The robots have come and are now going to dust

Jan 23, 2011 Features / Columnists, My Column

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By Adam Harris

Many years ago, when I was a boy, robots emerged. They were touted as the replacement for men in the labour force. They were supposed to do many of the things that men do, and they did not have to be fed. The result was that they would have upped production and men would have had to do very little except enjoy themselves.
For some it was a beautiful thing and as boys we talked about these things. Some of my friends remarked that they did not have to work, that they could sleep all day. I remember asking them how they would get money to buy these robots, and that was a difficult question. It never crossed their minds that they could steal, because that was furthest from every young mind.
We were all deathly afraid of the police and to talk of lock-ups was to talk about banishment from the face of the earth.
The robots did come, but not in the manner I imagined so many years ago. Indeed, I have seen the advertisements of cars being made and there were robots assembling the panels and welding them together. Indeed they could produce many more cars than if men were doing the job. The sad part was that they took away jobs from some.
There are robots in many forms. There are traffic lights that have replaced policemen, electronically operated doors and the like, dishwashers and other washing machines, house cleaning machines like the vacuum cleaners that could be programmed, and so many others. There are slot machines that pay out money when gamblers win and the ATMs—automated teller machines, that give us money once we put in a card.
The result is that we have become slightly lazier and very dependent on these things, to the point that when any of them malfunction we are at sea. Last weekend, I wanted some money to settle a debt so I went to an ATM. The lines were so long and this was repeated at many others. One that I found without a line was out of order.
People swore and grumbled. That would not have happened a few years ago if they had gone to a bank. Similarly, when the car assembly line breaks down the manufacturers have a serious problem. They then talk about lost production.
There are going to real problems in the not too distant future, because we have become so lazy that we do not even push to have our children behave in a certain manner, or get an education. In short, we are creating lost generations, and that is something that no robot will fix.
The other day I happened to be at a press conference and I heard that the Ministry of Education is working on having a school inspectorate system report directly to Cabinet. There were school inspectors when I was a young boy, and these were controlled by the people who governed the schools. In those days there were church schools.
Sometime later, the Ministry of Education furnished the inspectors and they were meticulous. Teachers were afraid of them. These inspectors checked everything; they checked the teachers’ notes of lessons, the various attendance registers, and even teaching methods. The parents of absent children were visited and where necessary, the police intervened.
Somewhere along the way these inspectors disappeared to make a re-emergence. Three years ago, I learnt that there were fourteen inspectors to visit the almost one thousand schools in the country. Needless to say, this was an impossible task and as expected, many schools were never visited.
Dr Roger Luncheon proudly proclaimed that in 2009, these inspectors visited forty per cent of the primary schools. I am left to wonder about the remaining sixty per cent. He then said that last year the focus was on the one hundred-plus secondary schools. I doubt that they visited all of them.
He said that so far there are problems of teachers being absent or poor administration, and of sporadic teaching, because the teachers find time to do other things but teach. That I could understand, because I see schools where children turn up at any old time.
In my day we ran to get there on time or face the consequences. Latecomers were flogged and since none of us wanted to be beaten we got there. These days, some schools would lock out the latecomers much to the anger of parents.
As a reporter, many parents called me to visit the schools, because there were dozens of children who could not enter. I would tell them that they should help discipline the latecomers instead of trying to embarrass the schools, and these parents would get angry.
I see children walking about classrooms during sessions because they are allowed to. The teachers seem incapable of controlling them. Dr Luncheon tells me that this year the focus would be on the administration.
This has been long in coming, but I still believe that it is going to be an exercise in futility because there are no sanctions and in any case, old habits die hard. The prison officers know this very well. They keep seeing repeat offenders.
There is technology to help, but I think that it is being wasted. The children have already been fed a dose of indifference to learning. And the parents continue to feed them because they have no time to see that the children learn.
And so it will be that in Guyana, when the robots break down there would be no one to fix them, because they all refused to learn. Life would be chaotic and crime would rule the roost because instead of learning to work we would learn to prey on each other.

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