When police departments first started buying and deploying bodycams in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a decade ago, activists hoped it would bring about real change. Years later, despite what's become a multibillion-dollar market for these devices, the tech is far from a panacea. Most footage they generate goes unwatched. And if they do finally provide video to the public, it usually doesn't tell the complete story. A handful of AI startups see this problem as an opportunity to create what are essentially bodycam-to-text programs for different players in the legal system, mining this footage for misdeeds. But like the bodycams themselves, the technology still faces procedural, legal, and cultural barriers to success.

When police departments first started buying and deploying bodycams in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a decade ago, activists hoped it would bring about real change. Years later, despite what's become a multibillion-dollar market for these devices, the tech is far from a panacea. Most of the vast reams of footage they generate go unwatched. And if they do finally provide video to the public, it's often selectively edited, lacking context and failing to tell the complete story. A handful of AI startups see this problem as an opportunity to create what are essentially bodycam-to-text programs for different players in the legal system, mining this footage for misdeeds.

It looks like footage from a news report. A cop approaches a graffiti-covered, seemingly abandoned building, the sound of his own footsteps and his uniform brushing the mic and disturbing the silence. Only 30 seconds in does the trailer start to look more like a video game: the exaggerated gun reload, the way the cop effortlessly vaults a barrier. But at a passing glance – even at close examination, on a phone screen – it looks as if it could be real. Unrecord, a "bodycam first-person shooter" being created by French independent developer Drama, made an impact with its shockingly realistic trailer last week.

The control room falls silent as multiple video streams from live bodycams fill its display monitors. The windowless building, its meter-thick walls baking in the late-afternoon heat, carries no signage, no identifying markers. As the men enter, the control room displays adjust from sunlight to show a near pitch-black corridor with doorways visible to the left. The audio is silent, save for the tread of rubber boots through pooled condensation and the hum of a generator somewhere inside. The four men had seen images of the hostage before they reached the building.

Blockchain has always seemed to me like a solution looking for a problem, which isn't a criticism. The laser, the transistor, and the integrated circuit all lingered, underutilized, until either the technology evolved, a complementary technology matured, and/or some clever entrepreneur enabled their wide and disruptive adoption. Or take barcodes, which were first deployed with middling success to track train cars, and only took on the eponymous universality of "UPC codes" when cash registers became more than mechanical contraptions. Currencies such as Bitcoin may well be only the first iteration of a blockchain-powered technology, but one that could disappear in a puff of smoke and a pool of investor tears if the speculative bubble pops. However, the notion of a decentralized, public ledger of consensus-driven facts about the world--which is what a blockchain fundamentally is--has a utility well beyond wild-eyed, crypto-anarchist dreams.

A police officer equipped with Taser's Axon Flex body camera (Photo by George Frey/Getty Images) Business is booming in the bodycam industry. Police forces across the United States are equipping more of their officers with cameras to gather more information out in the field. But with all that footage comes a tsunami of data that's becoming increasingly difficult to sift through. Taser International, one of the largest manufacturers of police bodycams, wants to bring some of the latest artificial intelligence techniques to make sense of all that footage. On Thursday, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company said it's making two acquisitions to up its game in the area.

Technology is advancing so rapidly that we will experience radical changes in society not only in our lifetimes but in the coming years. We have already begun to see ways in which computing, sensors, artificial intelligence and genomics are reshaping entire industries and our daily lives. As we undergo this rapid change, many of the old assumptions that we have relied on will no longer apply. Technology is creating a new set of rules that will change our very existence. Digitization began with words and numbers. Then we moved into games and later into rich media, such as movies, images and music.