This Company Is Helping Build China’s Panopticon. It Won’t Stop There
SenseTime, the world’s most valuable AI startup, aims to bring its smarter-cameras-everywhere model, well, everywhere.
SenseTime’s software tags each person and object its cameras spot with a growing series of identifiers, such as clothing styles and car makes and models.
Photographer: Gilles Sabrie/Bloomberg
The lobby of SenseTime’s Beijing office makes you feel a bit like you’ve stumbled into a Philip K. Dick novel. A panel near the entrance acts as a digital mirror, its built-in camera analyzing your face to estimate your age and assign an “attractiveness rating” (you score higher when you smile). Another screen shows an app that morphs your face like a Snapchat filter, except that instead of adding rainbow vomit, it slims the figure, widens eyes, and whitens skin.
A third screen displays a feed from a camera aimed at a distant intersection, with every person and object instantly identified and overlaid with a color-coded box. Humans are orange; cars are blue. The longer the system watches, the more bullet points appear beside the boxes: “Adult. Short-sleeve top. Trousers. Male. Black top. Gray bottom,” one set of points reads. “Volkswagen Passat. Black,” reads another. Motion lines trailing each figure indicate their direction and speed.