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>it is quite clear who will benefit: those in power

I think it's more likely that you want to detect a person so you don't hit them with a car than trying to hit them with a drone missile. Detecting cancer with CV, and other improvements to diagnostics also save lives. If you could be working on these technologies and stop, your decision could cost lives.

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If you are working on technology that detects cancer that is true. If you are working on technology that detects people, this is a harder question.

The same neural network can be trained for both problems. Advances in medical image neural networks translate to advances in people detecting neural networks.

Generally speaking this isn't super true, the objects are different enough that the same networks aren't best at both.

Of course, they are not directly used without changing the training data, etc. However, if we look at the big picture to make a general statement, then the advances brought by Computer Vision on natural images often help push research on medical images forward, albeit with a year (or two) of delay. One such example is U-Net (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Net).

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