The FIFA Club World Cup has undergone a revamp since it was last competed in December 2023 in Saudi Arabia. The number of participating clubs has increased fourfold to 32, the frequency of the competition has gone from annual to quadrennial and the champion's prize money – previously 5m – has gone up by a whopping 35m. It's not just the numbers that have changed in the tournament. FIFA is also looking to introduce new technology, including artificial intelligence to help the referees, and it is getting stricter on goalkeepers who waste time while holding the ball. Here's a look at the three big changes to be implemented at the monthlong tournament, which will get under way on Saturday in the United States: Small cameras, protruding from the referees' ears, will capture the live action unfolding in front of them.

A bill headed to Utah's Senate floor would require police to include disclaimers in any report written with help from artificial intelligence. Introduced by Sen. Stephanie Pitcher, SB180 comes nearly a year after multiple police agencies across the country began testing software like Axon's Draft One, prompting concerns from critics and privacy advocates. Draft One was announced by Axon in April 2024, kicking off a major new phase for the company best known for manufacturing tasers and a popular line of body cameras used by law enforcement. Axon built Draft One using Microsoft's Azure OpenAI platform, and is designed to auto-generate police reports using only an officer's body cam audio records. Once processed, Draft One then crafts "a draft narrative quickly," reportedly cutting down on police officer's paperwork by as much as an hour per day.

As technology develops, its pervasiveness makes Orwell's fiction to today's reality. There have been many debates against facial recognition technology regarding its enabling of abuse and other corrosive activities like facilitation of violence and harassment, disproportionate impact on POC and vulnerable population, misuse by authorities, denial of essential rights such as "as protection against "arbitrary government tracking of one's movements, habits, relationships, interests, and thoughts" etc. However, there are more reasons why we should fear facial recognition technology. Faces are hard to hide or change. They cannot be encrypted like an email or a text- they are just distantly capture-able from remote cameras and increasingly easy and inexpensive to obtain and store in the cloud- a feature that in itself stimulates "surveillance creep". Unlike traditional surveillance technologies- which require fresh, expensive hardware or new data sources, the data sources for facial recognition are prevalent and in the field right now, namely with body cams and CCTVs. There is a standing legacy of names and face databases- like for driver's licenses, social media profiles and mugshots. Any database of faces created to identify individuals caught or arrested on camera requires preparing matching databases that- with a few lines of code can be applied to examine body cam or CCTV feed in real time. It also worth remembering that faces, unlike fingerprints or iris patterns- are central to our identity. While it is easy to think that facial privacy is not the biggest concern for most as we show them to the world every-day, but we do. In fact, humans have for history, created values and institutions linked with privacy protections during periods where it's been hard to identify most people we don't know. Biological limitations and population size/distribution also affect the number of faces we can recognize. As succinctly worded by Chief Justice John Roberts "A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere.

IF EVERY public interaction were filmed, would the world be a better place? Common sense suggests it would, but common sense is an unreliable guide to human behaviour. The law of unintended consequences is often more useful. To some extent, we already live in such a world, with CCTV cameras everywhere and smartphones in every pocket. But the routine filming of everyday life is about to go to the next level.

Motorola is adding machine learning to its surveillance equipment used by law enforcement personnel. Cops in Chicago's Waukegan police department are already suiting up with the company's Si500 body cams. But those same cameras could soon pack AI that could help officers identify missing people and objects. A prototype device is in the works with Neurala, a deep learning startup that recently integrated its software with drones to track poachers in Africa. In the near future, the camera will be able to recognize images and communicate that data with other Si500s.