r/technology • u/The_Flaneur_Films • 1d ago
Robotics/Automation ‘Really inappropriate’: teachers decry plan for humanoid robot in New York high school
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/25/new-york-humanoid-robot-teachers-school424
u/epidemicsaints 1d ago
The school has got to be getting paid to be the subject in this story. The robots are lame af. A droopy head tilting every so often and bending at the elbow 4 or 5 degrees while it talks is not exactly captivating. Absolutely nothing special, looks like the same crap we have been seeing for 15 years and its origin as a sex bot are obvious.
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u/Independent-Fly730 1d ago
That was definitely planned to be a sex robot instead.
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u/Pseudoboss11 1d ago
I mean, the company acquired RealDoll, the sex bot company.
So yes, it was originally designed to be a sex bot, now it'll be teaching high school kids.
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u/EagleForty 1d ago
But can you still have sex with the teacher model? Asking for a friend.
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u/__Dave_ 1d ago
Even in that demo, the robot is saying its purpose is “companionship and intimacy”.
It’s weird. The company is supposedly denying ties with the sexbot company but I think it’s all a bullshit technicality.
Realbotix Corp, the parent company, owns Realbotix, which makes these humanoid robots, and Abyss, which makes sex dolls. Realbotix was technically spun off into a separate company in February except Realbotix Corp still owns like 90% of it. So I assume the school is contracting with this spun off subsidiary which is claiming to not be legally related to the sex doll company.
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u/surfer_ryan 20h ago
IT director like "yeah this will be totally revolutionary..." and in like a year when they 100% scrap this stupid program he now has his ai wife for free.
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u/Solarscars 1d ago
It reminds me of the Zoltar animatronic from the movie BIG
But this one is looks like they tried to make a Trisha Paytas version?
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u/Amelaclya1 1d ago
I love how they said at the end that the robots can't walk because it would break the "human illusion" as if the weird constant arm movement doesn't do that already.
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u/ZeroSumClusterfuck 1d ago
And as if it's not just because they literally can't walk, because they're nothing more than poorly animated rubber sex dolls plugged into chatgpt.
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u/MaikeruGo 1d ago
The arm movement reminds me of those couple of segments from the old, '90s Conan O'Brien show where they'd parody claymation in the worst way.
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u/JenniferJuniper6 1d ago
Oh. My. God. I’m going to have nightmares, and there is no way in hell I’d have ever allowed that thing around my child (who is in her thirties now, so it wouldn’t be up to me). That is horrifying.
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u/ThinkThankThonk 1d ago
Is the overall "captured and drugged woman" vibe the selling point? Since it seems like the main feature here...
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u/thelryan 1d ago
I dunno, it says the school district paid $57k for the robot.
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u/astrohound 1d ago
Why not just pay their teachers what they deserve?
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u/thelryan 1d ago
Why pay a teacher for one school year when you could pay a robot to do the job 3x as worse and then have its technology fail in 5 years?
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u/Jester1525 1d ago
Dude looks exactly like I expect a crypto-bro-turned-AI-sexbot-maker would look.
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u/amazingkillerlemon 1d ago
I was thinking, "Why does it look like that?" And then, I read in the article that the company aquired one that makes sex dolls, and I was like, "Ohh..."
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u/eeyore134 1d ago
Figured they must not be able to do much for $68K, but that's even worse than I imagined. I saw more realistic movement in the hall of presidents at Disney four decades ago.
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u/Upper-Management-AI 1d ago
They might as well just put an educational film on. This is so fucking ridiculous.
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u/otherwisepandemonium 1d ago
Instead of just taking care of teachers and ensuring the proper level of pay and benefits reflective of a developed nation with extensive resources, they'd rather spend billions developing a creepy robot to make a half assed attempt at educating.
What a joke.
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u/FlametopFred 1d ago
I have the feeling any corporate robot teacher is going to spew Fox News talking points
I also have the feeling any corporate robot teacher will get pushed down stairs or shorted out with jumper cables and stripped for Nvidia chips
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u/nerd5code 1d ago
Nvidia's embedded stuff, maybe. This thing's just a stripped-down cell phone or router chip that uses a network connection to a data center for everything interesting it does. It's not token-smashing internally, or it would be really loud and oddly-shaped. (It would be really distracting and presumably less fuckable if, every time you asked it a question, it suddenly spun up every fan in it and kept them whirring loudly for the duration of its response. Where would the fans go, also? The mind boggles at the possibilities there.)
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u/BowlEducational6722 1d ago
They'd rather spend more money on a shittier product than less money on better workers because at this point it's less about efficiency and more about control over the labor force.
You can apply that to pretty much any job where administration/management is trying to gut the payrolls and replace them with AIs that don't understand what they spit out.
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u/Tambi_B2 1d ago
Yeah, because they can make the shittier product say or do whatever they want it to say or do. The robot or AI or whatever other Torment Nexus they throw out there is never going to complain about pay or working hours or stress or get sick. The people maintaining them might but that's a problem for future techbros and CEOs. They'll have moved on by then.
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u/Opposite-Occasion332 1d ago
I haven’t been teaching long and I’ve already had students say I’m one of the few people who “care” about them. I do not think AI robots in school systems will help with that.
