Kit Sam Writing Competition - S5 Champion

Can Robots Replace Teachers?

by Lam Hei Yin (5D)

As artificial intelligence advances at an unprecedented speed, many industries will be threatened by automation. According to a survey jointly conducted by Japan's economic news and the Financial Times, among approximately 2000 jobs that humans are engaged in, 34% are likely to be replaced by robots. Perhaps manpower is no longer needed. Nevertheless, can a robot really replace a teacher? This issue is constantly worth discussing.

To commence with, indeed, robots can immensely ease the workload of teachers who have devoted so much time to students and enhance their work efficiency. To cite a stark example, robots can provide assistance for teachers on some repetitive work, such as marking assignments and exam answer-sheets. With the powerful Algorithm, robots even can integrate and make use of data to efficiently analyse students' strengths and weaknesses. As a result, teachers can undoubtedly provide focused guidance to students with reference to the unique features of the robots. It can also analyse students' English pronunciation problems where teachers can help students to make further corrections. Giving such tremendous assistance, robots not only enable teachers to have more free time to take note of their students’ learning progress and emotional needs, but also help them to enhance their teaching progress. In a word, the immediate element provided by robots is far superior to manpower.

However, apart from teaching students with endless knowledge, the process of teaching is done though interaction which is full of sincere emotions between teachers and students. As a matter of fact, robots are different from teachers because of a lack of emotions. We not only acquire knowledge which can also be learnt from books or from teachers, but also share our mutual time and life experiences which robots cannot possess. According to researches done by cognitive scientists, we all learn by 'experience'. Teachers can also teach us valuable positive outlook on life which is undeniably more essential than the knowledge in books. What is more, when we are frustrated, I truly believe that teachers who we can talk with are willing to solve our confusion while robots cannot.

Teachers are not only lively 'lecture robots' with emotions, but are also precious in our life of study as they can lead us to proceed to an impeccable direction. Therefore, I precisely believe that robots cannot entirely replace teachers. Despite not being as powerful as robots in processing big data, as long as teachers persevere with following the progress of times, they are indispensable and genuine beings whom students can deeply connect with and gain inspiration from.