In an infamous episode of Netflix’s “Black Mirror,” the show imagines a world where everyone is given a personal score out of five.
The main character Lacie, whose rating hovers around a respectable 4.2, becomes desperate to boost her social media score. She strikes gold when she’s invited to a social media star’s wedding, where hobnobbing with “prime influencers” and posting perfectly filtered photos will surely juice her rating. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t.
At a recent debate of top tech investors in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sarah Guo of Greylock Partners put out the idea that the future predicted by “Black Mirror” might not be so far off.
Smart cameras are blanketing the world, from the 170 million surveillance cameras in China used for tracking the country’s citizens, to the facial recognition security system in the Apple iPhone X. These cameras bring new levels of convenience, but Guo, who focuses her investments on cyber security and artificial intelligence, said that if people know they’re being watched, they may also change behaviors — for better or worse.
“There’s a saying, ‘You are who you are when no one’s watching.’ But I think we’re going to be watched,” Guo said at the tech debate. “And I know that I’m going to change as a driver if all the cars around me are going to be rating my politeness and safety all the time.”
Each year, the Churchill Club, a 32-year-old discussion forum based in Silicon Valley, hosts a debate among some of the leading, and most opinionated, luminaries in tech and business. This year, five venture capitalists, including Guo, laid out their predictions for what nonobvious tech trends would emerge just two to five years from now.
Guo said it’s not unreasonable to imagine a world where people are rated by individuals and surveillance cameras based on good social citizenship, not unlike what happens in the season-three premiere of “Black Mirror.” A person’s ranking may determine whether the person has access to a loan and at what interest rate, according to Guo.
By comparison, the character Lacie sets out to increase her social media score after finding her dream home and hearing from the realtor that she can shave 20% off the rent if Lacie boosts her rating above 4.5.
This sort of thing is already happening in China.
The most populous country in the world has deployed 170 million cameras since 2014 as part of a vast surveillance system it’s building. China wants to track all 1.4 billion citizens through a combination of facial recognition technology, group chat monitoring, and smartphone apps created by the state — and give people scores based on their “social credit.” Good scores get rewarded, and bad ones punished.
The program is due to be fully operational by 2020, but is being piloted for millions of people already. It’s mandatory for Chinese citizens.
Building a ‘social credit’ system in America
According to Guo, the arrival of ubiquitous smart cameras in the US is inevitable.
“If you live in an American city you’re caught on a security camera about 70 times a day. But most of these cameras have been dumb — eyes without brains, blindly saving images and videos to some server in some closet never to be seen again,” she said.
But as cameras become cheaper and smarter, adding algorithms to understand the content that they’re capturing, there will be an explosion of new consumer experiences built around facial recognition, Guo said. Cameras will power “seamless convenience,” from unlocking your iPhone X without entering a passcode to shopping at the store without having to check out. Cameras might capture memories from inside the home, “automatically saving clips of the milestones that you missed,” Guo said.
Her prediction caused anxiety for some tech investors who shared the stage at the Churchill Club debate. Nicole Quinn of Lightspeed Venture Partners said she’s excited about the convenience that facial recognition has created, but worries about its implications.
“Haven’t any of you watched the ‘Black Mirror’ episode?” Quinn said.
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures expects a full-blown rebellion if the government ever introduces a social credit system in the US, saying that the public will demand regulation.
Guo responded to their criticisms: “It’s not my fault what the future holds so if it’s scary I apologize. But in all seriousness I think there could be a backlash.”
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