The interesting thing to me is determining when something that is acceptable for humans to do at human scale is also acceptable for machines to do at industrial scale.

There are many examples. One is face recognition - clearly it is acceptable for individual humans to do this at small scale, but systematic identification of everyone on a street or in a stadium has different implications for society.

(In this case it almost doesn't matter whether the surveillance is performed by humans or machines - it's the scale and systematic nature that changes the equation.)