This topic has come up several times before on StP. For example
News & Blogs - Anti-Surveillance Camouflage for Your Face - https://squattheplanet.com/threads/anti-surveillance-camouflage-for-your-face.20506/ and
https://squattheplanet.com/threads/csx-installs-advanced-edd-with-cameras.40166/
I can't speak for developments in US private industry, but i lived in China, where a lot of this technology is developed and sees active use. Without a doubt, the tech is here to stay. It keeps getting more capable and cheaper year on year. However. In what has to be one of the world's most fiercely-surveiled countries, there are still homeless people. There are still criminals. There is still a shadow economy of people finding ways to escape the surveillance - everything from kids who just want to play more mobile games or spend more time watching short videos to hardened criminals who almost certainly have connections into the very same government departments and private security firms that are tasked with surveiling them. Oh, and there is a handful of human rights campaginers and activists in the mix too, although it's precisely those that the government most cares about tracking down and throwing in prison. Because in an actually authoritarian nation, turns out it's explicit anti-authoritarians who are the real concern of the powers that be, not so much the vagrants and criminals who implicitly try to stay under the radar.
The way i see it, technology marches on. There's no stopping it. People's idea of privacy and freedom will change as technology enables deeper monitoring. But technology doesn't only advance on one side. People will develop countermeasures, and then counter-countermeasues, and the arms race will continue. There are countless sci-fi books and movies about exactly this situation.
In any case, i think it's important to bear in mind the economic feasibility of any kind of surveillance technology. Sure, surveillance tech is already at the point where it can quickly detect trespassers, including at night. Maybe someday there will also be autonomous drones capable of not only navigating out to the trespasser but also restraining them until the police arrive, or at least shedding enough (literal) light on the situation to get a positive photo ID and report that on to the authorities. But you also gotta think, who is going to pay for all that? The government, who in most countries can barely afford to provide decent healthcare to their citizens? The same companies that fight tooth-and-nail to pay their employees as little as possible? I dunno. Unless your lifestyle is legitimately threatening people with power, or costing them a significant amount of money... why would they invest much in trying to catch you?
I suppose there is a case to be made that travelers might get caught up as collateral damage in a broader crackdown that's actually targeting a different group, and that's a topic worth discussing, especially if it's backed by the government. But i think those problems are more political than technical.
