Decolonial Educational Robotics

How not to make the same mistakes of the past with robotics

Introduction:

All the problems derived from today called “fake news” come as a result of the business model called Bigdata. Bigdata tries to make the world a pasteurized society. In a colonizing process, ethnically killing the people of other nations. This impoverishes technological developments. We will show how much this business model is bound to go wrong. And how robotics is much better applied by understanding the decolonial way of doing it.

What is wrong?

In the past, Europeans arrived in America and did exactly what “apps” and technologies like “robotics” do today. They did not try to understand how that other society worked. Nor are the social, human and cultural benefits that they could acquire if they not forcibly imposed the business model (strativist economy) they knew. If they made a small effort, perhaps they would realize that sewage and drainage that the Maya knew how to build could increase their life by 10 or 20 years on average. Or, they could have obtained the astronomical knowledge of the Incas and advanced in science some 200 years. But as we know, this was far from the perception of the colonizers. The only thing that mattered was gold and any other form of exploitation. So it is with technology and the teaching of robotics today. It is just a forced attempt to impose a business model. Making local wisdom irrelevant. And little collaborating for any social evolution. As contradictory as it may seem, it is impossible to teach without learning something. And that is the problem, it is necessary to create decolonialist robotics. Children and adolescents around the world are very different, and often feel completely uncomfortable with the way this type of education is imposed. Because all the signs and meanings are related to the countries that were able to get ahead. And that is to impose one culture on top of the other. Maybe in the US people want to create cell phones. But in a village in the middle of the Amazon people want to create other technologies to communicate with the forest. This will only be possible if we decolonize technology.

Decolonial Technology Example

According to studies by F. Almeida Brazilian indigenous technology can be applied in several aspects to improve the way of building ecologically renewable environments. This means that technology and especially robotics must be careful not to run over what is already being done there. If this care is not taken, we can regress the technological process in 200 years or more. As we did in the past. Only today, many technologies of the ancestral peoples of America are being analyzed, and things that are extremely advanced that could be used on a daily basis are being broken down much more effectively.

Many of these results can be seen in the book “Indigenous Technology in Mato Grosso: Dwellings” released in 2010.

How to decolonize robotics:

The worst scenario would be to start the process with a robotics kit ready with its own methodology and language. There are companies like Lego that create robotics kits with proprietary parts, and with programming language that only benefits the sale, the profit.

The best scenario is to build materials from the perspective of those who are learning (FREIRE, 1968) and use open technologies like Arduino and its derivatives. And materials that are analogous to the educational environment, such as paper and ink. And here comes the conductive paint, conductive thread, conductive tape and derivatives. Where the learner can be familiar with the process.

Conclusion:

The technology today is colonialist, the big brother already exists, and there is an ethical obligation to create self-defense mechanisms. Fake News, mass unemployment, etc. They are the consequence of a technology used to dominate. The way to create these mechanisms is to promote technology based on the local culture. This benefits the technology itself, as there is a plurality of how to solve the same problem, allowing more opportunities for local human capital to develop in a unique way, protecting the economy and collaborating for better technology.

Originally published at https://www.oyaquelegal.org.