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Living with Computers: Today's typewriter, adding machine, filing
cabinet, and answering machine. Few computers make and serve coffee
(yet), but it is brewing.
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At Home
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Main home attractions:
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Apple's dream of the computer being an essential part of the
kitchen, supplying recipes, grocery store orders, appliance control,
has only partially become common: the digital logic in appliances.
The biggest home use has become email and entertainment via the web
and through computer games, usurping the place of the remote
office. For a few geeks, it has also become a tool for
education and research. As Internet costs increase, the
entertainment function will become more balanced with other home
uses. |
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Communication: We will spend $1200 on a computer and $40 per
month on phone plus internet connection for "free"
long distance written communication. The cost is more than
saying the same words over the phone with those we want to
communicate with. Even so, the quality of thought in
communication via email is higher than by voice, if you discount
teen chat rooms. In chat rooms, many people are attracted
by its anonymity... but seem to forget that anonymity also means
you do not really know who is on the other end of the
conversation. This has led to abduction of gullible teen
girls. |
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Shopping |
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Banking and investment |
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Education |
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Download entertainment |
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Leisure publications on the Web |
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Home Networks. It used to be the 2 (or 3) car family. Now it
is the 2 (or 3) computer family. |
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Internet Appliances.
Set top boxes did not produce the level of sales dreamed
of. This part of the strategy of reducing the digital
divide failed to produce enough profit to make it worthwhile. |
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Education: Knowledge, skill, wisdom acquired through self study and
instruction.
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Instruction presentations |
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Simulations |
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Business Presentations |
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Computer Based Training
(CBT), Computer Aided Instruction (CAI)
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Courseware |
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Multimedia content delivery |
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Simulation |
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Automated testing and grading |
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Individualized instruction
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Self-paced study |
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Adaptive instruction |
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Practice skills, update experience |
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Expert instructor not in residence |
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Portable training |
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Preserve expert knowledge |
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Reduced instruction delivery costs (but not preparation costs) |
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Web-Based Training
(WBT) and Distance Learning or Distance
Education: Distance Education includes all methods of
non-residential instruction, including correspondence courses and
satellite-based classrooms. Web-based training is one
variation. Web-based training is a way of collecting
special-topic students world-wide on subjects that are very
specialized and the audience is small. It also is valuable for
home schoolers and isolated students. If you are very
self-disciplined, you can get a quality education in many subjects
using this approach.
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Be choosy about distance education.
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A good criteria: Ask the university
you want your degree from if a course you plan to take from a
distance education provider will be accepted at the university
for the purpose of fulfilling degree requirements. |
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At major universities,
distance education gets lots of lip-service, but faculty choose to
spend time on research. Distance education work is low
priority in academic departments even though it is high priority
with university administration. Income to a university
academic department comes from contracts. Promotion and tenure
for professors come from publishing, not distance education. |
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There are a few distance education zealots that are good at
both. Shop carefully for these golden nuggets. University of Nebraska is a good candidate; it started distance
education before it was "cool". Another choice is
University of Maryland, which has provided transferable credit
education to the military on a world-wide basis for a long time.
Commercially, Cisco
is good. |
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Edutainment: Avoid it. Arcade games masquerading as
educational software gets kids hooked on arcade games, not on
scholarship. Been there, done that; it is a short term gain and long
term loser.
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Reader
Rabbit is OK. Concept density is low, but it
provides repetition at an age appropriate level for
early beginning readers. |
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Math
Blaster develops pattern recognition responses, not
understanding. Kids get hooked on arcade aspect
rather than on math aspect. |
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Carmen
Sandiego, Sim City, Chess Master are all good games that
exercise problem solving skills. They are OK for
leisure activity, but are not a substitute for content
acquisition. |
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Digital Divide
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Reason this is a concern:
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Follow
the money trail of vested interests. |
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By users: limits access to information, critical to upward
mobility. |
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By vendors: limits access to markets. |
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Microsoft
wants more people to sell to, which means expanding the
retail market, whether by individually financed or
subsidized purchase. |
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Keep perspective on priorities:
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Access to food, water, clothing, power, transportation, public
safety, health care, and basic communications have priority in
importance. Many people who do not have access to Internet
also lack one or more of these other assets. |
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There
are a lot of people and occupations that do not need
Internet access to do well, just as not everyone needed
to be able to touch type in the previous generation. |
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The original concern from a 1996 Department of Commerce study was that purchase of home
PCs was divided along racial lines in the USA. A more recent
study (2000) has demonstrated that for the same income group, the
racial digital divide is not significant. |
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The digital divide is measured with respect to Internet
access. What is significant is income group and distance from
a metropolitan area. This is the same problem with electrical
power and telephone service decades ago. Long distance phone
access to Internet Service Providers is one primary problem.
