Writing Exercise 9

I cannot specifically remember a time when I heard about robots being used for English language instruction. Seemingly, each week a new story comes out of Asia, usually from Japan, about how they invented a robot which does some daily task. Their robots usually seem so weird to me; so much so that I can only superimpose a “01010101010010101 means Kill Meeeeee,” onto any Asian robot media clip upon viewing it. They freak me out. I never take them seriously because the lack a approachable human form and set of mannerisms. I know that the Asian RoboMasters are trying to construct beings which aid us on an everyday level, but not until viewing these clips have I been convinced they they can viably help us.

The Korean instructional robots now seem to have developed a more human diction and inflection than Sir Stephen Hawking; who is not a robot according to my research. The Korean robots seem like they can actually aid in the instruction of word selection and pronunciation. Given that substantial improvements have been made in more human-like robot behavior, I believe that robots, over time, will eventually be common place in the classroom. I predict this occurrence by the year 2040, when even Sir Hawking himself will actually be a robot. Mr. Whitehill's improvements on the facial recognition of humans by robots is a mile-stone. I do not know much about pedagogy, but I do feel it's important that a teacher be able to perceive and relate to his student as a subject. The teacher should be able to see a wrinkled brow, brought about by confusion. With Mr. Whithall's recognition programming, educational robots will be more apt to do this.

Another comment made by Mr. Cavallo, gave me hope that instructional robots can be made effective. Cavallo stated that his aim was to adapt robots to the human way of learning and not vice versa. A robot aiding us in our natural way is what I would like to see, assuming that robots will be instructing on a large scale in the future. I'd be worried if the paradigm of human learning is shifted out of a need to adapt to a robotic teaching device.

I do not have much detailed speculation on how the advent of robot instruction would affect writing. Assuming that print is constantly dying and students would have lesser needs for textbooks, robots may drive writers to write for robots. These robots are going to need idiomatic expressions, textbook terms, subsets of dialect, and technical methods programmed into what they can teach. These bits of information must have a human source. I am not proposing that more writers will be employed, I simply mean to convey that I believe that there will be more robot-specified writing performed.