Abstract
Firearm-related injuries are one of the leading causes of death for children in the United States, and most of them involve unsecured firearms in the home. Behavioral Skills Training, or BST, teaches children Stop, Don’t Touch, Run Away and Tell a Trusted Adult and is the method with the strongest evidence behind it. The issue that depends on trained facilitators and controlled settings which makes it really hard to scale. My team built an AI-based system that aims to deliver BST without the same difficulties.
The system has three modules that match the BST stages of instruction, rehearsal, and generalization. A NAO humanoid robot delivers the initial lesson through a scripted but adaptive dialogue. An AR training module that runs on a phone inside of a headset has the child rehearse the four safety steps in three realistic scenarios (kitchen, bedroom, garage) where they find an unsecured firearm and have to respond correctly. All of the conversational interaction across the module is run by a large language model that uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) knowledge base that uses documents on firearm safety, child psychology, and BST. We evaluated the system with ten experts in child development, education, and firearm safety. The experts evaluated criteria such as; instructional effectiveness, age-appropriateness, engagement, usability, and emotional safety.
Cryonics is the process of preserving a person’s body or brain at extremely low temperatures after legal death, with the hope of being revived once medical technology has advanced to cure the cause of death. The average preservation plan costs around €200,000 which puts it out of reach for most people. My research paper asks what social and economic factors create the unequal access to cryonics, and what that inequality reveals about emerging life-saving technologies more broadly.
The analysis uses the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework to trace how competing interpretations from scientists, medical institutions, religious groups, the general public, and wealthy individuals shaped the way that cryonics developed. Early on different groups disagreed on whether cryonics was a reasonable extension of medicine or just a fools errand. No single interpretation ever won out, so cryonics was never able to reach closure and stayed outside of mainstream medicine. This gap is what the private organizations ended up filling. Once cryonics was set up as a fee-based consumer service, the high cost became a normal feature of the technology rather than a problem worth fixing.
The conclusion is that inequality in cryonics is not really an accident but is a result of how the technology was interpreted and institutionalized over time. If cryonics ever does work, the people who benefit will be the ones who already had the money to get preserved in the first place. This matters beyond cryonics itself because other emerging life-saving technologies, like medical AI, regenerative medicine, and life extension research, could easily end up in the same place if they develop outside of public institutions.
The two projects might seem unrelated at first. One is an engineering system that teaches children firearm safety, and the other is a social analysis of a speculative technology and industry. What ties these two projects together is one central question: when a technology has the potential to save lives, who ends up with access to it and why? Cryonics shows what happens when a lifesaving technology develops inside the private market. Access tracks wealth rather than medical need, and the inequality gets normalized before technology even works. The firearm safety project is an attempt to go in the other direction. BST does work, but it is not scalable, and the children most at risk from unsecured firearms are the ones least likely to have the training available to them. Building the training into an AI driven robot and AR system lowers the logistical and economic barriers to effective firearm safety education.
Both projects treat equity as a design decision rather than something to deal with later on. The STS paper shows what happens when that decision is just skipped, and the technical project is an attempt to make a different decision early on.
