What are we going to do about all the cameras? The question keeps me up at night, in something like terror.

Cameras are the defining technological advance of our age. They are the keys to our smartphones, the eyes of tomorrow’s autonomous drones and the FOMO engines that drive Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Pornhub. Cheap, ubiquitous , viral photography has fed social movements like Black Lives Matter, but cameras are already prompting more problems than we know what to do with — revenge porn, live-streamed terrorism, YouTube reactionaries and other photographic ills.

And cameras aren’t done. They keep getting cheaper and — in ways both amazing and alarming — they are getting smarter. Advances in computer vision are giving machines the ability to distinguish and track faces, to make guesses about people’s behaviors and intentions, and to comprehend and navigate threats in the physical environment. In China, smart cameras sit at the foundation of an all-encompassing surveillance totalitarianism unprecedented in human history. In the West, intelligent cameras are now being sold as cheap solutions to nearly every private and public woe, from catching cheating spouses and package thieves to preventing school shootings and immigration violations. I suspect these and more uses will take off, because in my years of covering tech, I’ve gleaned one ironclad axiom about society: If you put a camera in it, it will sell.

That’s why I worry that we’re stumbling dumbly into a surveillance state. And it’s why I think the only reasonable thing to do about smart cameras now is to put a stop to them.