Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forgive me for bringing it up, but this is also the reason why smart gun technology is a complete dead end.
Cars are every bit as dangerous as guns. But no one here seems to be in such a panic with Tesla or self-driving cars. I feel there is a bit of undercurrent of Luddite sentiment going around here. Lots of people mentioning how "primitive" a baby monitor is or should be. But is it? It's an LCD video screen powered by modern advancements in battery tech connected wirelessly to a CCD video camera, with sensing technology…
Oh, I'm no Luddite, don't get me wrong---I'm a machine learning researcher. I have no problem with data science. The difference between all of the complex technology you pointed out inside the baby monitor and what we're talking about here is that all of that complex technology is robust and, for the most part, well-designed! The data science work here has tons of issues, and I think the vast majority of reactions are reacting to that: machine learning and data science really can be useful... but not if you apply it really badly. Someone else commented elsewhere in the thread that a simple thresholding algorithm would be just as effective---and not suffer from the myriad potential problems present with blindly applying TensorFlow because it's cool.