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Teaching With Robots
theodp writes "If you're a math, CS, or engineering grad, odds are you've seen your share of robot-like teaching — but never an actual robot teacher. Now, that's starting to change. Computer scientists are developing robots with social components that can engage people and teach them simple skills, including household tasks, vocabulary, elementary imitation and taking turns. Several countries have been testing teaching machines in classrooms. At USC, researchers have had their robot, Bandit, interact with autistic children. South Korea is 'hiring' hundreds of robots as teacher aides and classroom playmates and is experimenting with robots that would teach English."
I realise there seems to be a rather unhealthy obsession with robots in japan and korea but this is just going too far. You want some clunky pre-programmed robot to pander to your whims and stroke your ego - fine. But don't try the same shit with kids - its not fair. Get someone in to look after these children. If they're autistic they NEED to interact with people, not a glorified PC FFS.
It's an European research project that studies social interactions of robots and people, and attempts to get around the uncanny valley, among other things. They already have some quite interesting results, although I can't really elaborate on their scientific side, social robots being outside of my field of interest.
Disclaimer: I know a few LIREC members personally.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
I'm autistic, and I can tell you the last thing autistic kids need teaching them how to act neurotypical is a robot mentor.
The dirty secret of Autism Speaks and just about everything else (such as the developers of these robots) is that they advocate for exhausted parents, annoyed relatives, and the profit motive of Western medicine; they don't do anything for actual autistic people.
www.autistics.org
If the robotic teaching of basic skills becomes commonplace it will be at the expense of human interaction.
We already have too many people who are dysfunctional in society and lacking in the basic human skills of communications, emotions and compassion. I do not see this as much of an advancement, it is just a means of reducing the "human" component of our educational system.
Tisha Hayes
With unemployment as high as it is, you want to replace all remaining human occupied jobs with robots? What is wrong with you.
Maybe we could rethink society so we don't have to do things machines could, and still not starve.
As an unemployed person I tell you that nothing is wrong with me. If giving a society free labor is doing it an injury then something is wrong. Don't bring up anticompetitive dumping, that's only harmful because the agent doing the dumping will raise prices in time. And don't bring up cheap food in Africa, that's only harmful because Africa should be creating its own food and the gifts are not sustainable. If people are unemployed because of robots that means robots are producing all that hose people need -- and to a large extent that's already happening! Right now the government is taking wealth away from highly efficient industries and giving it to people who are producing nothing substantial. And it's happening by the tens of millions of people and by the billions of dollars. they call it "government handouts", "welfare", "social security", "disability relief", and "food stamps" Now there are two ways this can go. Destroy the technology, make our industries less efficient, don't build robots. Then you'll have millions of people doing unnecessary work. Or you can keep building more robots, raise productivity as much as possible, and have those same millions NOT doing unnecessary work. Unless you think that not working is inherently wrong, bad for a person, bad for society (if you do I strongly disagree) it can be said that RIGHT NOW society is moving into the utopia we have dreamed of, wherein robots work and people don't have to.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
"... and is experimenting with robots that would teach English." How is a robot going to teach English to children, when google voice is lucky to get half the words correct in a message from a native English speaker?
As a former ESL teacher in Seoul who also happens to be a Canadian, that particular group is using the tired rhetoric of minority bashing to protect jobs. It's mostly a group of Korean ESL teachers who want to drag ESL practices in South Korea back to the stone age of rote learning and memorization. I should mention here that the vast majority of Korean ESL teachers I worked with were excellent co-workers and very professional in their work ethics (which is more than can be said for many of the businessmen that I taught).
The cowboy days of teaching ESL in South Korea are pretty much done and gone, which is good for the industry. The South Korean Ministry of Education needs to get their act together and stop moving the goalposts for foreign teachers though, otherwise all the progress that has been made in the ESL sector will fall by the wayside, and Konglish will rear its ugly head once more.