Conversations with creators and thinkers who are charting the way forward in a tech-saturated society. In our shift to a digital future, we need alternatives to Big Tech. Homepage: techtonic.fm

Also available as an MP3 podcast. More info at our Podcast Central page.

April 24, 2023: You're being watched by surveillance glasses, Tesla cars, and robot police dogs

Listen to this show: MP3 - 128K |  Pop-up player!

Today: You’re being watched by surveillance glasses, Tesla cars, and robot police dogs

An update on alarming recent innovations in tech: eyeglasses connected to an AI chat bot, Tesla cars with surveillance cameras, and two new robot police dogs that DEFINITELY will never be outfitted with weapons.

• Surveillance glasses and ChatGPT: audio from this video (March 25, 2023) features Stanford students Bryan Chiang and Varun Shenoy. Chiang writes, ”say goodbye to awkward dates and job interviews . . . we made rizzGPT -- real-time Charisma as a Service (CaaS) . . . it listens to your conversation and tells you exactly what to say next . . . built using GPT-4, Whisper and the Monocle AR glasses.” More at this Futurism article (April 17, 2023).

• Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars (Reuters, Apr 6, 2023): "between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees." . . .

"Since about 2016, Tesla has employed hundreds of people in Africa and later the United States to label images to help its cars learn how to recognize pedestrians, street signs, construction vehicles, garage doors and other objects encountered on the road or at customers’ houses. To accomplish that, data labelers were given access to thousands of videos or images recorded by car cameras that they would view and identify objects."

• Link5G in the East Village:



• Video of press conference (Apr 11, 2023) where NYC mayor Eric Adams officially launches "Digi-Dog" and K5 Knightscope robots - warning, YouTube link

• Security Robots. DigiDog. GPS Launchers. Welcome to New York. (NYT, April 11, 2023):

Now, New York City is acquiring two robot dogs for a sum of roughly $750,000, using asset forfeiture funds. Officials said the dogs would not be used for routine patrol, but rather for life-threatening situations, including bomb threats.

. . . presiding over all of it was Mayor Eric Adams, who told the assembled news media that his continuing efforts to combat crime would most assuredly include robotic dogs — almost two years to the day after the New York Police Department bowed to public criticism and stopped using the technology.

“Digidog is out of the pound,” the mayor said.

• The NYPD Can Now Shoot GPS Trackers at Your Car (Apr 13, 2023): “in the hands of a department known for its surveillance abuses, the presence of any new tracking tech is worrying.”

• NYPD robocops: Hulking, 400-lb robots will start patrolling New York City (Ars Technica, Apr 12, 2023)

• S.T.O.P. Condemns NYPD’s ‘Knockoff Robocop’ Police Drones (Apr 11, 2023): “How many more millions do we have to waste on biased, broken, and downright creepy technology before we realize it won’t work? We should be investing in actual human beings, not robots.”

• From Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1954, translated into English in 1964), page 100:
“The techniques of the police, which are developing at an extremely rapid tempo, have as their necessary end the transformation of the entire nation into a concentration camp. This is no perverse decision on the part of some party or government. To be sure of apprehending criminals, it is necessary that everyone be supervised. It is necessary to know exactly what every citizen is up to, to know his relations, his amusements, etc. . . . every citizen must be thoroughly known to the police and must live under conditions of discreet surveillance. All this results from the perfection of technical methods.”

• Robot dog surveys damage at lower Manhattan parking garage collapse (Gothamist, Apr 18), followed by FDNY Robo-dog falls over (Futurism, Apr 21).


Above: the robo-dog from Black Mirror’s “Metalhead” episode

• And finally, thanks to WFMU’s Dave the Spazz (Thursdays 9pm-12mid Eastern), a Walgreens surveillance scale . . .



Sign up to get Mark’s weekly email newsletter.

PAST EPISODES: techtonic.fm lists recent Techtonic shows.

PODCAST: Subscribe to the Techtonic podcast