Surveillance and monitoring by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is invading government schools in Dallas as part of a pilot program supposedly aimed at keeping children “safe.” However, the Orwellian scheme, which will monitor and analyze the behavior of all students in one of the nation’s largest districts, is already fueling privacy concerns and other criticism among parents and civil-liberties advocates.
The “revolutionary technology” developed by the company Davista will be used to track student behavior and then alert authorities if it “deviates” from what the system considers to be normal “baseline” behavior. The system “empowers organizations to identify risk and take action before the projected risk becomes a consequential event or incident,” the Dallas Independent School District said.
In other words, even before any “event” or “incident,” the system will flag the students so authorities can “take action.” It was not immediately clear if these incidents would include sex acts, such as the 6-year-old girl in Texas who was forced to perform oral sex on a classmate while the teacher was in the class, or just behavior that might indicate a risk of violence.
“Davista’s student safety and support platform enables comprehensive analysis and review of student data through software, minimizing inherent human biases and disparities by objectively assessing data points and reducing assumptions and cognitive fatigue,” the school district’s press release continued, celebrating the technology.
“Leveraging existing data within the school, the technology pays attention to students’ participation, performance, and behavioral patterns,” added the statement. “This process establishes a baseline for each student, derived from their past information, allowing real-time analysis of any deviations from their personal baseline.”
The release goes on to quote some members of the school board praising the initiative as an alleged way to prevent “gun violence” and unspecified other “tragedies.” The “Honorable” Ron Price, a corporate executive helping spearhead the scheme, boasted that it “leverages the wealth of existing student data sources within Dallas ISD” and “automates the identification of students who may be at risk.”
Sounding the alarm on this at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Adam Dick offered a warning. “Parents, check on how your children are being treated by their schools, including in the name of providing for their own protection,” he said. “Your view of what should be done to protect your children is likely quite different than that of the people in charge at your children’s schools.”
This writer has been raising concerns about these sorts of surveillance technologies for years. About a decade ago, the U.S. Department of “Education” released a report highlighting surveillance devices such as “facial expression cameras” and “wireless skin conductance sensors” that were already in use in federally funded “education” programs.
One of the ultimate objectives of those technologies and data-gathering schemes was to “make predictions about [students’] future behaviors or performance,” according to the report. The document, titled “Enhancing, Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics,” made the case clearly.
In 2019, the United Nations brought governments together in Beijing for a conference on AI in education. The final agreement, dubbed the “Beijing Consensus on Artificial Intelligence and Education,” called on governments worldwide to use AI in “education” for a variety of purposes, including shaping the values of children on everything from gender and governance to the environment.
The Beijing Consensus agreement also demands that governments worldwide “adjust curricula to promote the in-depth integration of AI and transformation of learning methodologies.” And just last month, billionaire population-control fanatic Bill Gates let the cat out of the bag, admitting that within the not-too-distant future, AI would be replacing teachers.
Combined with the unfathomable amounts of data being vacuumed up in government indoctrination centers posing as schools, these AI technologies represent a monstrous threat to privacy, family, self-government, and more. It will be up to parents to protect their children from the horrific machine being built to enslave them all.