The Pedagogy of Androids:
Horizon Technologies and Citizenship Education

David Blades and George Richardson

Robot on the Ledge of Despair ©Amy Triggs 2006

In this article, we ask whether citizenship education, as it is currently taught, is capable of accommodating, anticipating or guiding horizon technologies, such as androids. Using the example of ASIMO, a robot produced by the Honda Motor Company, we draw on Janna Thompson’s notion of collectivist ethics to suggest that citizenship education needs to be reframed as an interdisciplinary and communitarian discourse if it is to meet the challenges that horizon technologies pose to civic society.

Androids at Our Doorstep

At the 1998 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems robotics engineers Kitano and Asada (1998) boldly challenged other engineers involved in the development of humanoid robots, or androids, to create a team of androids capable of defeating the World Cup champions by the year 2050. Imagine attending this match and that the human team loses. It is difficult to gauge how we might feel in such a scenario. On one hand, a certain pride is understandable at the engineering accomplishment of creating such talented, intelligent machines. On the other hand, however, it is perhaps unnerving to realize that our robotic creations are able to beat our best at soccer and likely could outmatch our best in other endeavours as well.

The young engineers admit their challenge is ambitious, but point out that less time elapsed from the first powered flight to the landing on the moon (1998, 419). In fact, these engineers may well be conservative in their estimates. The horizon of a social reality that includes androids has moved significantly closer since 1998 with the announcement by the Honda Motor Company of the production of the world’s first commercially available android, ASIMO.

Honda decided almost two decades ago to be the first corporation to mass produce androids for home use, devoting an entire research division towards this goal (Honda Motor Company, 2002). At first, their engineers concentrated on producing a fully ambulatory robot, the “P” series. The last of these, the P3, was the first to walk without attachments. ASIMO is the successor to the P3 and represents a quantum leap in robotic development. The December 5, 2002 release of the latest model features an android that can recognize moving objects, gestures, faces, sounds and environments. This android not only recognizes up to ten individuals, but also is able to greet them and even engage in limited conversation. In addition, ASIMOcan shake hands, carry loads, push wheeled objects, trap and kick a ball, move around stationary objects in a room, climb stairs and avoid collisions with humans as it walks about. You can call to ASIMO and the robot will respond—and it is decidedly cute at just over four feet tall (Figure 1).

Figure 1. ASIMO

Honda has embarked on an ambitious education and advertising campaign to prepare us for a world that includes such mechanical beings. For example, as part of their education campaign, Honda took ASIMO on an extensive, 15-month educational tour beginning in January 2003. During the course of the tour, over 67,000 students in the United States and Canada had the opportunity to meet and interact with ASIMO (Figure 2). The culminating activity of the initiative was an essay contest in which students were asked to describe “their vision for the future role of humanoid robots.” The winning entry received a visit from ASIMO (Honda Motor 2004). As the promotional literature for the educational tour noted, the development of ASIMO “represents the steps we’re taking to develop products that make our world a better place” (Honda Motor Company, 2002).

Figure 2. Students with ASIMO

It certainly will be a different place. Fuelled by rapid advances in the mechanical simulation of human movement and developments in artificial intelligence it is no longer science fiction to imagine a world where our children and certainly our grandchildren will interact with androids in public spaces and in their homes. With the digitization of the world, the pace of technological development will likely continue to accelerate, suggesting that the future is closer that we might suspect.

Given the scope and significance of advances in technological development, we argue that educators have a responsibility to help students anticipate and even direct the social changes resulting from the development of “horizon technologies” (Blades, 1999), such as genetic engineering, biotechnology, cybernetics, cloning and android production. Using the development of androids as an example of the social issues humankind must address, we propose a response in public education systems through the reconceptualization of citizenship education. In suggesting an approach to civic education that is cross-disciplinary and that incorporates an informed social activism at the local and global levels that is founded on establishing a sense of the “common good” we draw on Janna Thompson’s model of collectivist ethics as a framework for reconceptualizing civic education.

Citizenship Education and Horizon Technologies

Traditionally in the school curriculum, the development of citizenship was primarily assigned to courses such as social studies or civics (or their equivalent). The emphasis of these courses has generally been the transmission of knowledge, values and attitudes educational authorities deemed essential to the creation of responsible citizens to particular nation-states (Hahn, 1998; Torney-Purta et al.1999; Heater, 2001). In this approach, citizenship is understood almost exclusively as national citizenship, and the global community of nations assumes the status of “Other” against which the self-interest and well-being of the nation are measured. But this bounded conception of citizenship no longer functions in an era when, as political philosopher Will Kymlicka (2001) notes, “globalization is undoubtedly producing a new civil society” (326).

