The vast majority of computer vision research leads to technology that surveils human beings, a new preprint study that analyzed more than 20,000 computer vision papers and 11,000 patents spanning three decades has found. Crucially, the study found that computer vision papers often refer to human beings as “objects,” a convention that both obfuscates how common surveillance of humans is in the field, and objectifies humans by definition.
I don’t disagree with you at all in general, but in this specific case, I think it’s a misfire. “Object” is a very specific, technical term. Every single internal representation in code of anything that exists in the world is always called an object, and this kind of “object oriented” approach is probably the single most common paradigm in modern software. When I use the word “object” professionally, it just isn’t the same word as when I use it in my regular speech.
I don’t even disagree that we should update it. Maybe we should! But I really don’t think that, in this case, it’s the smoking gun this article thinks it is.