Robotic Nation Evidence

Robotic Education

New champion of fire safety: a robotic dog

From the article:

As kindergartners from Rudolph Elementary School approached the fire station Monday, Sparky the Fire Dog and Pumper was getting ready for duty. Sparky is a robotic dog who rides in his own child-size pumper truck.

From this ad:

Sparky the Fire Dog robot is an exciting new tool for teaching fire safety. A fully animated Dalmatian Dog and fire truck robot, Sparky can move, speak, listen, play audio cassette tapes, wink, blink, and move his eyes right and left, all by remote control. When he talks, his mouth moves in synchronization with these words. The fire truck can be made to go forward or in reverse and turn right or left. There are headlights, flashing emergency safety lights, and sirens on the truck - a great way to capture the audience's attention! Sparky can be used with great success in school classrooms, assemblies, station tours, mall exhibits, state and local fairs, parades, and any other setting where your fire safety message is presented. 3 to 12 year-olds love the robot but adults are amazed by the interaction as well.

One very common rationalization used to argue against the Robotic Nation is, "Human beings will never let robots replace humans in the workforce, especially in areas like teaching." Yet here we have robots interacting with kindergartners as the preferred means of education -- robots are better than humans at teaching fire safety to children.

This will be true in every area of education. Robots and computer-based video training will be more entertaining, more energetic, more "kid friendly", much more consistent and far cheaper than humans in the classroom. Human teachers will be just as vulnerable during the robotic revolution as everyone else.

The same will be true in day care centers. For example, Disney now has a wireless animatronic robot roaming in one of its amusement parks:



This article offers several other photos. This article also has a nice description. Right now these are not intelligent robots -- they are operated instead by humans using remote control joy sticks. But as robotic intelligence advances over the next 20 to 30 years, these creatures will become intelligent, autonomous beings.

Where would your child rather go to day care -- to a center staffed by bored teenagers and 20-somethings with minimal training and not a lot of interest, or to a center staffed by Barney the purple Dinosaur and his friends, all programmed to be constantly happy, caring and interested all day long?

Would teenagers in high school rather be taught physics by a human, or by a robot who looks like Albert Einstein? Would they rather be coached in PE by a human, or by a robot who looks like and plays like Michael Jordan in his prime? The choice is obvious...

See also: Why millions of teachers will soon be out of work.