One of the key reasons for the emergence of this new civil society is that technological innovations dating from the last century have rendered traditional approaches to citizenship problematic. For example, the rapid development of ground and air transportation has enabled citizens to travel in ways unimaginable 150 years ago. Journeys previously considered dangerous and long are now routine; one can stand on the Great Wall outside Peking one day and dine in Toronto the next. Satellite telecommunication provides almost instant access to information from all regions of the planet: If a camera can reach it, we can see it, from ocean depths to the surface of the moon. Internet communications and telephone text messaging provide a platform for real-time communication with anyone anywhere with access to a computer terminal or digital phone. These are but a few of the many inventions that have reordered the social fabric and, as a result, reformed our definition of what constitutes civil society.

Additionally, a significant consequence of our mobility is the rise of rapid distribution of products and ideas. While globalization was always a facet of human existence to the extent that economic and intellectual exchange have always taken place, the current degree of global exchange of ideas, influence and materials possible through the digital revolution is unprecedented in human history (Giddens, 2000; Held & McGrew, 2002). One result of this development is the emergence of “highly globalized capitalism” (Morrow & Torres, 2000) where the factors for production of material goods are “no longer located in close geographical proximity” (31) to citizens. As Kingwell (2000) points out, such developments call us to ask, “What does it mean to be a citizen in a world of fractionated identities, global monoculture, and crumbling civic nationalism” (3)?

The impact of globalization and rapid technological innovation characterizing the 20th century and this new century have created a complex matrix of public policy issues that are international in scope and highly interdisciplinary in nature. Yet amidst these radical changes citizenship education continues to emphasize the primacy of civic engagement on the national level and restrict its scope to social studies or civics courses.

This isolation creates a two-fold dilemma. First, locating citizenship primarily in social studies risks “freezing” citizenship as a discrete, subject-bound concept. As it remains solely within the precincts of social studies, and in a contemporary educational environment that is increasingly driven by high stakes testing and out-comes based philosophies (Apple, 1998), citizenship becomes just another concept to be acquired, tested, and discarded rather than a living practice in which students actively engage with complex, social issues in civic society (Barber, 1984; Kubow, Grossman & Ninomiya, 1998; Parker, 2001).

Second, and perhaps most critically, citizenship education kept within the exclusive domain of social studies tends to ignore the fact that many critical issues facing the future of humankind arise from other fields of human inquiry, most notably science and technology (Bencze, 2000; Richardson & Blades, 2001). Issues on the horizon, such as android development, the evolution of the web, and recombinant genetics—to name but a few—mixed with current issues related to environmental degradation, the existence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and destructive practices such as over fishing, present formidable challenges of complex, multifaceted, international issues to civic community (Richardson, Blades, Kumano & Karaki, 2003).

These issues challenge the traditional notion of “an informed electorate” developed through courses alone. To actively participate in an informed, responsible manner requires cross-disciplinary knowledge in areas such as technology, the sciences, mathematics and Language Arts. The science of global warming, for example, is generally restricted to school science courses and typically taught in isolation of the societal developments that contribute to global warming, mostly notably industrialization and capitalism. It is only when our children learn to traverse school disciplines that citizenship education can produce what Stephen Norris (1997) has called the “epistemic distance” and what Doug Kellner (2001) terms a “dialectic optic” that are essential for citizens to understand and measure competing knowledge claims and engage in informed, responsible political activity in a highly technologized, globalized society.

Robot Himself ©Amy Triggs 2006

Androids in Our Homes

In her paper on representations of technological culture, Margarita Pavlova (2003), citing Jacques Ellul’s work on the politics of technology, notes that there are two general categories of thinkers about technology: the minimalists and the maximalists. As the name suggests, the former group seeks to minimize the impact of technological innovation while the latter supports embracing new technologies as the continuing mastery of the world by humanity. From a maximalist perspective, androids represent the opportunity for liberating humankind from dangerous and tedious work. These humanoid machines could fight fires, clean our homes, assist the infirm and even contribute to the entertainment and sports industries, although, as Asimov (1950) points out in his famous collection of short stories, I, Robot, no one expects such integration into society to be easy for humanity.

