The Robots Are Coming!

by Andres Oppenheimer

  TEACHERS WILL NO LONGER BE THE ONLY PURVEYORS OF KNOWLEDGE

  Although Professor Einstein’s television debut left much to be desired, I came out of the interview convinced that educational robots and other intelligent machines will quickly find their way into classrooms and homes. While they won’t replace most teachers, they will take over a number of their current tasks. After all, robots have virtually all the qualities of an ideal teacher: they have unlimited patience, never get tired of their students’ questions, are able to explain their lessons in multiple ways depending on each student’s preferred way of learning, and are available twenty-four hours a day, anytime and anywhere. Plus, robots are able to monitor their students’ progress using sensors that detect their levels of comprehension based on the tone of their voice and dilation in their pupils, thus eliminating the need for regular testing. They can make learning seem more like a game and less like torture. All this will force teachers and professors to reinvent themselves and their profession.

  Until now teachers “taught” their students. That is, they passed on their knowledge. But now, with Google’s and YouTube’s search engines, as well as Siri and other virtual assistants who are able to answer any and all questions, the teacher’s role as a transmitter of knowledge has been completely taken over. Any Internet search engine has immensely more information than a human teacher, can deliver it more quickly, and can explain it in many more different ways. And robots don’t get impatient when a student goes off on a tangent with a string of questions that veer off the issue being discussed.

  “When children find something interesting, teachers often don’t have enough time to fully explain it,” Rifkin told me. “But Professor Einstein does. We can ask him as many questions as we want the deeper we get into a topic. We can ask him, ‘What’s a dumpling?’ and Professor Einstein will say that ‘it’s a kind of food made with dough, water, vegetables, and meat.’ Then we can ask him, ‘What’s dough?’ He will tell us that it’s a food made from flour and water. Then the kid might ask, ‘Where does flour come from?’ and so on.”

  But since any virtual assistant can easily handle a string of questions, Professor Einstein’s biggest advantage is that he can help students solve problems from many different angles. If we don’t understand the way he’s explaining a particular topic, the robot will try another and another until we get it. He can see us and listen to what we’re saying. He can tell from our tone of voice if we’re not truly grasping a particular concept, and he’ll try to find a better way to convey it, whether it’s visual or auditory, through humor or with games. If a student learns better visually, for example, Professor Einstein will use his hand and point to a computer screen showing an illustrated explanation of the lesson. If we learn better by listening, he will tell us a story.

  TEACHERS WILL BECOME MOTIVATORS, COUNSELORS, AND PERSONAL THERAPISTS

  As their traditional role as conveyors of knowledge gradually fades away and is replaced by robots and virtual reality, teachers will have to reinvent themselves, becoming motivators, academic counselors, spiritual guides, and personal therapists. They will still teach certain things, but they will be “soft skills” like intellectual curiosity, personal initiative, mental flexibility, teamwork, and ethical behavior. At least for the foreseeable future, robots won’t be able to match human educators when it comes to instilling people with moral principles, a sense of purpose, and a desire to change the world for the better.

  In this sense, the growing use of robots and virtual reality to impart knowledge could be good news for teachers: it will free up time they ordinarily spend preparing their classes, which they can then use to focus on the ethical aspects of education. They will also be able to devote more time to work on the strengths and weaknesses of their students, and encourage them to be more creative and enterprising. A robot like Professor Einstein won’t be able to teach these skills as well as a human, at least for now.

  “It’s great to have a tutor who never gets tired of your questions, who has infinite time, and cares only about your needs,” says Randall Bass, the executive director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University. “There is tremendous potential, especially for people who don’t have access to good education. But there are those of us who think education isn’t just about technical knowledge: we have to be thinking also about the moral aspect, helping the students be good people, to work for positive change, and be able to make complex moral and ethical decisions. I don’t think Professor Einstein can do that very well, at least not yet.”

  WITHIN THE NEXT FIVE YEARS, THERE WILL BE A ROBOT IN EVERY HOME

  I asked Rifkin how long it might be before his creation or other robots like it will work their way into our homes. “Within the next three, four, or five years,” he said. How could he be so sure? Because it’s already happening, he said. “Look at the case of Roomba: it’s a robotic vacuum cleaner, and just look at how many people are using it all across the world. So when it comes to a personal robot like Professor Einstein, I think within the next three to five years people will have them for all sorts of reasons, from medicine to day care, classroom supervision, help with homework, and many others.”

  Part of this inventor’s enthusiasm is that the prices for these humanoid robots are already within the budgets of many consumers. Professor Einstein was released in early 2017 and retailed for $300 through an offer on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter.com. Its creators had set a goal of raising $750,000, and within just a few weeks they had raised more than $850,000. Whether it was out of curiosity or necessity, people wanted to buy this robot.

