by Serwan Zangana
The first lady, Melania Trump, in March hosted a global summit on Artificial Intelligence (AI robots) in the White House and touted the use and the effect of such a technology in the future for children’s education. Advocating for AI robots to become teachers and integrate them into education, the first lady said, “Imagine a humanoid educator named Plato.”
Many companies are in the process of developing Humanoids, which are robots that resemble and act like humans, and they will be more adaptive to the human environment. Promoting the use of AI robots/humanoids can be a slippery slope, which means replacing human beings and eliminating many professional positions in society.
Speaking of humanoid Plato and its benefit to children, the first lady said, “… our children will develop deep critical thinking and independent reasoning.” But using Humanoids can negatively affect human thinking and lead to technology dependency, and such a tool can eliminate human interaction and connection with each other.
With pushing AI robots/humanoids into children’s education, the needs of human teachers and tutors as they are the core of education and play a major role in advancing the children would diminish. Seemingly, the first lady does not understand the necessity of human teachers as she sees the humanoids as the future American teachers. Regardless of the role of AI robots in education, the roles and the positive impacts of human teachers should not be ignored in the era of technology.
Instead of replacing teachers with robots/humanoids, such a technology can be developed as a tool to be used by teachers and educators to create a more effective teaching style in American schools. Humanoids should not be pushed into children’s lives and become part of their education, which impact their behavior and social relationship.
The first lady should have been more sensitive toward teachers as they are not only teaching the curriculum but also creating an environment to engage children in activities and prepare them for crisis and difficulties of life, and also to define the reality of living in human society while robots/humanoids are lack of such understanding as they are nothing but machines.
It is important to realize the risk of ceding control to robots, and instead use such technology to benefit human beings. The technology has been affecting human social lifestyle, and it is indeed becoming more addictive. This is what the major tech companies’ intent is to use technology like robots in every field of life and dismantle the use of human beings.
Unfortunately, the first lady is promoting these giant tech companies, such as Meta, Microsoft, Open AI, Google Zoom and Adobe in their process of creating a robots society. It is senseless to believe that robots would replace human teachers and understand students’ emotions and needs. In fact, this is what the first lady believes as she said, “Plato will provide a personalized experience, adaptive to the needs of each student.”
However, while robots can be useful to a certain degree in education, human teachers must not be devalued.
