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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite professors would do something like this manually. He would know everyone's names, call on people he thought were slacking or having trouble, and keep everyone alert and engaged and learning because you knew you were being, well, watched.

This seems like it achieves something similar, just automatic. Yet it makes me uneasy. Why? Are human brains unable to cope with the benefits of technology if there's not a consciousness doing it? Or is there something inherently evil about this? Or could it be great if used ethically with ethical rules imposed on it (like, say, the data is never stored for more than an hour).

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Scalability. What harm could one professor do by watching who's paying attention? Not all that much. With tech, one software update and hey, now you have a live time series of who's paying attention when- maybe scale attendance scores based on it. Oh, certain kinds of folks aren't recognized as well by the algorithm? Oh, turns out students are being trained to manipulate their facial expressions to seem attentive? Oh well.

Ooh, hey, we have this data on where everybody sits, too- that's handy, since it gives you more information about the social graph of the student body. Reliably sitting next to a Bad Person? Maybe you need some investigating.

And if a professor is caught mentioning subversive information in a lecture? Who was paying attention more than usual during that part? They seem interested, don't they? Might need to give them a talking to, too.

Permanence can be a big difference. What you did in class isn't going to follow you forever if it's only in your professor's head.

Here's the point. It won't be too long before these children graduate to the job market carrying along some sort of summary score about how good or lazy or naughty they were in school.

I am totally fine with the professor doing it. Kinda like I'm okay with cops patrolling for speeders, but I have a distaste for making it automated with cameras and computers. Using a human enforcer at least evens up the odds, but scaling with cheap sensors and CPUs suggests we could build a world where we actually forbid people from making a choice we disagree with. That is such a fundamental freedom, I think the consequences would be devastating.

Fundamentally it's a violation of trust and consent.

One teacher managing their own classroom allows them to do it on their own terms, personalize their discipline/teaching style to fit the needs of the class, and form a 2-way relationship with the students. Everyone is more or less on the same page and understanding of how and why they're being disciplined, if it comes to that.

Cameras scanning everyone's face once a second and sending them off to who-knows-where for who-knows-what isn't just uncomfortable because it's a 1-way transfer of information with seemingly nothing to offer the students except paranoia, it's applying 19th/20th-century prison surveillance tactics to the classroom. A modern-day panopticon.

It seems like this sort of enforced commitment is part of the reason people take classes rather than just reading a book?

Apparently some people have a stranger watch them work as a productivity hack [1].

Of course, consent makes all the difference.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19591227

When you're at school age, school isn't just "work time", it's most of your social life. There's a big difference to just letting someone watch you work.

I'm not sure what group started it, but there was a political activist group that started destroying CCTV and speed cameras in the UK and U.S. respectively...their main goal was to make it too costly to continually have to replace the damaged cameras...I'm not sure how it went but when I read about I thought it was a great idea...especially since voting won't do much to stop the installation of these surveillance tools...

And as a response, the cameras are now tiny, hidden, and multiple.

I'm sure as the tech evolves, people will find a way to subvert it...at least one can hope

Do you ever question your line of work and what good can come from the facial recognition technology you help develop?

Of course, I question reasoning behind clients use of our technology, and to date the purposes are universally issues of public safety: Universities, public school districts, sports stadiums, shopping malls, and so on are all highly concerned with public safety and that is the main driver of the adoption of FR.

Keep in mind, FR is not rocket science. (Hell, rocket science is not "rocket science".) It is going to continue to be developed, it is going to be ubiquitous, and the ethics of those in the industry largely define the ethics of the industry itself. If people of good conscious are not in the industry, no ethical concerns will be raised when ethically debatable clients and applications arise. I am part of the good ethics contingent.

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