  Skeptics will argue that just a few years ago, the “One Laptop per Child” program was supposed to revolutionize education and replace teachers with computers. That, of course, didn’t pan out. But even if Professor Einstein doesn’t end up being a hit, some other robot, tablet, or virtual reality headset equipped with artificial intelligence most likely will be. The X Prize Foundation in Silicon Valley—the same organization that is offering a prize for whoever can invent the best Star Trek–style tricorder—announced a $15 million competition to develop a robot or other electronic device that can teach Tanzanian children how to read and write in eighteen months without the aid of any human teachers. Under the rules of the competition, whoever wins the prize will be obligated to publish online for free how the device works. It is likely that shortly thereafter, there will be tens of millions of new robotic educators out there teaching kids across the world in a much more effective way.

  WILL ROBOTS IN OUR HOMES SPY ON US?

  I asked Rifkin whether these educational robots, with their eyes and ears, won’t invade our privacy. How do we know that they won’t be filming and recording us all day long, and perhaps sell information about us to governments or companies hungry for data about us? Just a few weeks before our interview, news had broken that during the course of a criminal investigation, police in Arkansas had seized an Amazon virtual assistant from a private home.

  The police had charged James Bates with murdering a friend who had attended a party at his house and whose body was found in a hot tub in the backyard the next morning. Investigators confiscated the Amazon Echo as evidence and demanded the manufacturer, Amazon, turn over everything the device recorded. The prosecutors argued that, since the virtual assistant was sitting right there in the living room, it had likely heard—and possibly recorded—everything that happened the night of the murder. The case made headlines across the country when Amazon refused to turn over any data, and many defenders of the right to privacy began to wonder whether home robots could be used—or worse, were already being used—to spy on their owners.

  Rifkin assured me that, at least when it comes to Professor Einstein, there’s nothing to fear. Any filming and recording done by the robot is contained within the robot itself. “We don’t retain any information. When the camera records you, it’s just to
recognize your face. We don’t upload photos, we don’t store images, we don’t transfer anything. Anything the camera sees stays in the robot locally, and again, it’s just for facial recognition purposes. The microphones don’t transmit any audio, either. They only transmit voice patterns, not your voice itself. Absolutely nothing is stored in the cloud. Everything in the device is encrypted: it’s as secure as your credit card,” he claimed. But the big question will be whether robot manufacturers will be able to resist the temptation of selling the information they will be collecting from inside our own homes. For many companies, that could be a much bigger business than the robots themselves.

  VIRTUAL REALITY WILL REVOLUTIONIZE TEACHING

  When I visited Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, they made me a presentation that absolutely convinced me that virtual reality will be as effective as, if not more effective than, educational robots. Basically, augmented reality and virtual reality can do something neither a human nor a robotic teacher can: transport us through space and time. It allows us to place ourselves into a geographic or historical reality—whether it’s the Egyptian pyramids or a Roman market in the second century B.C.—just as if we were in a movie.

  Benjamin Schrom, a project manager at Google Expeditions, the company’s virtual reality educational division, showed me the Google cardboard viewfinder sitting on the table in the conference room where we were meeting, and invited me to look through it. Instantly I found myself in the middle of a jungle. As I turned around in a 360-degree circle, I saw mountains, waterfalls, and rivers. And these were real images: the same things I would have seen if I were actually standing in that actual location in the real world. “This tool turns teachers into superheroes. They can take their students on field trips to places they would otherwise never be able to visit, and without even having to leave the classroom,” Schrom told me as I looked, mesmerized, at the landscape around me.

  Google put these VR cardboards on the market alongside a virtual class on jungles and has been going full speed ahead to develop other virtual courses. There are already more than five hundred apps that let students use these devices among other things to virtually swim with sharks, travel through space, or stroll through a museum, and there are soon to be thousands more. As more students buy it, more developers will be creating apps, Schrom explained. The young executive, a man in his thirties who, like most of his colleagues at Google, wore jeans and a T-shirt—in fact, I didn’t see a single tie at any Silicon Valley tech company—told me he had been a teacher before entering the world of technology and had experienced firsthand the limited access to materials that educators have.

  “Imagine you want to dissect a frog in biology class,” Schrom offered by way of example. “It can be complicated to do that in real life, so many schools just use a blackboard or photographs. But with virtual reality, it’s a lot easier: each of the students can dissect their own virtual frog, remove the heart and other organs, all of that. It’s a visual and very personal experience, not a symbolic and abstract one.”

  WILL CHILDREN CONFUSE VIRTUAL REALITY WITH REAL LIFE?