In his book, the Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), Kurzweil takes the maximalist position even further, imagining a future where androids are integrated into human society as companions, teachers, caretakers and even lovers. Computer scientist Hans Moravec paints a similarly utopian scenario when he suggests that in the future, work increasingly done by robots, humans “will occupy their days with a variety of social, recreational and artistic pursuits, not unlike today’s comfortable retirees or the wealth leisure classes” (Moravec, 1999, 6). MIT engineer and expert in artificial intelligence Marvin Minsky (1994) follows the maximalist position to its logical end, arguing in his essay, Will Robots Inherit the Earth?, that the development of robots is the first step in the ultimate technological evolution of humanity. Rather than compete with or replace humans, Minsky envisions merging with our creations to:

lengthen our lives, and improve our minds, in the future we will need to change our bodies and brains. To that end, we first must consider how normal Darwinian evolution brought us to where we are. Then we must imagine ways in which future replacements for worn body parts might solve most problems of failing health. We must then invent strategies to augment our brains and gain greater wisdom. Eventually we will entirely replace our brains—using nanotechnology. Once delivered from the limitations of biology, we will be able to decide the length of our lives—with the option of immortality—and choose among other, unimagined capabilities as well. (1)

What is not considered in his optimistic portrayal of human evolution are questions about whether such a merger would still be human. As the French sociologist Baudrillard (1992) points out,

in aiming for virtual (technical) immortality and ensuring its exclusive perpetuation by a projection into artefacts, the human species is precisely losing its own immunity and specificity and becoming immortalised as an inhuman species; it is abolishing in itself the mortality of living in favour of the immortality of the dead. (84)

Minimalists concur, arguing that the consequences of the evolution of androids may threaten the existence of humankind rather than enhance our quality of life. They are quick to note that in order for androids to function in human society these machines will need forms of intelligence that rival, or exceed, human capacities. The presence of intelligent, ambulatory machines in our homes raises important questions about the legal and moral status of machines made in our image (Kaku, 1997; Kurzweil, 1999; Tenner, 1997). For example: Would android intelligence lead to their self-awareness? At which point does our ability to pattern a machine after ourselves lead to machinery with a right to self-existence? To its particular forms of happiness? Can such machines become miserable? Would we care? Are androids beings in their own right? If we do not offer rights to androids, are we in the process of creating a race of slaves and would this be a new kind of racism? If humanity develops an attitude of disregard towards androids, how might this affect our regard for each other?

Robot as Conqueror ©Amy Triggs 2006

The Pedagogy of Androids

Certainly these questions, among others, have already generated considerable reflection and debate. Elaborating on the lessons of Mary Shelley’s classic, Frankenstein, the darker side of android technology is a popular topic of science fiction. In works ranging from Karol Capek’s play RUR to the recent science fiction film, The Matrix, concern is expressed about the possibility of androids developing into a self-replicating species capable of evolving into a state of complexity beyond human control. Throughout these works, the monster’s stark warning to Doctor Frankenstein resonates “you are my creator, but I am your master; obey” (Shelley, 1998, 10).

Regardless of the position taken on android development, it is clear that the presence of mechanical beings in our homes will affect human society. Consider, for example, how inventions such as automobiles, telephones, and the transmission of current electricity have affected what it means to live in the world. In effect, each major invention creates its own pedagogical influence, often in ways we cannot predict and develops a form of being-in-the-world that may, or may not, threaten our humanity (Heidegger, 1977; Franklin, 1990).

It would be naïve to imagine that the development of “horizon” technologies such as androids will not take place. It is, however, possible that the direction and evolution of such technologies can be influenced through active, civic engagement. In this context, over thirty years ago, in his classic Future Shock, Alvin Toffler (1970) reminded us that when it comes to technology,

we can no longer afford to let such secondary social and cultural effects just “happen.” We must attempt to anticipate them in advance, estimating, to the degree possible, their nature, strength and timing. Where these effects are likely to be seriously damaging, we must also be prepared to block the new technology. It is as simple as that. Technology cannot be permitted to rampage through society. It is quite true that we can never know all the effects of any action, technological or otherwise. But it is not true that we are helpless. (438)

We suggest that one way to be involved in the direction of technology is to create a framework of citizenship education that is as anticipatory and responsive as technological innovation itself. However, forming such a framework is not simply a matter of new and better techniques for teaching citizenship within a course such as Social Studies or Civics. Nor are existing school programs that feature “technological literacy” sufficient, since these programs tend to adopt a vocational focus towards helping students learn the skills to use existing technologies, such as computers and the Internet or develop facility in the use of industrial tools (Gradwell & Welch, 2003). What is needed, instead, is a reconceptualization of what it means to educate for citizenship within the opportunities of public schooling.

