It is, of course, a rural district, a district located on the Seneca Nation reservation in Western NY. The Salamanca City Central School District enrolls roughly 1400 students K-12, roughly a third of whom are Native American.
And they're getting a "humanoid robot" teacher.
There are so many red flags flying around this story. Take this description from Melissa Manno at New York Focus who talked to Andrew Siguel, CEO of Toronto-based Realbotix (more about them in a bit):
The female robot, named Sally, will have a “lifelike appearance” with silicone skin and long brown hair, Kiguel said in an interview with New York Focus. It will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions.
The "female" robot? Robots do not have gender, as far as I know. Students will use a unique id code to announce themselves to the bot, so the bot can id with whom it is speaking. Place your bets now on how many nanoseconds until students decide there is fun to be had by switching id codes.
The robot will be tied into the school's tech curriculum, which was developed by Steve Sozniak "to prepare students for high-demand tech jobs," and I sure hope they aren't referring to all those coding jobs that are now being handed over to AI.
But hey-- nothing like waving jobs and technology at rural, marginalized districts (the district has roughly 79% low-income students) in an attempt to get them to sign up to be some tech bro's guinea pig.
And it won't just help students, who might, for instance, "upload photos of homework for feedback, ask the avatar to generate lessons on topics that interest them, or receive real-time translations in over 100 languages." You know. Cheat. But teachers benefit, too-
If a teacher loses their place during a lesson or needs a prompt on what comes next, Kiguel said, they can ask the robot for guidance because it has been loaded with the district’s curriculum.
Good lord in heaven. How the hell does a teacher "lose their place" in a lesson, unless it's in a district that is so tightly scripted that teachers are required to memorize the script? Maybe she turned two pages at once? And what the heck does it do to student respect for the teacher if they get to watch the teacher be redirected and corrected by a bot??
Teacherbot will cost $57,590, but it will not come with some of the advanced features of Realbotix's other products, and if you're thinking "What features" or "How do this company think it's ready to make a roboteacher, anyway," well, hold onto your hat.
Realbotix is already in the humanoid robot business. Specifically, the humanoid sex robot business.
Realbotix used to be Tokens.com, a crypto company (which let you rent real estate in Zuckerberg's Metaverse) that bought Simulcra, the company behind RealDoll, in 2024, into That was merged with RealBotix with the intent to expand above and beyond the sex robot biz into AI and other robots. That move was funded in part by investor Arthur Hayes, a crypto-bro with legal problems of his own (to add to the confusion, Bed Bath and Beyond just bought the Tokens.com domain). Realbotix also wants you to know that they make companion robots, intended to fight the loneliness epidemic (but not, apparently, with sex).
The "how did this even happen" part is its own little story. Manna reports that Salamanca's superintendent Mark Beehler says that the "partnership with Realbotix began after a former colleague met an investor at a dinner and discussed the possibility of bringing the company’s robots into the education sector."
The company provided a demo of the teacherbot "counseling" a child who has been bullied, with basically, "I'm sorry that happened to you. You should go tell a trusted adult."
And you may be wondering about the wisdom of getting teaching support from AI and its tendency to just make shit up. Realbotix thinks it has that whole "hallucination" thing under control.
To avoid AI-generated inaccuracies, Beehler said Realbotix trained the robot and avatar to say, “I don’t know,” instead of generating fabricated or misleading responses known as “AI hallucinations.”
That seems both unlikely and inadequate.
Look, I would not be particularly concerned if my child's teacher was a former sex worker, but I would sure as hell be concerned if it weren't even human. And I would be doubly concerned if that non-human was given a bunch of synthetic humanoid features designed to trick my children into thinking of it as a person rather than a plagiarism-fueled next-token-predicting machine.
It would also be super if all these Frankenstein wannabe's stopped unleashing their ideas on poor, rural families who lack the clout to push back. Behhler says he'll assess the success of this nightmare fuel through "qualitative feedback" from teachers and students. And Ryan Schaaf of Notre Dame told Manna he's optimistic, but that it will require "thoughtful implementation" (yikes) and lots of teacher monitoring and guiding student interaction with the bot (in other words, another new tech making more work). Here's hoping this doesn't waste a whole year of student's learning.
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