Robotic Nation Evidence

Robots and Teachers

The BBC is reporting, in an article entitled "Watching TV is bad for children", on the effects of TV on young children. The article says:

Children under two should not be allowed to watch any TV, experts say. Older children should watch no more than two hours a day, the researchers at the Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Centre in Seattle said.

Each hour in front of the TV increased a child's chances of attention deficit disorder by 10%, their research in the Pediatrics journal showed.

The most provocative part of the article, however, is this sentence:

Children who were exposed to the unrealistic levels of stimulation at a young age continued to expect this in later life, leading to difficulty dealing with the slower pace of school and homework.

What this sentence brings up is the fact that there are now two ways to look at the world:

• In our current view of the world, kids who get over-stimulated become a problem because their brains expect more than school can deliver. Therefore, we label them as "sick", calling the disease Attention Deficit Disorder, and we medicate them with Ritalin et al to slow their brains down.
  
  
• In the new view of the world, we would instead encourage kids to over-stimulate their brains as much as possible. This would speed their brains up, allowing them to accomplish more in shorter periods of time, reach higher levels of intellectual achievement, absorb new material faster, etc. Then we would label things like traditional classrooms and homework as "Stimulation Deprivation Environments" (SPEs). These would be dangerous places that cause the highly advanced, super-saturated brains of these stim-kids to wither from boredom.

At some point, traditional physical environments will all become SPEs, and kids will only feel comfortable in artificial environments pumped into their brains either through Vite Racks or through Vertebrane systems.

What does this have to do with teachers? Clearly the BBC article is pointing out that the days of the traditional teacher in a traditional classroom setting are numbered. Why would we continue to educate our children in boring, Stimulation-Deprived Environments? Instead, we will begin the changeover to robotic and computer-enhanced education of a highly stimulating nature. This will begin an upward cycle of ever increasing stimulation for our children's brains, to the point where the people alive today seem "slow" and "backward" by comparison.

See also this post.