The education of our children is one location for achieving an “epistemic distance” from technology necessary for a critical examination of technological innovation. Critical dispositions can begin early in a child’s education by examining the function of existing technologies in everyday life and how these artefacts shape our lives. Older students in elementary schools could be invited to critically explore existing public discourses that debate the merits of particular horizon technologies. Science fiction, from Asimov’s I, Robot (1977) and the character Data on the television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation to a host of popular films, such as the Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2002), Blade Runner (1982), AI (Artificial Intelligence, 2001), and the Matrix (2000), focuses on issues of living with androids, and presents a deep concern that android technology might somehow evolve beyond its maker. At the same time, the counter and seductive positivist promise that the newest technology—in this case androids—will lead to a better life is already developing through the availability of robotic, artificially intelligent pets and Honda’s recent television advertisements of ASIMO. Through a thorough examination of these discourses, students can explore the way technologies and other social issues are framed by various interest groups, thus revealing some aspects of the interplay between science, technology and society and citizenship as well as providing opportunity to critique various positions in this dynamic.

Students in high school can be invited to understand their role in social issues, in particular how their choices as consumers affect material production within a discourse. Inviting students to understand their location in the discourses and how this location forms and affects social issues, such as the role of androids in society, will require reorienting the existing curriculum towards interdisciplinary studies and advancing the cause of citizenship education in school subjects such as social studies, science, and language arts. While integration for citizenship is common in elementary schools, disciplinary fragmentation of secondary schools presents formidable barriers to an interdisciplinary form of citizenship education.

Secondary schools might take first steps towards decoupling citizenship from social studies through creative scheduling, formation of thematic years and the development of courses in interdisciplinary studies. Simply scheduling social studies and a complementary science course together in the same semester, with registration automatically enrolling students in each course, would mean that the socials and science teacher could jointly plan units that develop citizenship as students examine a particular set of issues from scientific and societal perspectives. Schools could take this further, especially at the junior secondary level, by having entire semesters devoted to citizenship development, where courses required find their examples and contexts in selected societal issues. Finally, because, most school districts allow some degree of local development of new courses, secondary schools could capitalize on this flexibility to develop a new course in “interdisciplinary studies” that might offer the content of some courses in a new framework structured around citizenship education.

Robot Out of The Darkness ©Amy Triggs 2006

Collectivist Ethics: Reframing Citizenship Education as a Way of Being

Developing a critique of technological innovation or exploring societal issues is inadequate to enable students to deal with various issues facing humankind. Citizenship must not only develop the epistemic understanding of students, but also their ontological commitment to active engagement in the social order and commitment to change. Citizenship education is thus more than equipping students with information and cognitive strategies for thinking about issues; what is needed is a form of citizenship education that calls students to be citizens through positive, effective social action.

Understanding citizenship as a way of being beyond a way of knowing implies a new direction in citizenship education, one that necessarily draws on a variety of school disciplines and links the pedagogy of public schooling with the pedagogy of civic life (Englund, 2000). This pedagogy moves beyond information exchange towards establishing an agenda of action where students, teachers and school communities work with the general community to create a practical, effective social discourse and practice with the goal of effecting social change. In the case of android technology, this may involve preparing and presenting legislation and finding other legal and social avenues that might direct the evolution of any horizon technology.

