
Manu Joseph: AI killed the remarkable video clip and took apart an old pact humans have long had with nature
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It would appear that we are still in the era of extraordinary mobile-phone videos. The latest among them is footage taken by a bystander in Minneapolis as hooded officers of America’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has acquired the chilling acronym ICE, raided a locality looking for illegal immigrants.
An American woman who was not a target of the raid but was there to protest against it blocked the road. We can see an ICE agent grab the handle of her car door; she reverses and then drives ahead, perhaps trying to get away. Another agent responds by shooting the woman dead.
Until a few years ago, most people in the world had never seen a human die. Then the proliferation of mobile phones made it common. Today, we can watch shootings, fatal accidents, plane crashes, executions and even people just dropping dead after being hit by lightning.
But there are also more pleasant extraordinary video clips of killer whales working in tandem to dislodge a seal from an iceberg, though they may not be very pleasant if you ask seals. Maybe in olden times, people saw some extraordinary things but surely never such a wide array of remarkable sights. It is odd that we don’t marvel enough about this.
This has happened not only because of the invention of the smartphone, but also because it has now become so ubiquitous that wherever there are humans, there are as many phones. This is all very new. Even 10 years ago, the very definition of a remarkable event was that there was no video of it.
Today, it is taken as a mystery, even as shady, if something remarkable has occurred and there is no video of it. The sheer number of such videos has reduced our shock and diminished our wonder. We have
. Read on livemint.com