cameras are the watching eyes bringing in integrity in peoples life and establishing a better-disciplined society.
It is controversial, but the human evolution made people ‘smarter’ over the years, now the smart technologies are dis-empowering the peoples ‘smartness.’ The day will come, people will be ‘dumb slaves’ and just follow the instructions of technological systems to exist. Many machines are learning and getting upgraded already. The learning of a machine is specific to what is needed for its performance, whereas the learning’s of people is mostly redundant and very little is relevant for their existence and happiness.
In one of the irrigation projects, initially, we planned to collect the water levels at various locations through the people in service. But we had many doubts regarding their integrity and the cheating methods that they would adopt. What if? They don’t go to the place and send someone else to do their job; collect the wrong reading; or note and report the reading wrongly; don’t visit the place as per the time slot; if they miss collecting reading for some days due to personal factors or natural factors such as heavy rains in the field area; they could be lazy for the job; some are very old and cannot go always to the field; etc. Moreover, the collection of the data using human beings is the costliest. So finally I decided to use the GPS enabled sensors using the GSM boards, the data was transferred to the computers and mobile phones for easy analysis and decision making. A sensor shows errors, but people can lie. An intentional lie by a human being is more dangerous than the error in a system, where error can be detected and corrected. Sometimes one lie of a person leads to many lies rather knowing the truth and getting corrected.
