Rogun the Robot Babysitter

Considering the title really says it all, it was really hard to come up with an introduction for this new invention. Yes, you read it right the first time, Rogun is an actual robot baby-sitter. Visions from Ray Bradbury’s “The Electric Grandmother” and Isaac Asimov’s “Robbie” come to mind. I think Rogun might not be the best of names. I hope that is an acronym of something, because sounds like a monster that should be tearing up Japan.

Of course, we all know that we don’t have the technology to create an independently-thinking robot. Or do we? Well, all nightmare visions of robots taking over aside, the Rogun is an advanced piece of hardware with some features that make it good for a baby-sitter job.

For example, it has the ability to recognize faces. I suppose that’s good for a start. At least it knows the person or persons it will babysit. So if some escaped monkeys from a zoo come into the house, Rogun will promptly ignore them. Okay, that scenario will never happen, but it does have the ability to recognize a stranger. Then, it can call the parents and alert them of the danger.

Rogun also has a camera that I assume is always on in some form. After all, it brings video to the Internet wirelessly, so parents can keep an eye on their child no matter what. This is assuming the parents have some wireless device on them so they can watch.

Rogun was built by Korea’s Korn-Tech, who made it about a meter tall. It took three years’ worth of research to get him walking, and the bugs still aren’t all worked out yet. However, Korn-Tech predicts that Rogun the robot baby-sitter would have a shelf value of about $5,000 USD each.

I suppose that is a small price to pay for a babysitter who parents can implicitly trust, and doesn’t complain when you do not pay enough. However, am I the only one who has thought through the obvious fallacies of this? For example, what is going to stop a normal kid from doing a Revenge of the Baby-sat maneuver and knocking Rogun over on its back? I am assuming that parents wouldn’t want Rogun to do an auto disciplinary functions, because that’s getting into Terminator and I, Robot territory.

Are we as a society really ready for robots to be our babysitters? I know that the concept of “latch-key” kids would have been unthinkable by parents 50 years ago, but is practically a standard in America today. Are we fooling ourselves by thinking the robot guarding our kids is actually good protection? I’m afraid the technology isn’t quite there yet.

But even if it is, this is children we are talking about, being put in the arms of a robot. We’re just not ready.