With new awareness, I began to notice how the aggressive push to collect more training data was leading to pervasive surveillance not just in the digital world but the physical one as well. I noticed, too, how the gaze of that physical surveillance seemed to repeatedly fall on already vulnerable populations, including children or historically marginalized groups, even more so in developing countries. That year, I stumbled across a Massachusetts-based, Harvard-incubated startup selling AI-powered headbands that said it could measure a student’s brain wave activity to tell a teacher whether or
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