Cancer Vs Policing

Scanned, tackled, arrested: how live facial recognition was piloted on the streets of Croydon

“The arrest was one of hundreds made during a six-month Met police pilot of LFR cameras on vans and fixed to lamp-posts, ... The trap was set at 10am, when the clusters of surveillance cameras mounted high on pillars at the junction of Church Street and North End were switched on. ... The wanted man unwittingly walked past one of the cameras and instantaneously Sgt Brown’s handheld beeped furiously and flashed up the suspect’s pin-sharp live photo, alongside a previous custody photo, his name, ... Every face passing the cameras – as many as 5,000 an hour – was being scanned ... Uniformed officers standing across the road received the same alert and they all dashed to converge on the suspect, who made a vain run for it and then began to fight hard. A pair of officers jumped on his back and several more came in on top as they brought him down, amid shouting and consternation from bystanders.”

How is this different from the immune system in the human body? A “bad cell” enters the human body and a swarm of the body’s “good cells” swing into action to overpower the bad cell and bring it, to coin a phrase, “to the ground”. That is why, your nose blocked with mucus, your body wants to spit it out. To the ground. Either that or the bad cell is reduced to its component parts and diverted to your urine or faeces.

We don’t complain about our body’s defences. If you are reading this note, then you are an apex human; your genes are the result of surviving weaker genes that failed to fight off infection before their host body could issue children. That is – propagation of genes in the gene pool. You are an apex human, a living, breathing, walking demonstration of the immune system bequeathed to you by your parents and their environment.

Our species, in particular a species of society known as “Londoners” have good cells (police and AI systems) that can spot a bad cell from miles away, swarm and then physically leap on the bad cell bringing it to the ground; that bad cell is handcuffed and led to jail.

Of course, sometimes a bad cell becomes cancerous, and our body’s defences fail to identify or subdue it.

How do you feel about Cancer?

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