“Just like a good personal trainer, we want the robots to be able to guide the child toward a behavior that we desire,” said Brian Scassellati, a computer science professor at Yale and principal investigator for the study.
full story here…..
In a day and age where the National Stasi Administration or NSA records every phone conversation, email, and text message into a database for future use doesn’t creep you out. Then this story will seem relatively benign. However, if you are totally creeped out by the Nanny state telling you how to live your life and raise your children you will find this report very alarming.
The article talks about how great it will be to create robots to teach your children to read, workout, and all the other activities normally associated with parents teaching children. Though the article says that the robots are not to replace the function of the parents role in the child’s life, despite them being programmed replicate those functions exactly.
For those of you that have not realized that the future of labor around the world will be centered around robots, hopefully this will provide you with a little wake up call. Robots are scheduled to replace the majority of unskilled laborers and retail workers by 2050. Just one example is in Japan, where their is a counsel at the McDonald’s to take your order instead of a human being. It is similar to the self-checkout at the grocery store.
This trend will replace cheap foreign labor as the technology improves and becomes more affordable for companies to replace their workers with robots or different forms of machines. The more demands made on employers by governments for workers will only increase this process. Why would you pay somebody 15 dollars per hour to take orders at McDonald’s when you can replace them with a kiosk. It has already begun and it is a disturbing trend for the future.
This brings us back to this education robot, which in my opinion will accomplish a few different objectives for the nanny state.
1) It will put another device in the home which will be able to monitor, record, and report on the behavior of the child, as well as the parents. If you think this is unlikely, you should look up the reports from a few years back, where they were spying on kids at home through their school issued laptops.
2) It will indoctrinate/normalize the acceptability of taking orders from robots in the minds of very young and impressionable children.
3) With parents that the state deems are unfit to raise their children, they could require a robot such as this to be in the home. As an example in Britain they have a program where CCTV cameras are installed in the home to ensure the children have a good environment. If these parents refuse they lose their welfare benefits.
These are just a few of the trends that I see coming out of this program. Decide for yourself whether the coming robotic revolution is going to benefit humanity or effectively replace it. You already see the impact of what drones are having on the military and warfare. What is to think that the effect on the economy will be any different.
-Trevor
@kfir720am