This Chinese CCTV Facial Recognition Prototype Is Terrifying

It's probably inevitable at this point that we'll end up living in an always-watching surveillance state, and this video of a CCTV facial recognition prototype in action is a troubling preview of what that might look like: 

The recognition suite, built by Chinese company SenseTime, includes SenseVideo — which allows tracking and classification of objects — and SenseFace — which scans and matches faces to a database. Both can be seen in action in the video above. 

While CCTV systems are widespread throughout the world, they're very ineffective at identifying faces (as this fascinating New Yorker piece from last year details) — systems like SenseFace might change that.