Tuesday mornings are when I work on my lesson plan for the new week’s ethics class. This week we’re talking about Robots. Some questions:
- How would you feel if your teacher or sports coach was a robot?
- Are there any jobs that should never be done by robots?
- If robots start doing lots of work, what will humans do?
- Should we program robots to have feelings, or would it be better to keep them as emotionless machines?
- If robots become as smart as people, should they ever be given rights such as voting or freedom to do what they want?
- If we didn’t give smart robots rights to freedom and voting, would that be slavery?
After completing the lesson plan, I made a new Darths & Droids comic. Then took Scully out for a walk. The day was surprisingly cold up to that point. A chilly southerly breeze actually made things colder at midday than it was at 6:30 in the morning. But the sun came out around lunch time and warmed things up.
This afternoon I tackled a major spring cleaning chore. I removed all the sliding window panes (sequentially) and washed them in the bathroom. Then removed the flyscreens and washed those. Then washed the fixed panes, then replaced the screens and sliding panes. We have laminated glass in most of the windows so the panes are very heavy and it’s tricky getting them in and out and carrying them through to the bathroom. I also had to brush away a lot of spiderwebs from the outsides of the windows. And washing the exteriors of the fixed panes is tricky because we’re above ground level and I have to lean out with a long-handled squeegee. Then I also cleaned the flyscreen door and glass of the balcony doors. All this took a few hours, but now we have sparkly clean windows that look like they’re almost not there at all.
Doing that, somewhere along the way I gave myself a nasty bruise on the sole of my left foot, up near the middle toe. I probably stood on something hard while trying to heft a heavy window pane in or out. I noticed while walking around afterwards and it’s quite sore.
Tonight I had the first Robots class. I think this is going to be a fun one this week!
Oh, I think I mentioned a few days ago that we had our dining chairs reupholstered. Here are before and after photos, to show what they looked like, and how they are now.
New content today: