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A group of college students braved the frigid New England weather on Dec. 13, 2025, to attend a late afternoon review session at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Eleven of those students were struck by gunfire when a shooter entered the lecture hall. Two didnt survive. Shortly after, a petition circulated calling for better security for Brown students, including ID-card entry to campus buildings and improved surveillance cameras. As often happens in the aftermath of tragedy, the conversation turned to lessons for the future, especially in terms of school security. There has been rapid growth of the nations now US$4 billion school security industry. Schools have many options, from traditional metal detectors and cameras to gunshot detection systems and weaponized drones. There are also purveyors of artificial-intelligence-assisted surveillance systems that promise prevention: The gun will be detected before any shots are fired, and the shooting will never happen. They appeal to institutions struggling to protect their communities, and are marketed aggressively as the future of school shooting prevention. Im a criminologist who studies mass shootings and school violence. In my research, Ive found that theres a lack of evidence to support the effectiveness of these technological interventions. Grasping for a solution Implementation has not lagged. A survey from Campus Safety Magazine found that about 24% of K-12 schools report video-assisted weapons detection systems, and 14% use gunshot detection systems, like ShotSpotter. Gunshot detection uses acoustic sensors placed within an area to detect gunfire and alert police. Research has shown that gunshot detection may help police respond faster to gun crimes, but it has little to no role in preventing gun violence. Still, schools may be warming to the idea of gunshot detection to address the threat of a campus shooter. In 2022, the school board in Manchester, New Hampshire, voted to implement ShotSpotter in the districts schools after a series of active-shooter threats. Other companies claim their technologies provide real-time visual weapons detection. Evolv is an AI screening system for detecting concealed weapons, which has been implemented in more than 400 school buildings since 2021. ZeroEyes and Omnilert are AI-assisted security camera systems that detect firearms and promise to notify authorities within seconds or minutes of a gun being detected. These systems analyze surveillance video with AI programs trained to recognize a range of visual cues, including different types of guns and behavioral indicators of aggression. Upon recognizing a threat, the system notifies a human verification team, which can then activate a prescribed response plan. But even these highly sophisticated systems can fail to detect a real threat, leading to questions about the utility of security technology. Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, was equipped with Omnilerts gun detection technology in January 2025 when a student walked inside the school building with a gun and shot several classmates, one fatally, before killing himself. Lack of evidence This demonstrates an enduring problem with the school security technology industry: Most of these technologies are untested, and their effect on safety is unproven. Even gunshot detection systems have not been studied in the context of school and mass shootings outside of simulation studies. School shooting research has very little to offer in terms of assessing the value of these tools, because there are no studies out there. This lack is partly due to the low incidence of mass and school shootings. Even with a broad definition of school shootingsany gunfire on school grounds resulting in injurythe annual rate across America is approximately 24 incidents per year. Thats 24 more than anyone would want, but its a small sample size for research. And there are few, if any, ethically and empirically sound ways to test whether a campus fortified with ShotSpotter or the newest AI surveillance cameras is less likely to experience an active shooter incident because the probability of that school being victimized is already so low. Existing research provides a useful overview of the school safety technology landscape, but it offers little evidence of how well this technology actually prevents violence. The National Institute of Justice last published its Comprehensive Report on School Safety Technology in 2016, but its finding that the adoption of biometrics, smart cameras, and weapons detection systems was outpacing research on the efficacy of the technology is still true today. The Rand Corporation and the University of Michigan Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention have produced similar findings that demonstrate limited or no evidence that these new technologies improve school safety and reduce risks. While researchers can study some aspects of how the environment and security affect mass shooting outcomes, many of these technologies are too new to be included in studies, or too sparsely implemented to show any meaningful impact on outcomes. My research on active and mass shootings has suggested that the security features with the most lifesaving potential are not part of highly technical systems: They are simple procedures like lockdowns during shootings. The tech keeps coming Nevertheless, technological innovations continue to drive the school safety industry. Campus Guardian Angel, launched out of Texas in 2023, promises a rapid drone response to an active school shooter. Founder Justin Marston compared the drone system to having a SEAL team in the parking lot. At $15,000 per box of six drones, and an additional monthly service charge per student, the drones are equipped with non-lethal weaponry, including flash-bangs and pepper spray guns. In late 2025, three Florida school districts announced their participation in Campus Guardian Angels pilot programs. Three school districts in Florida are part of a pilot program to test drones that respond to school shootings. There is no shortage of proposed technologies. A presentation from the 2023 International Conference on Computer and Applications described a cutting-edge architectural design system that integrates artificial intelligence and biometrics to bolster school security. And yet, the language used to describe the outcomes