Which one is the robot?
“Bizarre” is the right word — apparently, there was an event at the White House to bless a future of AI humanoid slaves taking over all of our menial jobs, like, you know, teaching.
At a bizarre White House event on Wednesday, first lady Melania Trump walked side by side with an artificial-intelligence-powered robot before spelling out a vision of the future in which children are taught by a “humanoid educator.”
Trump was hosting an international summit on technology and education in the East Room and arrived accompanied by a white-and-black robot that matched her stride, at points unsteadily.
It looks more like a PR event for a tech company called Figure, or a demo of their current model of robot, called Figure 03. I looked up their robot, and the technical details are sparse. They claim it “takes care of household tasks like laundry, cleaning, and doing dishes, all autonomously” — you mean, it’s a glorified autoloader for the dishwasher and washing machine? I do all that already, and don’t need a robot to do it. Cleaning is a more complex task, but I don’t see how a robot is managing dusting, sweeping, mopping, cleaning up cat vomit, picking up the books I leave scattered all over the place and putting them back on the shelf correctly, or just generally tidying up after my sloppy self. They have videos of the robot in action, but they make it look like their most important task is walking slowly carrying a tray to serve champagne to wealthy venture capitalists at parties in your multi-million dollar home. A very important function to some people, I’m sure, but not something I’m at all concerned about.
You can buy your very own champagne-server and dishwasher loader for the low, low price of $30,000-$50,000, available in white, light gray, or soft blue.
Melania talked about how a humanoid robot could take over the task of teaching your children. Please note the very important word in the first sentence of this quote.
Addressing delegates at the two-day Fostering the Future Together summit, the president’s wife proceeded to speak glowingly about an imaginary robot teacher named Plato, an allusion to the philosopher in ancient Greece.
She envisioned the tech-fueled guide having a deep understanding of every major subject, including classical studies, and being available “in the comfort of your home.”
Arguing that AI will be “formed in the shape of humans,” she said the robotic Plato would “provide a personalized experience adoptive to the needs of each student.”
This “teacher” does not exist, and it specifically is not Figure 03, which looks like it’s straining its mighty brain just to walk across a room without falling over. She’s just “envisioning” things, you know. Maybe someday we can replace all those human classics teachers with machines that will also serve champagne. The techbros are all just waiting for mechanical Plato to walk into their house and teach them impressive-sounding stuff. Finally, an excuse to learn Latin, without the fuss of a human instructor!
Melania Trump is the perfect humanoid to promote this important cause.
But Trump didn’t linger. She was in the room for seven minutes for her introductory remarks, departing before a panel discussion on artificial intelligence in education and skipping the networking and relationship-building she encouraged her fellow spouses to take advantage of during Tuesday’s event.
Maybe she could have her personal humanoid robot do all those tiresome activities?
I’ll wager that there was an actual human remote controlling the robot, but even if I’m wrong about that, it is still more human the Melania. I’ve always thought she looks like a cyborg.
I have two questions:
1- How much did Melania get paid for her 7 minutes?
2 How of many these Humanoid Robots will Trump’s wealthy buddies have to purchased in a quid pro quo get government contracts?
2a – How will the money from the purchases get back to Trump?
I couldn’t tell the two apart.
Q: Which on is the robot?
A: I say both. Both are stupid robots not worth teaching kids about the ABCs.
I’ll be impressed when a robot can teach Melania to speak midwestern English without a Slovenian accent.
HA! HA! HA! That’s not a humanoid robot. These are humanoid robots:
As a still entirely human Classics teacher, I somewhat disapprove of this idea. O tempora, o mores, as the robot would almost certainly fail to recall.
On the other hand, a robot that you can hang expensive clothes on and your hideous rubbery blob of a nine-tenths-dead president can sleep with, that seems a much more sensible proposition.
500 quatloos this “robot” was a teleoperated puppet–just like Dilbert Stark’s.
As a retired Latin teacher, I laughed at this.
I know how difficult it is to get teens to pay attention to learn Latin.
A teacher has to be so many other things in order to earn their respect and attention – an actor, a mentor, a person they trust to confide in, someone who makes sure that they are awake, and not too hungry or thirsty to learn that day, and so many other things. A robot couldn’t do that.
There are so many nuances to teaching a language. A teacher needs to be able to demonstrate how the language sounds (or probably sounded in the case of Classical Latin) and be able to make the language come alive in the context of the culture and its history. The robot may have access to those facts, but teens will simply tune out if facts are presented in a boring manner. I doubt whether a robot would dress up as a Roman matron to engage the students in learning about what her daily life in Pompeii would have been like!
Perhaps they singled out the Classical languages because they thought that Latin and ancient Greek aren’t spoken, so even a robot can teach it. I beg to differ, as I’m sure other classicists will do.
Then again, perhaps someone in the maladministration suffered through a tough “drill and kill” Latin teacher in school and wants to take their revenge!
I’m no intellectual giant, but it is obvious that this is the slovenian ex-hooker who, after over a decade here, can’t put together or pronounce a coherent sentence in english (let alone latin and greek) and displays an intellect as sophisticated as a turnip. The HUGE absurdity is she got into this country on a ‘genius’ visa.
She is proof the war on intellectualism and education is a massive success.
Almost all the many robot/android roll-outs have been radio controlled. I agree with:
@1 Captain Kendrick: I’ll wager that there was an actual human remote controlling the robot
and
@8 rickarddavidt: 500 quatloos this “robot” was a teleoperated puppet–just like Dilbert Stark’s.
Almost all the many robot/android roll-outs have been radio controlled
‘available in white, light gray, or soft blue.’ What are they saying when there are no brown robots. Are they politely trying to say brown people shouldn’t be menials? OR Are they saying we are so bigoted that we only have white robots, no brown ones?
Who knows.
cartomancer,
You and I answered at exactly the same time.
Do you teach from the Cambridge Latin Series? I did, and found that I could slip in so much extra cultural and historical information using the text as a jumping-off point. Those texts are certainly not boring. My students fondly called it “a Roman soap opera”, and couldn’t wait to come back the next fall to follow the adventures of Quintus and his family members!