Last Saturday, the New York Times Magazine published the fourth installment in its “Smarter Than You Think” series, this one titled “Students, Meet your New Teacher, Mr. Robot.” The article highlights the use of robots as teachers of young students.

Imbued with boundless patience and ability to recall facts, robots hold promise as effective teachers in high-repetition scenarios such as language class autism therapy. Teams from UCSD, MIT, UConn, etc., are field-testing teaching robots for a variety of uses. The results of these tests have been positive and the future use of robots in the classroom seems likely.

The article also discusses the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence — teaching machines to teach themselves, in the spirit of infant children. It perhaps overstates that we can obtain this Holy Grail in the near future; there’s considerable research and innovation that must come first.

Please check out the feature, and its associated media — the video on Robotic Teaching is particularly exciting.

– Learning to Read People; and

– A timeline detailing the history of Artificial Intelligence.

Share your thoughts — especially those on the future of AI as the article describes it — below.

(Contributed by Chase Hensel, CRA/CCC Tisdale Fellow, & Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)