Are Our Children Learning to Bend to the Panopticon?

An imitative AI based tool erroneously identified a clarinet as a gun, sending the school into lockdown panic. A lot is interesting about this — the fact that schools are trying to use tech to prevent shootings, the fact that the firm in question does not tell people how successful its tools are in actually identifying weapons, the fact that we live in a society so broken that we need such tools, but what really horrifies me is the reaction to the mistake.

The school and the firm both admit that the tool mis-identified an instrument as a gun, leading to police being called. A mistake? Not according to the firm:

““We don’t think we made an error, nor does the school,” Alaimo said. “That was better to dispatch [police] than not dispatch.”

Yeah, better to terrify kids about a clarinet than to admit a mistake. That unwillingness to admit that your tool is scaring kids and wasting police time and resources unnecessarily is bad enough. But then they blamed the kid:

Cops left after the confused student confirmed he was “unaware” that the way he was holding his clarinet could have triggered that alert, the Post reported. But ZeroEyes’ spokesperson claimed he was “intentionally holding the instrument in the position of a shouldered rifle.”

How evilly security-theater-brained do you have to be to say that nonsense with a straight face. Oh, our tool cannot tell a clarinet from a rifle? Fix that, you say? Oh no — that would require money, time, commonsense, and basic human decency. We are a tech company — we don’t do any of that. Best to blame the child for carrying a clarinet against their shoulder. Probably outta send the little terrorist to Gitmo, am I right?

The school thinks they are right, apparently. They did not instruct the firm to do better, they did not question the wisdom of sending cops to a kid rather than checking it out themselves, they did not question the wisdom of subjecting their students to a tool apparently designed to terrify them (better to send the cops than not, remember?). No. Instead, they sent a letter to parents stating that their kids should try not to do things that the machine will misinterpret.

Imagine that: a system so broken that it thinks a kid holding a clarinet to their shoulder — the way kids have done since the invention of the clarinet — justifies calling the cops wants to blame your kids for its failings. Do not piss off the angry gun detection god, kids. You never know when it might send a SWAT team after you. The problem is the system, not the kids. Insisting otherwise puts the cost of the system’s failures on children, demanding that they somehow figure out how to not trip the broken system. We should not be training our kids to appease the panopticon we built around them as a replacement for commonsense gun control. We should be allowing kids to be kids, not sacrificing their childhood so some tech asshole can buy another yacht. Everyone in the school system associated with this travesty should be fired.

We are supposed to raise kids. Teach them to think, to be decent to each other, to explore and learn and play and experiment. We cannot do that if we refuse to deal honestly with problems and if we insist that they must bend their humanity to the will of an algorithm. We are people, not inputs and we hurt our kids when we insist otherwise for the profit and ego-soothing of adults.