Just as the Internet replaced telephone operators and the nightly news anchor as the default source of information, teachers may be next on the chopping block. Automated learning is a cheap solution to recession-swelling class sizes and renewed calls to make technological innovation a centerpiece of education.

Districts all over are experimenting with teacher-less computer labs and green-lighting entire classrooms of adult-supervised children exploring the Internet–an Android powered tablet designed specifically for students. Teachers’ unions’ protests notwithstanding, the cybernetic takeover might mean a redefinition of “teacher” as a research assistant or intellectual coach, since subject-matter lecturers are no match for access to the entirety of human knowledge.

Whether this is a welcome innovation for cash-strapped areas or the first wave in an inevitable robot apocalypse seems to hinge on one’s location on the planet. In India, virtual classrooms are hailed as an education revolution. Here, even in Wild

West-like educational frontiers like Florida–where, on Tuesday, a new Android-powered tablet for students debuted at the Florida Educational Technology Conference–the idea of tech replacing teachers has been criticized as “criminal.”

In the interest of exploring the difference, let’s start with some of the most disruptive evidence on teacher-less education–from the slums of India, where handfuls of unsupervised children can now compete with their privately educated counterparts, thanks to standalone kiosks connected to the Internet. Newcastle University Professor Sugata Mitra discovered that groups of children spontaneously formed supportive learning communities when given access to Internet stations and challenged to answer scientific questions.

In his now famous TEDxGlobal talk, Mitra tells how a humble pre-teen girl led him to believe that he had underestimated his first experimental group of Tamil-speaking children. “So a 12-year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, ‘apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecules causes genetic disease, we’ve understood nothing else.'” Emboldened by findings that one academic reviewer called “too good to be true,” Mitra is seeking billions in funding and millions of voluntary man-hours to launch his educational vision into a global movement.