
Not Paying Attention in Class? China’s “Smart Eye” Will Snitch on You - raleighm
https://futurism.com/smart-eye-china-facial-recognition/
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jcwayne
Just wait until this starts impacting the parents' social credit rating.

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jerf
One of the great challenges facing us in this 21st century is that we're going
to have to come face-to-face with some of our casual assumptions about the
world, now that we've got machines that can manifest them, and learn how to
start clearly distinguishing between goals and methods.

Usually I'm talking about this in the context of laws, one of the easiest
examples of which is the speed limit. The purpose of the speed limit is not to
ensure that all cars are going 65 miles per hour or less. That is, on its own,
a pointless goal. The purpose of a speed limit is to _keep people safe_ , and
to give police a mechanism to exert pressures to keep people safe. That's why
if the speed limit is 65 and you're driving 40 on ice and slip off the road,
you still may get a speed citation even though you're "25 under"; because the
law is not really about speed. It's why you might cruise by a cop when
everyone around you is doing 75, and the cop doesn't simply leap out and grab
the first one they see, because the law is not about speed so much as it is
about safety.

In this case, consider classroom expectations. Obviously, if we have a machine
that can perfectly gauge how much attention a student is paying to the
teacher, bigger numbers are better than smaller numbers, right? The student
who is 100% engaged is clearly better than the one 95% engaged, who is better
than the student 60% engaged, who is better than the student 5% engaged. But
what are you going to _do_ with those numbers? 100% almost certainly means
"this student has figured out how to game the system somehow". 95% is probably
still a bit high, but they may be a student who is just at the limit of their
ability and learning. Meanwhile, 60% may be the one who mastered the material
last week and is currently bored.

In theory one could hope that these numbers would be examined holistically,
and compared to a control group against the final outcomes of the education
process. In reality, ha! You've got these bright shiny _concrete_ numbers, and
you've got them _now_ , and they will overshadow everything else. And in
general, numbers should be larger rather than smaller, and the whole system
can't hardly help but set all the goals too high. And you've got teachers
looking at the numbers, and principles looking at the numbers for the school,
and the school superintendent looking at the numbers across schools, and the
regional government looking at the superintendant's numbers, at every step of
the way the goals will creep up because Numbers should be Bigger.

Buckle in for some decades of this sort of thing before we finally become wise
enough to figure out how to use these systems, or, perhaps, learn _not_ to use
these systems.

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closeparen
Depending on the road, the purpose of the speed limit might be fuel
conservation rather than safety. 55 mph was imposed in the 1970s to mitigate
the oil crisis; it was not driven by safety concerns. Current consensus is
that posting speed limits is neither a useful nor effective tool for promoting
road safety. Instead, engineers focus on the physical characteristics of the
roadway to modulate the speed at which drivers will feel comfortable.

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axlprose
as someone who didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until later in life, one naively
optimistic take on this, is that perhaps it'll allow for teachers and parents
to catch signs of the condition earlier in kids, and then be able to treat it
better.

Unfortunately, I have a hard time believing this would actually happen. But
it's better than thinking being born with ADHD is now borderline illegal in
China, I guess.

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nitwit005
Just seems like the sort of product that delivers a bunch of facts you already
know. It's not as if the teaching staff doesn't know what kind of expressions
are on their students faces, or which ones don't pay attention.

If the administration wants data, paying someone to sit in classes to observe
once in a while is probably cheaper.

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bwang29
Just wait until some student will start wearing a specific T-shirt to trick
the camera - oh wait - everyone needs to wear the same uniform too.

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teddyh
“ _It approves of re-reading._ ”

