If you ever visit Tasmania, the Port Arthur penal settlement will no doubt be high on your visit list. It’s well worth it, though the beautiful, peaceful surroundings belie the place’s grim history, from colonial times to modern. One place where that grim past is most apparent is the Separate Prison.
This structure represents what passed for an innovation in corrections at the time. It was based on the theories of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, especially his ‘panopticon’. This was a prison so designed that its inmates would be under constant, unseen supervision. The theory was that, knowing they were being watched constantly would encourage the prisoners to behave.
It was a miserable failure, but the desire to constantly spy on their subjects persisted in the 20th century, in authoritarian regimes, most especially the communists. Big Brother is Watching You became the catchphrase associated with tyranny.
Somewhere, though, between 1948 (when 1984 was written) and today, we’ve sat on our collective hands as a surveillance state that even George Orwell couldn’t have imagined has been foisted on us. The most-surveilled country in the world is, unsurprisingly, communist China, but the USA isn’t far behind (with 50 million CCTV cameras compared to China’s 200 million).
Per head of population, though, Americans (15,291 cameras per 100,000 people) are slightly more spied-upon than even the Chinese (14,184 per 100k). New Zealanders (7850 per 100k), surprisingly, are almost as spied-upon as Brits (7893 per 100k) – and twice as much as Australians (3704 per 100k).
Information about who we are, what we do and buy and where we go is increasingly available to completely anonymous third parties. We’re expected to present much of our lives to online audiences and, in some social circles, to share our location with friends. Millions of effectively invisible closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and smart doorbells watch us in public, and we know facial recognition with artificial intelligence can put names to faces.
How does all this spying affect us. Even in the 19th century, Norman Triplett showed that cyclists raced harder when they were watched. We’ve all experienced the frustration of being perfect typists until someone is looking over our shoulders. But does knowing we are being watched all the time affect us in much deeper ways?
Decades of research show it also infiltrates our mind to impact how we think. And now a new study reveals how being watched affects unconscious processing in our brain. In this era of surveillance, researchers say, the findings raise concerns about our collective mental health.
Among nearly all animals, being stared at is a sign of aggression. We humans evolved under the same pressures that informed our other mammalian cousins, especially given that we began as prey animals eking out a precarious existence in savannahs full of stalking predators. This explains why being watched provokes fear and flight responses like sweating.
The fact that people behave differently under watchful eyes isn’t surprising. Who among us hasn’t acted more selfishly when they were alone than they would when someone could see them? Psychologists put this down to concern with one’s reputation.
Which, among other things, led to the so-called ‘open-plan office’. The idea is that the drones won’t slack off when they know the boss is watching. But workers hate them. One study found that people performed worse when subjected to constant watching.
The effects of surveillance on cognition go even deeper – into our brain’s unconscious processing of the world around us. In a study published last December, researchers showed that being watched accelerated participants’ unconscious analysis of faces.
A team led by neuroscientist Kiley Seymour of the University of Technology Sydney […] wondered whether this unconscious processing might also be affected by knowing one is being watched. They had a group of people witness cameras being set up to send a live feed of them to another room […]
People in the “watched” group perceived faces faster and more accurately than those in the control group.
The difference was huge, for an unconscious process: nearly a second. Moreover, the effects don’t seem to be just about being able to see eyes watching us. Just knowing that we’re under observation kicks the perception into high gear.
“The conclusion would be that being watched drives this hardwired survival mechanism into overdrive,” Seymour says. “You’re in fight-or-flight mode, which is taxing on the brain.”
Indeed, knowing that we could be under surveillance, but not knowing if we actually are, at any given time, could exacerbate the effect.
This constant surveillance could tax cognition in ways that we don’t yet understand. The faculties compromised by surveillance “are those that allow us to focus on what we’re doing: attention, working memory, and so on,” [French psychologist Clément Belletier] says. “If these processes are taxed by being monitored, you’d expect deteriorating capacity to concentrate.” This body of research suggests that bringing more surveillance into workplaces – usually an attempt to boost productivity – could actually be counterproductive. It also suggests that online testing environments, where students are watched through webcams by human proctors or AI, could lead to lower performance.
So, when Arthur C Clarke wrote that, “Big Brother could be watching you – but probably isn’t,” he missed the point. He still could be: we can never be sure.
But, thanks to the same AI technology used to spy on us so thoroughly, we can attain to not caring.
Artificial intelligence (AI) could hold the key to hiding your personal photos from unwanted facial recognition software and fraudsters, all without destroying the image quality.
A new study from Georgia Tech university, published July 19 to the pre-print arXiv database, details how researchers created an AI model called “Chameleon,” which can produce a digital “single, personalized privacy protection (P-3) mask” for personal photos that thwarts unwanted facial scanning from detecting a person’s face. Chameleon will instead cause facial recognition scanners to recognize the photos as being someone else.”
So, we could all become living ‘Agent Smiths’, from The Matrix, able to disguise ourselves at will and walk unseen by the watchers.