Computers at public libraries can overcome general lack of access in
rural communities. The other issue is an understanding of what
computers can do for rural workers. I know at least one dairy
farmer that used computers since the mid-1980s to mix and measure
feed for each cow, and collect statistics on milk production for
each cow. That farmer did not use the internet. Absence
of internet connection does not imply lack of productive computer use. |
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Northern versus Southern Hemisphere is more of a problem.
You need reliable electrical supply. For Internet use, you
need a reliable communications system. Poor nations, sparse
population, and regional and civil wars all work against
establishment of computer based communications. |
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Web sites on the digital divide:
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Opportunities for Disabled People
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Motion limited people
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Employment opportunities that do not require mobility |
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Robotic prosthetics |
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Input/Output limited people
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Adaptive devices to provide input/output for computer |
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Synthetic speech |
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Braille output |
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Sensory limited people
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Neural
implants is becoming a reality. |
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Entertainment:
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The numbing of the American mind, and we even pay for it
willingly! Stupid 101. The opiate of the masses. |
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Positive comment: The entertainment industry led the development
of the CD and DVD as a cheap way to distribute huge files. The
computer industry benefited from this. |
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You can view fine art on the web. Is this entertainment or
education? Well, mathematics is entertaining. |
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There are a few very good
webcasts. For example, Les Miserables
by Victor Hugo:
http://www.oneplace.com/ministries/focus_on_the_family_radio_theatre/Archives.asp |
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E-Commerce
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Reduces transportation costs of making a sale. |
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Speeds the responsiveness of urgent contracting. |
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Geographically widens the market for soliciting and responding to
invitations to bid on contracts. |
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Retail e-commerce over the web has received much attention.
Pursuit of this market drove the consumerization of the web.
The collapse of the delivery of goods during the Christmas rush
season of 1999 A.D. was a harbinger to the current retrenching of
the Internet market. Y2K (Year 2000 fears of computer hardware
and software obsolescence) turned out to illustrate "Yours To
Keep" depends on physical delivery of goods, not just
advertising and collection of orders. The idea of electronic
commerce is far from dead. We are
going through a period of balancing retail electronic commerce with other
more traditional methods of reaching a market. Once again, we
are learning that real wealth comes from real work, not just
images. Information flow is very important, but there is more
that needs to be done. |
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Electronic storefront, shopping cart |
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Online auction: Beware! This is one of the top scam-ridden
businesses. Owners or co-conspirators artificially drive up
cost by counter-bidding. It is common for goods to be sold at
prices above the list price. Fair market value is determined
by the price someone is willing to pay for goods and services.
What are ethical and unethical ways of influencing market value? |
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Beware of impulse buying. If you are tempted to buy
something, save a copy and try again next week. Urgently made
purchases are rarely best-value purchases, and often are
unnecessary. After a while, you find out that things that are
on "sale" are routinely on sale. It might not be
that exact item, but a comparable item will be. |
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Finance
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Personal Finance Software: A convenient way for a disciplined
person to manage personal finances. Beware: Do not use on-line
bookkeeping services for personal finances. The data you
supply will end up in a market research firm, or worse. |
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Online Banking:
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This is being driven by government and business to reduce the
cost of getting pay to you. It is faster and more
secure. |
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Problem: You do not have personal control over the
receipt of funds. It is not always clear when money
becomes available to you. When banks buy each other out,
the routing code sometimes is changed without your knowledge,
leading to lost money and no willing responsible manager. |
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Problem: You lose the ability to have anonymous
transactions. This is good for taxing agencies. It
is bad if you are engaging in competitive ventures. |
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Problem: If makes people dependent upon banking
services. This is very bad if you are homeless or are a
migrant worker. |
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Online Stock Trading: Day Trading is very risky, addicting,
and has cost families their savings. I strongly recommend
against direct online stock trading. A reputable stock broker
can give you much better advice... for a high fee. You pay for
what you get, you should take charge to get what you pay for.
(Beware also: brokers make their money off the transaction, not on
whether the stock goes up or down. Get to know your
broker. It s/he an overpriced used car salesman, or someone
with real knowledge and ability to be of service? Try to find
a broker that is over 50 years old, retired from another line of
work, with formal education in business or finance at the Master's
degree level, and 3 or more years experience as a broker.) |
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Government. Finally, an idea whose time has arrived. There
is enormous volumes of information online which you have already paid
for through your taxes. You can now read the law for yourself, and
find Supreme Court Decision opinions. You don't need to let the
new media be your filter for what you should think. Federal,
state, and local governments are now online. It does not replace
direct personal contact with your politicians, but it is much better
than it used to be.
