CHAPTER 3
It is natural that many people are wary when they hear "cameras all over town". But the question we face is not "surveillance society or not".
While we avoid thinking about it, records keep accumulating all around us:
Most of these have no mechanism by which a third party can verify who retrieved information, when, and for what purpose. Surveillance is spreading in fragments, ungoverned.
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The real question is not "surveillance or none" but "governed watching-over, or ungoverned surveillance". |
In democracies, even thinking about the monitoring of public space tends to provoke strong rejection. As a result, what has stopped is not the spread of surveillance but the design of mechanisms to govern it. The wish to protect privacy is, ironically, delaying the creation of mechanisms that would protect it.
Meanwhile, everyday anxieties remain — children cannot play outside on their own, people feel uneasy on dark streets.
Thanks to smartphones, cameras, computing, communication and storage can be packed into small, inexpensive parts. Streetlights already cover public space. The technology to watch over public space without gaps can now be built from ordinary components rather than special equipment. What is missing is not technology but a governance mechanism society can accept.
"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it" is an idea associated with the physicist Lord Kelvin. The author of this concept extends it to society as follows:
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Trust infrastructure → Trust → Social acceptance → Measurement → Understanding → Improvement |
Improving public safety requires measurement first. But measurement can be carried out only if society accepts it. Acceptance requires trust, and trust requires mechanisms that support it — a trust infrastructure. VRAIO is that trust infrastructure.
← Previous: 2. A Child Does Not Come Home | Next: 4. How It Works →
FMPS + VRAIO: Public-safety infrastructure built on streetlights, and the governance of AI outputs | Yusaku Fujii (Gunma University) and NPO e-JIKEI Network Promotion Institute
This site presents a research-stage concept; all figures are estimates.