Chinese officials boast a god's-eye view of towns from above (www.economist.com)

Local Chinese officials are deploying wall-sized “god’s-eye” digital surveillance grids in towns and villages that stitch CCTV, government registries and other sensors into map-like dashboards. In one example, a village of 15,000 is divided into a dozen grid units; the screen flags people who need social services (the destitute, mentally ill) alongside categories such as known drug users (58 listed) and other individuals “needing attention.” Officials say the system speeds problem-solving and resource allocation, but the same integrated view also enables continuous tracking and profiling of potential troublemakers. For the AI/ML community this is a concrete illustration of real-world, at-scale deployment of data fusion, computer vision and predictive analytics tied to administrative labels. Key technical features include geospatial grid indexing, person-level linking across heterogeneous databases, real-time visual dashboards and automated flagging algorithms. The implications are twofold: technically, these systems offer rich operational datasets and deployment challenges (privacy-preserving inference, robustness, bias mitigation, false-positive rates, and model interpretability); socially and ethically, they raise urgent questions about consent, error impacts, targeted enforcement, and export of surveillance tech. Researchers and practitioners must therefore pair engineering advances with governance, auditing and rigorous evaluation to avoid amplifying harms.