of this system leaned away from prevention, instead offering to mitigate the potential for a mass shooting to be carried out effectively. While the difference is subtle, prevention and mitigation reflect two different things. Prevention is stopping something avoidable. Mitigation is consequence management: reducing the harm of an unavoidable hazard. Response versus prevention This is another of the enduring limitations of most emerging technologies being advertised as mass shooting prevention: They dont prevent shootings. They may streamline a response to a crisis and speed up the resolution of the incident. With most active shooter incidents lasting fewer than 10 minutes, time saved could have critical lifesaving implications. But by the time ShotSpotter has detected gunshots on a college campus, or Campus Guardian Angel has been activated in the hallways of a high school, the window for preventing the shooting has long since passed. Emily Greene-Colozzi is an assistant professor of criminology and justice studies at UMass Lowell. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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As the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) returns to Las Vegas from Jan. 6 to 9, the tech industry is gearing up for its annual spectacle of prototypes, silicon benchmarks and AI-branded gadgets. But one of the most consequential shifts in enterprise technology over the coming year will unfold far from the keynote stages and demo floors. HP, the 85-year-old Silicon Valley company long defined by PCs, printers, and enterprise hardware, is repositioning itself as a work-intelligence platformwhere devices learn continuously, services anticipate needs, and AI dissolves the traditional boundaries between hardware, software, and the cloud.Under Jim Nottingham, senior vice president and division president of Advanced Compute Solutions, HP is treating AI not as a feature or a marketing layer but as a structural force reshaping how the company builds products, manages its supply chain, and generates revenue.As enterprise spending shifts toward intelligent, autonomous systems, that strategy is becoming central to HPs future and to whether it can compete with contemporaries, including Dell and Lenovo on devices, while holding its ground against Microsoft and the cloud hyperscalers that control workplace software, data and AI workflows.Nottingham said HPs transformation began with an uncomfortable realization that work was not working as well as it should. Customers had raised these issues for years, but the true scale of the problem became clear only after HP measured it through its 2025 Work Relationship Index. The findings were striking as just 20% of knowledge workers say they have a healthy relationship with work, meaning most feel overwhelmed by fragmented tools, constant interruptions and systems that make work harder rather than more productive.We heard versions of this from customers across industries and geographies, Nottingham says. When you have visibility across millions of devices and organizations of every size, patterns like this become impossible to miss. Those insights forced HP to confront a deeper truth about AI. You cant just add AI to a device and call it transformation.Instead, HP rethought how devices, software, services and management systems work together across an entire workday. The shift cut across personal systems, print and services at the same time, pushing the company toward a single, platform-led vision of the future of work rather than three separate roadmaps.At CES, well demonstrate that platform-led view across the portfolio, Nottingham says. AI became the organizing principle because its the first technology capable of tying those pieces together and enabling work environments that are more adaptive, secure, and intelligent. From hardware economics to intelligence at scale HPs reinvention comes at a moment of pressure. Hardware margins are shrinking as devices commoditize, while hyperscalers increasingly control enterprise workflows and set the bar for intelligent work systems. HPs counter is scale. Few companies span endpoints, managed fleets, printing infrastructure, and workforce software at a global reach. HP is betting that AI layered across that footprint can drive higher-margin services and recurring revenue without forcing customers to replace existing systems.Recent financial results help explain the companys confidence. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, the company reported revenue growth of 4% year over year, driven largely by strength in Personal Systems. AI PCs accounted for more than 30% of shipments during the quarter, and HP expects that share to approach 50% next year. Subscription and services businesses now generate billions of dollars in annual recurring revenue, reinforcing a shift away from one-time device sales toward a more durable, platform-driven business model.Industry experts argue that this shift reflects where enterprise computing is headed, but execution is what separates leaders from laggards. Pierre Baqué, CEO and founder of Neural Concept, said meaningful AI transformation requires intelligence to be embedded into system design from the outset, accounting for real-world constraints and tradeoffs.The future of enterprise computing is about leveraging intelligent, AI applications that learn and adapt across the full lifecycle, improving how engineering teams accelerate and validate their operations, says Baqué.HPs AI PCs are built around that philosophy. The systems integrate neural processing units that run AI workloads locally, enabling real-time inference without constant reliance on the cloud. The payoff is lower cost, faster performance and stronger privacyadvantages that matter in regulated industries and bandwidth-constrained environments, and that distinguish HPs approach from cloud-first Copilot PCs and consumer-led AI designs from Apple and Qualcomm.For specialized workers inside companiesthe people responsible for the most complex and demanding workflowsthe stakes are much higher, Nottingham adds. Whether the work involves generative AI, simulation or data science, our solutions streamline complex workflows, remove friction and help increase productivity. A different competitive wager HP is embedding AI across categories competitors often treat separately, including AI PCs, workstations, printing and device management. Print