  Despite all its advantages, virtual reality has its problems, such as the danger that children might confuse it with real life. A study by Bank of America and Merrill Lynch indicates that virtual reality will lead to a new global technological revolution not unlike the massive boom in smartphone use during the first decade of the current millennium, but it comes with a warning: “We also identify longer-term risks around the psychological and neurological impacts, social isolation, hindered vision, privacy and cybersecurity.”

  According to another study, by Stanford University, a group of children who had participated in a VR experience of playing with whales couldn’t distinguish between reality and false memories a week after the experiment. So what would happen if—just as today’s young people are able to find pornography on the Internet—children start accessing virtual reality sites of, for instance, radical or racist groups? Will we end up with legions of young racists or fanatics? If a white supremacist group or hackers from Russia or North Korea want to destabilize Western democracies by posting fake virtual reality videos of young people being attacked for no reason by a group of African Americans, what can we do to prevent young people from developing racial prejudices? The social consequences of not being able to differentiate between fantasy and reality can be quite serious.

  Another risk is that virtual reality could produce even more social isolation than laptops or smartphones. As the aforementioned study points out, “role-play VR games can exacerbate social isolation. There are rising numbers of teens and young adults who stay at home and display depressive and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.” In Japan, one of the countries where video games are most popular, it is estimated that there are between 700,000 and 1.5 million hikikomori, or people who refuse to leave their homes, and their average age is thirty-one, the same study says. In 2018, the UK government created a minister for loneliness to deal with the growing number of people who live in virtual isolation. Prime Minister Theresa May said that “loneliness is the sad reality of modern life” and added that it is causing an increasing number of health problems. In our push to improve education, will we end up creating a society of antisocial young adults addicted to their virtual reality goggles?

  THE TREND OF THE FUTURE WILL BE “FLIPPED CLASSROOMS”

  Virtual reality and robot teachers are likely to speed up a new trend known as “flipped classrooms” in schools that are turning the traditional model of education on its head. In this education system, children study at home and do their homework in school. Increasingly, with tablets, educational robots, and virtual reality, instead of studying at school like most of us did, young people will be studying at home in the mornings, and then go to school in the afternoon or evening to do their homework with the help of their teachers and in collaboration with their classmates. By some measures, this system has proven to be much more effective and socially fair than the traditional one.

  The traditional system of going to school during the day and doing homework in the afternoon or evening is a recipe for social inequality: only middle-class and rich kids whose parents were fortunate enough to finish high school or get a college degree can help their children do their homework or get private lessons from a tutor. That gives them a head start over children from lower-income homes; such children often don’t have parents who can help them with their homework or who can afford a tutor. So the traditional model leaves children in underprivileged homes at a huge disadvantage. Over time, they fall further and further behind their better-off classmates, and many end up dropping out of school altogether.

  Also, several studies have shown that, with the advent of interactive games, many students learn better by interacting with their electronic devices than they do by sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher. As we noted earlier, each student has his or her own pace and needs: some concentrate well in the morning, while others function better in the evenings. So why not let young people study on their own time, at their own tempo, and with whatever method they prefer, and do their homework at school with the help of their teachers?

  Our traditional school system comes from the Prussian system of education that originated in the eighteenth century. The king of Prussia had established free elementary education, which was both collective and compulsory. The king’s idea was to produce a working class of obedient subjects who learned from a young age to go to work at the same time every day and to respect authority. By replacing individualized education—the apprenticeship model—with a collective one, the king of Prussia tried both to create a large group of disciplined workers and to shape the minds of the citizens by having them study from the same books, developed by the government. As part of this educational system, students had to sit in rows, stop whatever they were doing when the teacher entered the room, and listen silently to their educators as they gave their lessons.
It was a model designed to churn out disciplined laborers ready for the factories during the Industrial Revolution, but that is becoming rapidly outdated in the innovation economy of the twenty-first century. Today, robots and algorithms are handling growing numbers of routine tasks that workers used to perform at factories, and nations need increasingly more creative people with critical minds, who can invent new products or processes.

  According to Salman Khan—the great Silicon Valley educational innovator whose Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org) offers free educational videos that have already been seen over a billion times—today’s world needs a working class of creative and curious people who can come up with new ideas and implement them. That’s the exact sort of student that the Prussian model was designed to discourage. The flipped classroom, he says, allows students to develop critical thinking to the best of their abilities and assures that nobody is left behind. Thanks to educational videos, virtual reality, robots, and other technologies, “what was once done in the classroom can now be seen by the children on their own time and at their own pace. Students can rewind videos, ask the robot teacher to explain something again, or rewatch something on their virtual reality headsets that they didn’t quite understand the first time. And the teacher can figure out the level each student is at and help them solve problems,” Khan told me.