Social Cognition: Machine VS Human's and their role in learning

Although some of the topics that apply to social cognition seem to be very obvious I found this subject extremely interesting. Of course humans have evolved to learn how to imitate and observe other people in order to gain new knowledge about the world, but I think that the research involving human vs machine and their roles in learning give a really interesting insight into the way that we interact with the world as children.
While reviewing the lecture slides I couldn't help but find it strange that children treated QRIO as if he were a mentalistic agent yet further on in the lecture we learned that other research had found that children are able to distinguish between hands and tools. Although QRIO behaved and responded in the same ways that mentalistic agents do, he still had the physical qualities of a machine. The tools in which were used to grasp the objects in the Woodward studies also responded in similar ways as the human hand had shortly before it and yet the children were able to distinguish it as an inanimate object. And even more interesting is the fact that the children were unable to learn the same task from a machine that a human had performed previously in the "unfulfilled goal study".
I feel like this information can be beneficial to improving how we teach infants and children novel tasks. I think that in today's society we rely greatly on machine's and these studies prove that children are better able to learn when they are observing real human interaction. By using this information we can come up with new techniques that involve teachers or parents showing them things which aid in children's development. Unfortunately I think that a lot of new toys are being developed to teach kids new tasks that are based on using inanimate objects but this may not be the best way in which the teach them. I think that parents should be aware that children respond much better the observing humans and can imitate their actions much better.
I think that it would also be interesting to see how beneficial some of the new programs that are offered for the TV and computer are to children's development. Do they really learn new skills from these things? Even if they were shown to be learning from these machines I wonder how much more efficient they are than if they were to be taught these things through more conventional ways. It seems to me that human interaction is extremely important and by eliminating that would have negative effects on children's development. Because in today's world we do relay so heavily on machine's I don't see things moving in the opposite direction and so it would be important to continue studies that emphasize the importance of human interaction to child development and learning.