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Health Care
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Record keeping |
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Rapid communication: within hospital, to pharmacy, between health
care institutions. It does not necessarily improve the quality
of communication. There is still need for a patient to be
personally being aware of what actually is done. Nursing
station personnel often enter what they expect will be done rather
than what actually was done. |
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Diagnosis and treatment guidelines and training:
telemedicine. This has huge positive implications for making
quality health care available to poor nations with few
doctors. It permits some specialty care with the specialist at
a great distance. |
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Computer Aided Surgery: This is a reality, today. The
Navy does it. |
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Research dissemination |
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Science
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Much of the communication between researchers is over the
Internet. The Internet made rapid communication a
reality. Commercialization of the Internet slowed the Internet
considerably, impeding information exchange. This is one of
the many reasons for developing a new generation of network
technology. This work is now in progress, and is separately
being pursued by the National Science Foundation and the Department
of Defense. |
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Look
for on-line language translation to make a huge contribution
in the future for communication between researchers (and
businesses). |
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Publishing
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Electronic Books E-Book Library at the
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/ebooklist.html |
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Electronic Reference:
MerckMedicus http://www.merckmedicus.com/
USNA Library http://www.usna.edu/Library/Quick.htm |
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Newspapers and Magazines:
NAAź: Hotlinks to Newspapers Online http://www.naa.org/hotlinks/index.asp |
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e-books: Electronic books have the advantage that you can search
and extract easily. For blind people, the recent availability
of relatively low cost synthetic-speech readers opens up new
vistas.
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For the publisher, copyright protection is a huge
problem. |
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Another problem is that a particular fixed format
that is readable with hardware and software several years ago cannot
be read today. An attempted solution to this is the
e-book which places the electronic book on a dedicated piece of
hardware. This also permits the publisher to control the
amount of time the book can be used, and how many times a particular
page can be read. |
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Problem: The protection of the book from
being copied in electronic form negates the motivation for wanting
to buy a book in that format. This is a good innovation for
electronic books that have a significant interactive
component. |
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For static conveyance of information, the Basic
Object Oriented Knowledge (BOOK) is still a useful display device. |
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Travel
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Travel planning
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Resources available to pilots for two decades are now becoming
available to motorists. Weather. Routes. |
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Navigation: Global Positioning System, a satellite
constellation, receiver, and software used to compute the
location of the receiver. |
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Maps, route specification, and navigation directions. |
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Monitoring and recovery from theft |
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Emergency assistance, possibly automated call for help when
involved in a crash |
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Mobile communication |
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Vehicle operation and control |
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Telecommuting
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Hype exceeds reality at the moment. |
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Save commuting time and expense |
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Devote more time to work |
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Reduces company investment in office space |
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Increases company investment in telecommunications |
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Workers lack daily contact with office social and political
environment |
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Good for workers who need to go out to visit customers |
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Bad for workers who need to receive customers |
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Emerging Technologies
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Virtual Reality
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3-D imaging, tactile, and audio. |
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Great for training simulation. |
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Software Agents
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Penn State used intelligent agents for distance education courses
preparing people for the Fundamentals of Engineering exam.
Over the net is best, but is also in wide use in phone menu systems. |
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Intelligent Agent: Microsoft IntelliSense. Popular
implementation of ideas well-established by the early 1980s.
It takes time to build a large user database that can catalog user
needs and symptoms. |
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Network Agent: Performs tasks on a remote computer, and reports
results back to user. Search engines, automatic notification
or alarm services, other client/server actions. |
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Robots
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Robots do not require social security,
medicaid, or double time
pay on holidays. They don't require sleep, don't get drunk on
duty, or engage in politically correct or incorrect behavior.
(While harassment is not common from robots, many people find them
sometimes frustrating.) |
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Hazardous, repetitive, or high precision tasks:
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Working inside a nuclear power plant or volcano, or on the
ocean bottom. |
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Send robot after a dangerous crook in a
building or cave. |
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Manufacturing equipment. |
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Future nursing home care: Robots less likely to abuse patients
purposefully, can reduce staff without reducing the already low
quality of care. I recommend against it. Fix the
staffing problem. |
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Child care: Play partner for kids, the automatic baby
sitter. It can't do much worse than no one there. It
can provide safety monitoring. It can provide an extra pair of
eyes and ears. It will not initiate child abuse purposefully
unless programmed to. Caution: kids will destroy it quickly. I
recommend against it. Get a real person. |
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