Well, I had quite a range of teachers over the years, but I can't honestly say I ever had one who was robotic.
Japanese schoolchildren may not be able to make this claim.
Japan, it seems, is deploying the robot Saya on a trial basis at a primary school in Tokyo. (Source: UK Telegraph.)
In this picture, Saya looks pretty impassive and dummy-like as she monitors her charges, but don't be fooled. She is multi-lingual, can conduct roll call and assign tasks, and make facial expressions.
The humanoid was originally developed to replace a variety of workers, including secretaries, in a bid to allow firms to cut costs while still retaining some kind of human interaction.
Okay, I just flat out don't get Japan.
Much as I can see that robots can be used for certain types of work, I don't see why they should be in human form. Why not C3PO or R2D2 - you know, robot-robots. I do see how a robot could cut costs, but I just don't see how putting a pliable latex face on a robot lets you "retain" any "kind of human interaction." (The one place I can maybe see where this might work is in dealing with the autistic, the severely depressed, et al. who may respond better to communications in non-human but vaguely human like format. In fact, a humanoid is being designed as a companion for those with Alzheimer's.)
Other uses already deployed for the humanoid - which was created by University of Tokyo professor Hiroshi Kobayashi - are traffic directing, acting as a receptionist, and "luring university graduates to sign up to courses."
Other than signing up for a course in robotics, I can't imagine what kinds of courses that an object that's just a layer of latex and a wink-and-a-nod removed from a crash test dummy could lure a grad student into.
Again, I so don't get Japan.
According to the article, the Japanese government wants a robot in every home by 2015. To what end, the article doesn't say. Perhaps to tend to Japan's elderly - and getting older - population. Robots that can open a soup can, take out the trash, and figure out how to work multiple remote controls would be useful to me now, let alone in a year or two when I become elderly. But I really don't want a humanoid robot - although, come to think of it, having a robot that looked like George Clooney would be kind of fun. Mostly, if I do get a robot, I want it to look like a retro-1950's robot. I prefer my humans to be human, thank you.
Professor Kobayashi, by the way, "believes that within a few years robots with the physical and mental skills of a two-year old child will be available. "
Yikes! Just what the elderly need racing around: grown-up sized robots with the physical and mental skills of a two-year old.
The Boston Globe picked up on Saya last week, and there I learned that Saya "can express six basic emotions -- surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness, sadness."
Call me a literalist, or call me old-fashioned, but Saya is really not expressing human emotions. She - I mean it - is demonstrating the robotic equivalent of showing emotion.
Professor Kobayashi says that young children and old folks respond best to humanoid robots.
"Children even start crying when they are scolded."
But Kobayashi doesn't see Saya replacing human teachers anytime soon. Pretty much all she can do is call the roll and holler orders, like "Be quiet." It is, he admits, "Just a tool."
The kids in the test-drive classroom - fifth and sixth graders - did get a kick out of their temporary teacher, however.
Still, I'm relieved to see that some scientists have reservations about surrendering care of the young and the old to robots. Georgia Tech's Ronald Arkin is one.
"Simply turning our grandparents over to teams of robots abrogates our society's responsibility to each other, and encourages a loss of touch with reality for this already mentally and physically challenged population," he said.
And as for robot teachers, if I'd had them, I'd have missed out on an awful lot.
Could a robot have grabbed Michael Mahoney's soda can and swung it back and forth as she ranted about "a seventh grader who doesn't know how to use a can opener" - only to have the can explode on Sister Florence as she demonstrated her can-opening prowess? (This was just prior to the introduction of flip-top cans.)
Would a robot have ever had the knowledge and outright generosity of spirit to explain to a bunch of nine year olds that a school fire in Chicago that killed a hundred kids was actually intended for Our Lady of the Angels in Worcester, and not Our Lady of Angeles in Chicago, with the result of God's one mistake being that good and innocent children died while bad and guilty children lived?
Could a robot have had the presence of mind to rearrange the class seating arrangement on a moment's notice so that we could win the contest highlighted in the December St. Dominic Savio Club Newsletter, a contest offering a prize to a classroom if someone with the initials "MC" (for Merry Christmas) was seated in the second row, fifth seat? What a coincidence that Sister Saint Whilhelmina put Michael Curran in that seat! Unfortunately, plenty of other non-robot nuns must have come up with the same amazing coincidence, because we won nothing. (It was probably just a bunch of Dominic Savio holy cards, anyway, and I already had one.)
I really don't need to supply any more reasons to make my case.
No robot could ever have replaced the teachers I had.
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I will say that I did have plenty of rational and excellent teachers. It's just that the loonies are much more interesting to think about.
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