NANNY ROBOTS FOR CHILDCARE

When I was younger, ugh, I hate to go there, one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes was taken from a great Ray Bradbury story called “I Sing the Body Electric.” It’s about a group of children that lose their mother and the Father, who has to work all day goes and gets an android nanny to care for them. It was heartwarming, touching and fiction. Not any more. NEC has come up with a robot for child care called PaPeRo. Yes now you can drop your kids off with the cute cuddly little ‘droid. It is capable of recognising and talking to people. It can send images by mobile phone, as well as play games and sing along. OK now here comes the weird part and the one I don’t get. Adults can control the robot via the internet and see through it using cameras. They can even speak to children through the robot's voice. Now doesn’t this make the robot redundant and stupid. In other words if you have to monitor the children through the robot and the robot’s behavior, doesn’t it make as much sense or more to still just have a human day care worker? You haven’t eliminated the need. If it’s the parents that are monitoring the robot, how do they work? If it’s at a day care facility, you still have the day care worker monitoring the day care of the robot. You might as well have them in the room with them. All you’ve created is an expensive toy for the kids. You can do the same thing with a set of Transformers. OK, they get to interact with R2D2 but beyond that this is useless. Kids are smart. You wait, one of them will show up with a wrench and PaPeRo will be PartseRo spread all over the floor. The first time one of them shoots him with a squirt gun and short circuits him it’ll be the crap heap for PaPeRo. Trip him and see what happens, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” “Hey PaPeRo, would you like some of my pudding?” Nope. This just isn’t going to work.

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=163013&in_page_id=34