If students are to develop citizenship as a way of being, they must be challenged to habitually take a critical examination of social issues, such as the development of androids, to the question of action: As a citizen, how should I act on this issue? What responsibilities do I share as a member of my local, national, and global communities? In her book Discourse and Knowledge (1998), Janna Thompson proposes a process of collectivist decision-making that might enable communities to reach ethically sound decisions on how to act on social issues. This ethics could begin in schools, where students put their ideas for action forward through a group process for critical examination but the school community. Thompson (1998) explains how this input into critical discourse leads to a particular ethical position:

The inputs to a critical discourse are the considerable positions reached by competent judges on a set of related issues. They are positions which satisfy the requirements imposed upon individual judgment. Participants in critical discourse examine these products of individual reasoning and the justifications for then; they argue, bring to bear relevant background theories and information, criticise and amend them. Some positions brought to the discourse will be eliminated by criticisms, others will be amended, and some new ones may be advanced. The output of the critical discourse is the ‘cogent’ positions which survive critical discourse and from which a conclusion will finally be constructed. (86)

For example, some students may believe that scientists should work towards developing androids for our homes. Others may disagree. Using Thompson’s notion of collectivist decision-making, each student has the obligation to enter a critical discourse with his or her peers and is subsequently challenged to provide the supporting reasons, ideas and beliefs for his or her positions. Arguments are then thoroughly examined by the group and accepted, rejected or modified according to supporting evidence and logic. Teachers play a crucial role in guiding and encouraging students to form and share opinions in such a forum. Teachers will need to remind students that if their position is rejected, better arguments may be needed, or perhaps their position is not justifiable. A significant pedagogical task is helping students learn to not take criticism personally, but to see the critical discourse process as a way of forming social policy. Teachers should include their personal voices in the discussion and not be shy to reflect on the positions they also hold about technological changes, but only after students have voiced their ideas thoroughly.

Thompson advocates widening this cycle of debate to include local communities. The school could remain as the location for debate and discussion, but this time, the ethical stance developed would reflect the resources, experiences and ideas of a much wider group. While the difficulty of attempting to construct wider cycles of debate should not be minimized, doing so initiates the democratic infrastructure to move citizenship education beyond its current, bounded, static structure.

Robot on Journey ©Amy Triggs 2006

The development of Thompson’s collectivist ethics continues to include wider communities at the national and even global level, through a similar process of advancing positions and argumentation. Children and schools are still involved initiating the debate, as are their local communities. But each moves out into a wider sphere linking local communities nationally and around the world. Schools can play a key role by organizing international partnerships with students groups through the use of video cameras, the Internet, digital phone messaging and computer-based translation services, thus developing a system that could theoretically link any group of students with any other group that has complementary technology. Citizens from the community can go to their local schools to use this equipment after school hours, locating the school as the hub for citizenship involvement in the local, national and global communities. For a small capital investment, citizenship education thus takes on a way of thinking and being that embraces local realities and global possibilities.

Since the issues occasioned by horizon technologies affect all humankind, it is not idealistic to propose a citizenship that creates a global imaginary and a way of being in the world that considers action and responsibilities from a global perspective. For example, suppose a school and local community take an ethical stance demanding that researchers and engineers ensure that the first principle of android behaviour is that “a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”[1] Being a citizen is more than achieving this stance, although this is an important first step. For citizenship to take on an ontological imperative, students and members of their communities must act as citizens.

In the case of android development, citizens in schools and members of the community might contact corporations such as Honda to ascertain how this corporation is considering the ethical dimensions of the societal impacts of their invention. The corporation might be invited to a dialogue with communities worldwide interested in being involved in the direction of this horizon technology. If the corporation refuses, or does not care to develop such ethics, citizens might become involved in positive social action, such as boycotting products by the corporation or advertising campaigns. Such actions are the precise opposite of anarchism; instead, students with the support and involvement of their local and global communities take on their duties as citizens seriously by informing corporations of their moral obligation to follow directives established through the process of public collective ethics. In the case of androids, such public involvement divests corporations from having the sole agency in bearing the responsibility for their products, while at the same time allowing public guidance to governments, agencies and the industrial complex on the limits of technological innovation.

Conclusion: It’s never too late to act

In the face of increasing influences of technology on our lives, philosopher Albert Borgmann (1974) reminds us that, “technology with its seemingly infinite resourcefulness in procuring anything and everything does have a clear limit” (195). Following Thompson’s notion of collectivist ethics, we argue that establishing exactly what that limit is presupposes a vigorous and informed public debate about the role horizon technologies play in securing or maintaining the public good. Such a debate is inherently pedagogic and must begin in schools with the reconceptualization of citizenship education as an international and interdisciplinary discourse. One approach to begin such a reconceptualization is through school-initiated, proactive engagement with the public about where emergent technologies might take humankind and how we can ensure that these technologies develop in ways that enhance civic life now and in the future.

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