[macandcheese]

Robots raising children? Nothing wrong with this, and it's cute, admittedly, but I can't help but think that in 20 years we'll have robot teachers instructing rooms of children who go home to their robot nanny and rarely, if ever, make human contact with their people parents.

[soylentcola]

Not sure how this really relates to "robots raising children" though. More just having a laugh with tech that young kids sort-of understand but don't quite grasp the limits of yet.

I remember as a kid we got a Commodore 128 computer and I was teaching myself to write BASIC programs. I had two younger brothers (I was maybe 9 years old, they would've been 6 or 7) and while they generally grasped "computers", they didn't really know the difference between what they saw in movies and what our little home computer could do.

After seeing Wargames or something like that, I wrote a program that simulated dialing into "the government" and displaying menu options. Even had the Hollywood-style one character at a time by adding delays to my PRINT commands.

Basically it was just a bunch of menu options you could pick from but in the end you end up selecting an option that commands it to launch nukes or something like that. Like I said, I was a kid so my understanding of things wasn't very subtle either.

Still, it scared the shit out of my brothers before my mom told me to quit screwing with them. Hell, we didn't even have a modem hooked up to the thing... Mom was a big no-fun.

[ansible]

OMG, my friend pulled this exact prank on his younger brother and some of our other friends. He had a "hack password" command that looked like it was trying all the combinations and some other stuff.

I don't think he had a modem at the time either... though his dad did try to build an acoustic modem from plans in Circuit Cellar. I don't recall if they ever got that working.

Good times.

[soylentcola]

Well, we did have a modem (Dad had bought the computer used from a guy at work and it came with a load of cracked software on floppies and a modem) but I think my folks were worried about me getting into trouble so they kept it stashed away somewhere I couldn't access.

Looking back it was probably a good move. No "hacking" the DOD or anything but I'm sure I'd have at least ran up some phone charges once I discovered BBSes.

[tzs]

On the plus side, when we reach a point where a child can be raised with no interaction with live adults, spreading humans to other habitable planets orbiting other stars becomes a lot easier.

We don't have the energy to travel fast enough for relativistic time dilation to make the trip short enough to make the trip in the working lifetime of the crew. The usual solution to that is the "generation ship"...a ship that takes hundreds or even thousands of years to reach its destination, but that is a self-contained ecosystem that can keep the crew, and their plants and animals, alive for the multiple generations it takes to get there.

Another proposed solution is to cryogenically suspend the crew, and then revive them when they arrive. The big problem with that is the "revive" part. Cryogenic suspension of a whole person is currently a one-way process.

While we can't do a whole person, we can do embryos and sperm.

That raises the possibility of sending a ship that is fully automated, with a cargo of embryos and sperm. When the ship finds a habitable planet it can land, unfreeze the embryos and sperm, and make some babies, and then raise them to be adulthood.

[xg15]

On the plus side, when we reach a point where a child can be raised with no interaction with live adults...

Depends what you understand as "can be raised". Seems to me that there is the potential for such persons to become mentally unstable or tuned to a highly different set of ethics than we are. If a person is only raised by robots, how do they learn dealing with actual humans?

[tzs]

I would expect their educational material to cover ethics and how to behave toward other humans. I'd expect their entertainment to include a good dose of movies and TV shows and written fiction that involves multiple humans interacting so they can pick up a lot from that.

I'd also expect that children raised exclusively by robots would be raised in the company of other similarly raised children that they would play and socialize with, giving them some experience and chance to practice what they learn formally in school and informally from movies/tv/books.

[ars]

> I would expect their educational material to cover ethics and how to behave toward other humans.

Kids need love, not that. Giving them instruction without love doesn't work at all.

The reverse works fine.

> in the company of other similarly raised children that they would play and socialize with, giving them some experience and chance to practice what they learn formally in school and informally from movies/tv/books.

Yikes. You would raise a generation of severely damaged psychopaths if you did that.

[maxerickson]

On the other hand, we already have children's television. Going from there to individualized, responsive content is probably a win.

[JadeNB]

> I can't help but think that in 20 years we'll have robot teachers instructing rooms of children who go home to their robot nanny and rarely, if ever, make human contact with their people parents.

Then they can talk wistfully to one another of "the fun they had!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fun_They_Had