1. The first thing that shocked me in the video was how the surveillance was beyond the workplace. Mr. Singh told Neeta the band was “compulsory at work but optional outside” but then immediately pushed her to wear it to sleep too, telling her it would come with bonuses and benefits. When she agreed, she consented to 24/7 monitoring in exchange for these advantages. What made it more disturbing and shocking was that Mr. Singh later confronted her about partying, going to “dodgy parts of town” and not sleeping enough. He had data on all of it even though this is not how it should be used. The second thing that shocked me was learning how Timnit Gebru was fired from Google. She co-led Google’s own Ethical AI team, and was pushed out after co-authoring a paper that flagged risks of large language models. The irony was that a company with an internal team explicitly dedicated to AI ethics fired one of its leaders for doing exactly that job. Timnit described being fired in the middle of her vacation, followed by harassment campaigns and threats. It revealed that ethical AI research inside big tech isn’t really independent. When the findings threaten the business, the research gets buried and the researcher gets removed.

2. This week we watched a video where a girl was drinking and her surveillance bracelet reported it to her doctor, who then stopped her medication. The point wasn’t whether she was right or wrong to drink. It was that a system was watching her outside of any medical or work context and that data directly affected a decision about her health. Watching the Model Employee video immediately reminded me of that. Both videos show the same thing: automated systems reaching into parts of your life you didn’t expect, and the data they collect having real consequences. AI and algorithmic systems aren’t neutral, they carry assumptions and the people most exposed to their consequences are usually the ones with the least power to push back. Honestly, I didn’t think about any of this when the semester started. These two videos together are what made it actually click for me.

3. The first thing I’ll actually change is reading terms and conditions more carefully for anything AI-related, because Neeta put on that bracelet without fully understanding what she was agreeing to, and I realized I do the same thing constantly. At work, I’ll be more careful about what information I put into Siemens’ AI portal since that data might be collected somewhere. Outside of work, I won’t let AI tools build too detailed a picture of me, because that data might not just sit there. It may get shared, sold, and used to profile me based on my preferences. I want to use AI less overall. Watching these videos made me reflect on something I already felt and that over-relying on AI has genuinely weakened some of my own skills, and I don’t want to keep doing that.

4. Something I think would be worth covering is real examples of companies that already track their employees. The film felt like it could be fiction but it made me wonder how much of this is actually happening right now. I had no idea this was already being done at places like Amazon or Uber. Seeing real cases in class would make the whole surveillance discussion feel a lot more relatable.