It sounds like a creepy science-fiction movie about a future dystopia, but it is very real and it is happening now. The federal government is funding a new scheme to build a “friendly social robot” that will be deployed at schools to collect data on children’s mental health, according to news reports and official documents. The new machines will add to the growing battery of federally funded Orwellian tools to gather every conceivable form of data on students for Big Brother.
The project is supposed to produce a “user-friendly” robot known as “EMAR,” or Ecological Momentary Assessment Robot, “that gathers teen mental health data in a public high school setting,” according to the federal “National Science Foundation” funding the scheme to the tune of more than a million dollars. It is needed, NSF says, because “adolescents are very likely to have long-lasting relationships with robots in the future at work, in the classroom, and at home.”
“It also needed especially since adolescents constitute a vulnerable population that is negatively affected by stress and mental health issues, and since there are well-established difficulties in gathering accurate, useful, mental health data from teens in their natural environment with digital surveys and experience sampling using static data collection tools including computers, tablets, and smart phones,” the official award document continues.
Success of the scheme, as defined by the NSF, will “contribute to the development of ubiquitous social robots that serve as tools for on-site, real time data collection.” Such tools, the grant documents continue, “would improve research methodology and facilitate evidence-based decisions in real time.” While the exact nature of the “decisions” that supposedly need to be made was not specified, the robots are supposed to serve as an “essential tool” to assess the “mental health” of children and develop “interventions” for them.
The University of Washington, which is running the project, added that EMAR will “gather longitudinal data on stress in teens in order to better understand the experience of stress and to begin to build a profile of what stress looks like for teens.” The researchers behind the scheme hope to gather this sensitive data from “as many teens as possible,” they said. To do that, the robot will have to be “perceived as a peer to students.”
As for why they wanted to use a robot to gather the data, the individuals behind the project said, among other things, that it would ensure that extracting the sought-after data from children would not be perceived by the victims as “boring.” There is also the phenomenon of “increased compliance.” “Initial research with undergrads shows that students were more likely to do what a physical robot asked than a computer or a robot on a screen,” UW said in a blog post about EMAR. The United Nations appears to be capitalizing on those findings, too.
This summer, the Newman Report exposed a broad array of federally backed data gathering targeting government-school children being funded by the federal government. Indeed, government schools are now conducting mental health and psychological assessments on children each month in some areas as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The data-gathering schemes also track students’ support for “diversity” and other policies supported by the establishment.
Meanwhile, the federal government is funding incredibly intrusive and Orwellian technology aimed at vacuuming up the most sensitive data imaginable from children. Among the devices in use for years now through a federally funded tutoring scheme: a “facial expression camera” used to “detect emotion” and “capture facial expressions” by extracting “geometric properties on faces.”
Very soon, government schools and the federal Leviathan that controls them will know far more about American children than even those children’s own parents. This Orwellian data gathering, which is all in addition to the indoctrination role played by government schools today, will haunt children for their entire lives. The only remaining option for sensible parents is to remove their children from the system immediately.
