Surve-cams

Today's AI-enabled surve-cams evolved from late 2oth century surveillance video cameras first used in retail stores, factories, and office and apartment buildings to enable security personnel to monitor public spaces throughout the building from a single location. With the addition of recording capabilities, these surveillance devices soon became useful in criminal investigations; permanently focused on every building entrance and exit, they recorded the comings and goings of people 24 hours a day.

With the dramatic increase in street crime and urban terrorism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, many cities, particularly in Europe, installed such devices on street corners and throughout public transportation terminals and stations. So effective were these devices in capturing images of suicide-bombers and other criminals that soon virtually every municipality in the world installed surveillance cameras that covered almost every public space. However, the volume of recordings were so great that they were generally viewed by the Authorities only after a crime had occurred, as law enforcement officials attempted to identify the perpetrators at particular times and locations.

This situation changed dramatically with the emergence of super-computing AI video detection programs in the second decade of the century. Now, every video recording could be scanned by computer instantaneously and detect any suspicious actvity or person that it was programmed to recognize. It was not long thereafter that Authorities extended surve-cams to private spaces and individuals wherever they were, leveraging the ubiquity of holopods in the society. Anyone carrying a holopod (which was just about everyone) could be "looked in on" by Authority holopod-based surve-cams.