CCTV

This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Prap for a busy week with Whole Foods Market. Start your day with fully cooked breakfast sausages from Amy Lou. 365 brand frozen waffles with no bleached flowers. And of course Whole Foods Market eggs, which are all cage free or better. In the evening, bring home a build your own family meal that feeds four for just $35. Choose one entry and two sides. Shop smarter, not harder, at Whole Foods Market. How many streaming subscriptions do you have? Is it the same for your business? Avoid it by having all your business on one platform. Try Odo for free at Odo.com. That's O-D-DoubleO.com. 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Hartford. Painter Munder is a sandspit in northern Germany, where the river Painter meets the Baltic Sea. There, in October 1942, German engineers sat in a control room watching a television screen. It showed live, close-up images of a prototype weapon on its launch pad, some 2.5 kilometres away. They counted down. On another screen, with a wide-angle view, they saw the weapon's surge skywards. The test had succeeded. They were looking at something that would shape the future. But perhaps not in the way they imagined. The V2, the Fair Geltungswaffe, the Vengeance Weapon, was supposed to win Hitler the War. It was the world's first rocket-powered bomb. It travelled faster than the speed of sound, so you didn't know it was coming until it exploded. But crucially, it couldn't be targeted precisely. The V2's killed thousands, but not enough to tip the scales of conflict. Vener von Braun, the brilliant young engineer behind the V2, surrendered to the Americans as the Third Reich fell, then helped them win the space race. If you told him that his rocket test would be the first step towards putting a man on the moon, he wouldn't have been surprised. That's exactly what motivated him. But von Braun might not have anticipated that he was also witnessing the birth of another hugely influential technology. A closed-circuit television or CCTV. The pictures in that control room, with the first example of a video feed, being used not for broadcasting, but for real-time monitoring in private, over a closed circuit. The top brass at Pena Munder worked slave labourers to their deaths, but they had no intention of joining the fatalities. They invited television engineer Volta Bruck to devise a way for them to monitor the launches from a safe distance. And that was wise, because the first V2 they tested did indeed blow up, destroying one of Bruck's cameras. Exactly how popular Bruck's brainchild has now become is tricky to pin down. One estimate, a few years old, puts the number of surveillance cameras around the world at 245 million, that's about one for every 30 people. Another reckons they'll soon be over twice that number in China alone. It's clear that the market is expanding quickly, and its global leader is a company called Hick Vision, part-owned by the Chinese government. What is China doing with all these CCTV cameras? Here's one example. Picture the scene. You're trying to cross a busy road in the city of Zhang Yang. You should wait for the lights to change, but you're in a hurry, so you make a dash for it weaving through the traffic. A few days later, you might see your photo, name and government ID number on a huge electronic billboard above the intersection, outing you as a J-Walker. But it's not just about the public shaming. Surveillance cameras will feed into the country's planned social credit scheme. Exactly how the national system will work remains unclear, but various trials are using both public and private sector data to score people on whether they're a good citizen. You might lose points for driving inconsiderately, paying your bills late, or spreading false information, score high, and perks might include free use of public bikes, score low, and you might be banned from taking trains. The aim is to incentivise desired behaviour, or as an official document poetically puts it, allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step. Perhaps this is reminding you of a certain novel, published seven years after Walter Brook pioneered the surveillance camera. In 1984, George Orwell imagined life when everything is monitored, not only in public spaces but in people's homes. Everyone who's anyone must have a tele screen through which big brother can watch them. But there's a hint in the story that these devices were originally something people chose to buy. When the duplicitous Mr. Charrington needs to give Winston a believable reason for the apparent lack of tele screen in his spare room, he says they were too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it. That sounds like the kind of conversation I've had recently about the voice controlled smart speakers that some of the world's largest corporations would like to sell me. So I can ask about the weather or say, "Alexa, turn up my central heating" or "automatically monitor what's in my fridge." The comic artist, Zach Wienersmith, sums up the value proposition. "Can I put a device in your house that perpetually listens to everything you say and do?" Stores that information, profits from it, and doesn't give you access to it. "You'd have to pay me a lot." "No, you'll pay us." "Uh, pass?" "The device can figure out when you're low on cheeseballs and drone-deliver them in 30 minutes." "Give me the machine!" Devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home have taken off because of advances in artificial intelligence. And that's the same reason behind the burgeoning demand for CCTV cameras. There are only so many screens one person can look at, but if software can watch, and listen, and decipher meaning, how much surveillance you can do is limited only by computing power. Is it reasonable to feel a little queasy about this? Or should we sit back and enjoy our drone-delivered cheeseballs? That depends in part on the extent to which we trust the entities that are surveilling us. Amazon and Google hasten to reassure us that they aren't snooping on all our conversations. The devices themselves are just smart enough to listen for when you're saying the wake word. "Alex?" Or "Okay, Google?" And only then do they send audio to the cloud for more powerful servers to decipher what we want. Then we have to trust that these devices are hard to hack for criminals, and perhaps for governments. Of course, not everyone walks at the thought of the state knowing more and more about our daily lives. One Chinese woman told Australia's ABC that if as her government said every corner of public space was installed with cameras, she'd feel safe. Those who take a different view might be glad to know that CCTV isn't yet as smart as it seems. The intersection in Jiangyang appears entirely automated, but actually the face recognition algorithms aren't reliable enough. Government workers are sifting through the footage, but maybe that doesn't matter. The perception of surveillance is enough to deter fewer people are J-walking. That's the idea of the panopticon. If you think you might be being watched, you'll always act as though you are. It's an idea George Orwell understood perfectly. We learned about the origins of CCTV in Albert Abramson's book, The History of Television, 1942-2000. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com/50things. A world of wonder. That's just too crazy to try to do something as dangerous as that around the moon. Moments of joy. What you should see now is a cloud. A world of drama. We don't have to be afraid now, do we? I'm real life too. This is maybe the first lead of evidence we have in almost 48 years. Amazing stories. From all over our sphere. There's nothing that you can't do in this world if you set your mind to it. Shall we do it all again? Next year. Podcasts from the BBC World Service. Search for BBC World Service or whatever you get your podcasts. Amazon Music Subscription.