What’s more harrowing than sending your child to school? Maybe getting stuck on a city bus that can’t drop below 55 miles per hour or it will explode, but that’s about it. Once your kid hits school age, you have to decide (if you’re lucky) between public and private education, vet the teachers, and neurotically worry about whether they’re learning enough and are socializing effectively. For seven hours a day, someone who’s practically a stranger is responsible for the wellbeing of one of the most important people in your life.
It’s a stressful situation, but maybe it would be less so if your kid’s teacher was a humanoid robot.
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Or not. Upstate New York’s Salamanca city central school district recently paused a $60,000 program to install an android teacher’s aide from the company Realbotix, named Sally, to assist their actual instructors. Sally was to have specifically been deployed into high school classrooms for students studying technology and robotics. As the superintendent of Salamanca school district said: “The robot also provides opportunities for students to learn how the robot is maintained, how it is updated with new approved content, and how to troubleshoot issues.” As you can imagine, Sally was chosen by the students of Salamanca to be a perky brunette rather than other options, like “bald middle-aged man” or “aspiring author struggling to finish their novel during lunch break”. I shudder to think what crude jokes teenage boys would come up with regarding their artificial teacher.
Fortunately, public outcry caused the district (which boasts a municipal population of only 6,000 people) to pause their dystopian plans. As bad as this idea was, at least it didn’t involve a robot disciplinarian issuing hall passes and assigning detention to unruly students. All we need is RoboCop chucking kids through a plate-glass window for being tardy to third period. Sally was programmed with working arms and hands, but not legs, which would prevent any random acts of violent retribution.
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I wish any of this made sense. The superintendent said Sally would give a small town, rural student body a chance to interact with high-level technology they’d otherwise have to “travel 1-2 hours” to see. Students could ask it questions about pertinent topics related to their classes. You know, like they could with the smartphones they probably have in their pockets with access to the internet – repository of all information known to humanity. But see, the difference is, this smartphone is shaped like a pretty lady.
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Teenagers are already skeptical or even outright annoyed by their teachers, with their pedantic rules and insistence that learning is fundamental. Teaching can be a thankless job, because of lack of resources, even in large metropolitan areas, let alone small towns. Public school teachers are often underpaid, making it harder to earn a decent living in a taxing profession. Why not take that $60,000 for a robot and divide it up amongst your instructors? Or just buy every student a laptop? Is having an uncanny valley android gesticulating about Arduino boards going to change anyone’s lives besides the upper management at Realbotix? No teenager is going to take this thing seriously or do anything except throw erasers at it while their real teacher isn’t looking.
And anyway, if society is going to thoughtlessly usher in an age of synthetic learning through artificial intelligence, why go with a generic humanoid? We should at least make our robots something kids would like. We could start with a self-aware Super Mario. I’d absolutely stop whatever I was doing to talk to a robo-Mario if I could, and I’m sure teens would do the same. Why is silicon the best material for building microprocessors? How does cloud storage work? What’s the easiest way to beat the Rainbow Ride level in Super Mario 64? Are Princess Peach and Princess Daisy sisters or just good friends?
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It doesn’t have to be just Mario. What about a robot Pikachu? Could Salamanca school district license the likeness of Logan Paul or MrBeast to teach algebra? We could have android Blippis running preschools, holographic Robin Williamses from Dead Poets Society in universities, and fake Sydney Sweeneys teaching acting. What if the Paw Patrol could work as crossing guards?
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Once again, the people we’ve put in charge of raising our children show a lack of understanding of actual children. Kids don’t want nondescript robots answering questions a search engine could do just as fast. They want to play Roblox and drink Mountain Dew. And maybe, just maybe, a real, flesh-and-blood human being could inspire them to want more than that. We’ll never find out if we try to outsource education to tech companies.