AI applies generative models to formatting, security and intent recognitionan area few expected to see meaningful AI impact. In AI PCs, documents, meetings and workflows can be queried instantly, while tasks such as video editing and image processing shrink from minutes to seconds, even offline.By enabling hybrid compute that combines local responsiveness through AI with cloud scale, we are helping these teams work faster and more effectively without disrupting their flow, Nottingham says. He added that AI PCs now make up a growing share of HPs shipments, and adoption is accelerating. It reflects where enterprise computing already is, not where it might be someday.HPs transformation raises a larger question for the industry: If a company with HPs scale and legacy must become intelligent to stay competitive, what does that mean for every other maker of work devices?Autumn Stanish, a director analyst at Gartner, says the industrys shift from device-driven revenue to software, services and lifecycle-based models has been inevitable.This has been inevitable for a long while now, and a very slow transition for the hardware industry, she said, as longer device lifecycles and price pressure eat into traditional hardware profits. Device pricing isn’t going rise enoughto make up for that lost revenue, pushing companies to look beyond selling PCs and other systems. She notes that HPs expansion into digital employee experience tools such as DXP, along with managed device lifecycle services now offered by HP, Dell and Lenovo, reflects where competition is moving. Cloud AI processing is expensive for providers and customers alike, she added, making local, on-device intelligence increasingly essential. The future of work, then, may arrive not through spectacle, but through quiet reinventionwhere AI fades into the background and systems adapt to how work actually happens.
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At 10:24 p.m., while brushing his teeth, my husbands phone pings. Its not an emergency. No one is bleeding. No building is on fire. Its an email that begins with the words, Just circling back. In France, this would be illegal. Or at least deeply frowned upon. Since 2017, French workers at companies with more than 50 employees have had a legally protected right to disconnect. That means, employers cant expect workers to answer emails or messages after hours. Similar policies exist across Europe, including Spain, Belgium, and Greece. Meanwhile, in America, were circling back at bedtime. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2015\/08\/erikaaslogo.png","headline":"Girl, Listen: A Guide to What Really Matters","description":"Ericka dives into the heat of modern motherhood, challenging the notion that personal identity must be sacrificed at the altar of parenting. ","substackDomain":"https:\/\/erickasouter.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} The Country That Turned “Always On” Into a Personality Trait In theory, Americans love freedom. In practice, we seem to love productivity even more. Historically, we dont just work, we identify with our work. We humblebrag about being slammed. We apologize for vacations. We wear burnout like a well-earned Miss America crown. The unspoken rule is clear: If youre not reachable, youre not serious. Ive interviewed hundreds of working parents over the years, and one thing comes up again and again: Its not just the workload that is crushing them, its the anticipation of it. The constant low-grade anxiety that an email could arrive at any moment. That their boss might just need one thing. Silence could be interpreted as laziness. Work doesnt end anymore. Its like the constant background noise of our personal lives. Americas Love Affair with Hustle Culture (and Why We Cant Quit It) Heres the uncomfortable truth: We dont just tolerate hustle culture, we reward it. We promote the people who respond fastest. We praise the ones who go above and beyond. We quietly penalize the ones who protect their time, especially women and parents. Especially mothers. Disconnecting in America isnt seen as healthy; its seen as risky. And thats the difference between us and Europe. In France, disconnecting is a labor right. In the U.S., its a personal boundary you have to negotiate politely without inconveniencing anyone important. Good luck with that. The Myth That Availability Equals Value One of the biggest lies of modern work is that responsiveness equals commitment. But study after study shows the opposite. Constant availability leads to burnout, cognitive fatigue, poorer decision-making, and lower creativity. When your brain never powers down, it doesnt perform better; it performs worse. And yet, here we are. Answering emails from the sidelines of the soccer field and Slack-ing during bedtime. Weve turned the ability to be interrupted into a marketable job skill. So, Could a Right to Disconnect Ever Work Here? Legally? Maybe. Culturally? Thats a higher hurdle. Because Americas resistance to disconnecting isnt just about logistics. Its about identity. Work isnt just what we do; its who we are. For many of us, especially in an economy as frighteningly precarious as ours, being reachable feels like job protection. Until we change what we reward, no policy will fully save us. A right to disconnect would only work in America if we stopped confusing exhaustion with ambition and availability with worth. What Would Real Progress Actually Look Like? Im not sure legislation is enough for a cultural shift. We will need leaders who model boundaries instead of martyrdom. With companies that measure output rather than online status. With workplaces that understand rest isnt the enemy of success; its the fuel. And maybe, just maybe, it would start with all of us resisting the urge to circle back at 10:24 p.m.. The French have a phrase for this: la vie. Its the part of life that happens after work. In America, we call it being unreachable, and we are still not sure we are allowed to be. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2015\/08\/erikaaslogo.png","headline":"Girl, Listen: A Guide to What Really Matters","description":"Ericka dives into the heat of modern motherhood, challenging the notion that personal identity must be sacrificed at the altar of parenting. ","substackDomain":"https:\/\/erickasouter.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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