It’s being reported that a few days ago, Senator Jim DeMint, as he addressed a church group in South Carolina, stated that gay men and sexually-active, unmarried women should not be allowed to teach our children. Fortunately for DeMint, though, it looks as though there may be a cost-effective alternative to those all-to-common Social Studies sodomites and makeup-wearing World History whores on the horizon. According to press reports out of Japan, robot teachers are fast becoming a viable alternative. Here’s a clip from the article.
Unlike more mechanical-looking robots like Honda Motor Co.’s Asimo, therobot teacher, called Saya, can express six basic emotions – surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness, sadness – because its rubber skin is being pulled from the back with motors and wiring around the eyes and the mouth.
In a demonstration, the robot’s mouth popped open, its eyes widened and eyebrows arched to appear surprised. Saya pulled back on its lips to make a smile, and said simple preprogrammed phrases such as “Thank you,” while its lips moved, to express pleasure.
“Robots that look human tend to be a big hit with young children and the elderly,” Hiroshi Kobayashi, Tokyo University of Science professor and Saya’s developer, told The Associated Press Wednesday. “Children even start crying when they are scolded”…
That’s right — they can even make children cry! They’re that damned good.
And, not just that, but they’ll work for free. And, what’s more, I suspect they could be programmed to coo sweetly while being made love to by principals, and say things like, “I love the way you administrate – so firm, so forceful.”
All kidding aside, I do think this is the way that some folks would like to see public education evolve, and it scares me. Seriously, in some school districts, we already have teachers reading from approved scripts. How much farther off could robots in the classroom be? Not only would they save us taxpayers a ton of money, but, more importantly, they’d break the back of the teacher’s union – one of the nation’s largest and most powerful Democratic unions we ahve. As that’s the case, it’s hard to imagine that any Republicans would stand in the way.
12 Comments
I was expecting to be a lot more impressed by the robot. The technology clearly still has a long way to go. You’re right about the trends, though. We’ll likely see robots and virtual instructors in the class room in the not so distant future. There is a silver lining in that they’re susceptible to hack, though. Parents and kids could access the code and have the teachers saying all kinds of inappropriate, hilarious, or thought provoking things.
Imagine having an animatronic Glenn Beck in each classroom, reading the daily news.
Until we can robotically simulate a Mary Kay Letourneau I just don’t see this idea going anywhere.
As I’ve said many times, it just KILLS NeoCons to know that women like me (sexually active, albeit married) are making more money than some of them at our union public schools. Right now, Dick Cheney was just about to jerk off to a picture of Glenn Beck sucking off an elephant but then he remembered TeacherPatti gleefully spending her money and little Dicky fell like an anchor.
Seriously, this thought terrifies me as well. We’ll end up with a nation of for-profit charter schools with robots reading from scrips and Boards of Directors making a fortune off of the backs of our children. On the positive side, I like the idea of hacking the robots to say inappropriate things. Let’s get to work on the TeacherPatti robot and only teach her words starting with “mf” and such.
I’d love to hear the robot telling kids how to perform gay sex acts.
Can the robots extrude McNuggets? If so, we could fire the lunch ladies too!
What we need to do is just close down publicly funded schools altogether. Everyone should just read the Bible instead.
I had a gay elementary school teacher (5th grade) and I can tell you that I was one of the sharpest tacks in the grade and I barely realized what his deal was until years later. Kids are smart but they don’t employ the same standards of judgement that adults do & I can assure anyone who cares to know that they’re not sitting in class drawing parallels between what they’re learning & their teacher’s sexuality. Adults may not realize this but a teacher’s sexuality is actually the LAST thing any student wants to consider unless they’re personally attracted to said teacher.
It pains me to think that a bunch of suited assholes would want to deny students a fantastic teacher & role model like Mr. D & all of the amazing memories & learning experiences he provided.
Try this. I made it last night.
http://192.20.225.36/tts/speech/6449e04ee67c675b1a6b946ef162a298.wav
That was fucking awesome. Please proceed.
It’s not working for me. I can only hope it was a recording of a robot instructing children on the joys of gay sex.
You guys are sick. There is nothing wrong with a good robot. It only does what it is supposed to so it is ultimately up to good or bad people to tell it what to do. Now, the bad robots – those you have to watch out for.