Can robots take the place of teachers?

The robot teacher

Her name is Saya. She used to be a receptionist at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel in February 2007. She's now teaching at an elementary school in Tokyo. Saya took 15 years in the making. The aim the creators have in mind was to have a robot in every home by 2015.

The Robot initiative has been created for companies who wanted to cut down their costs by having robots perform secretarial tasks such as organising files, photocopying and faxing. Now it seems that Japan wants to introduce robots to be part of our daily lives especially to do labour and social work, such as cleaning and looking after the elderly population.

Saya has been given many characteristics. She is able to express six human emotions, these are surprise, fear, disgust, anger, sadness and happiness. Her eyes widen and her eyebrows arch when she's surprised. Her lips can also move to express pleasure and she can say phrases like "thank you" when she's happy.

The teacher robot cannot do much more than call out the children's names and give orders. Hiroshi Kobayashi, Tokyo University of Science professor and Saya's developer, says Saya is just meant to help people and warns against getting hopes up too high for its possibilities.

As the development of Saya has been very long and thorough, it may take many more years to produce the so-called perfect "human-form" robot to perform all laboring tasks in the home, offices as well as on the streets. Saya is likely to be modified and upgraded throughout her lifecycle to obtain the maximum peformance.

Technology progresses at a fast rate. If it is possible to produce a robot that can have most charateristics needed to perform relevant tasks, could we then be looking at a life on earth with robots? Many movies such as Terminator, Star Trek, iRobot, A.I. and Daryll have entertained us with the notion of living with robots and makes us think about the prospective issues. The American sitcom Dark Angel depicts well the construction and mass deployment of human-from robots that look, act, and feel as human beings, almost like enhanced humans.

Your views

• I'm strongly against this motion. A robot is a metal-bodied being. It has no humane feelings. It basically dictates according to the imformation stored. The fun and room-to-think-for-every-student is lost. BillabongBabe
• Thankfully, we've got a while to go before robot teachers are even a possibility; robotics isn't moving along as quickly as some people expected it to.DoJo/o~rama
• A robot wouldn't be able to teach humans because when your young alot of the things you learn are via facal expression & robots can't give young children that as they are mad of metal. Lil Devil