Computers do not have any general visual understanding unless they are told exactly what to look for, and this is quite shocking considering how powerful they are. A task as simple as differentiating between a dog and a cookie can pose an incredible challenge to machines.
Humans process visual information holistically, incorporating prior knowledge, experience and intuition to interpret the visible world. Meanwhile, computers speak the language of 1s and 0s, and they have to be taught by humans to see and discern certain objects and situations, using specific techniques like frame differencing for detecting motion, background subtraction for detecting presence and brightness algorithms for tracking objects. As it is up to humans to teach computers how to make sense of pixels, I think there is room for creativity in how we translate and represent the visual world to machines.
In a world where computers are developing a greater sense of “sight” day by day, data privacy and surveillance becomes an important topic of discussion. Those developing and deploying products based on computer vision, including computer scientists, artists and anyone in between, have to ensure fair and ethical use of the data, if any is collected. At the same time, I think it is also important for everyone else to learn to recognize and question the real world applications of computer vision as we go on with our daily lives.