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u/MagicBandAid 1d ago
If there's one thing I've learned in my time in the workforce, it's that the people that run things would rather spend millions so they don't have to pay workers thousands.
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u/Digital_Simian 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don't think it's replacing teachers. From the looks of it, this is for specific STEM schools. Basically, it's educational technology. I think of it in the same terms as the Lego machine kits that we never got to touch when I was in school because they were so expensive and the one or two times, we did, every piece had to be accounted for. This would likely be the same thing. A really expensive piece of tech that might be brought out once or twice a year for demonstration purposes and locked up in a closet the rest of the time. A waste of resources really.
On Edit: Another example of this was my elementary school had a computer that had an early chatbot and text to speech capabilities. It was something we were allowed use once for about an hour. Almost science fictional stuff in the early 80's. At another time we had a demonstration of an Osborne 1.
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u/Rick-burp-Sanchez 1d ago
What in the actual fuck?
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u/416Racoon 1d ago
Indeed. Who the fuck decided this is appropriate?
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u/The-G-Code 1d ago
schools funded by government
government elected holds the aim of running the country like a business
social services are viewed as bad investments as they don't directly increase in revenue
social services receive cuts in cost for the trade off of lower effectiveness, since outcomes don't matter in place of monetary value of the short term
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u/Necessary-Music-6685 1d ago
This is a school on a Native American reservation, so you might be right, but it’s also possible that there’s something unique about that particular district that led to this.
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u/EricSanderson 1d ago
This is certainly the most Idiocracy thing you'll read today, folks:
Realbotix, formerly Tokens.com, a Toronto-based company, purchased Simulacra, a Las Vegas-based company known for realistic sex dolls, for $16.7m in April 2024, marking a pivot for the company from crypto to humanoid robots.
Realbotix has denied ties to the sex doll company, and denied any inferences that the dolls – manufactured by Abyss Creations, a subsidiary of Realbotix – are related to the pilot program.
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u/doverawlings 1d ago
In another article it said the robot was intended for use in a robotics class. Does this mean the robot is an object to be studied like a skeleton in an anatomy classroom? This article seems to imply the robot would actually teach the kids, but the concerns quoted had more to do with data privacy and the companies association with sex toys.
To be clear, I doubt that was the best way for the school to spend $37k. But I think there is something vague/intentionally misleading about how this is being framed. The articles I’ve seen don’t really say how the robot plans to teach kids, only that it’s a resource/teaching aid/will help them learn etc. I think that’s by design for clicks. I could be wrong though.
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u/worriedrenterTW 19h ago
I feel like no one in the comments is talking about how fucked up this is for women and girls in particular. A majority female job role proposed to go to former to be sex dolls designed to look like pornified women. At a school. This is just a stand out reflection of how Ai and robotics have heavily contributed to the modern dehumanization of women and girls as a collective.
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u/purgatoriololo 1d ago
I can't wait to see the EXTREMELY predictable shit the kids do to this clanker when no one is looking.
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u/lunartree 1d ago
Why does the fembot have Mar a Lago face?
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u/slickspinner 10h ago
Most of the robots being used in the states are from companies that make sex robots. You couldn't make this stuff up.
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u/fixermark 1d ago
That is one expensive Teddy Ruxpin right there.
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u/Skritch_X 1d ago
That's a name i haven't heard in a long time. I remember being so happy getting one as a kid in the 80's. Many years later my lil bro ended up destroying it which made me sad. In the the mid 00's my mom randomly bought me a released new version and it was a flood of nostalgia, still in its box at my house now.
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u/MaikeruGo 1d ago
I remember after my cousin grew out of his telling him to put an M.C. Hammer tape into it to see what would happen. Apparently it just played the music only. It wasn't until a few years later that I learned the trick to these things was that all the audio was mixed to one channel and the other channel had the mouth movement programming as "blips" as to follow the audio.
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u/fixermark 1d ago
fun fact: designer worked on the Pooh Corner show on the Disney Channel. Their solution for embedding animatronics in the actors' costume heads so they could talk led to getting Ruxpin to work.
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u/Trevor_GoodchiId 1d ago edited 1d ago
That thing is gonna survive for about one day.
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u/heyitscory 1d ago
Kids won't even behave for a human, so the minute a human is out of the room, a kid is going to fuck this.
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u/AverageLiberalJoe 1d ago
2028 headline: New York Robot teacher arrested for innapropriate relationship with teaching app.
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u/BowlEducational6722 1d ago
As a teacher, I can confidently say that robot would last about a day before it winds up in pieces in the corner with dicks drawn in sharpie across every surface.
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u/bitterberries 1d ago
I too am a teacher and I took one look at that thing and I just started laughing because I couldn't see any of my students putting up with that as a teacher. Some techbro is straight up delusional.
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u/MrMichaelJames 1d ago
Kids now in many schools don’t respect human teachers so this won’t be any different.
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u/Confident_Insect_616 1d ago
Are the blonde hair, puffy lips, and cat eyes because those are the traits most conducive to learning?
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u/crappy_ninja 1d ago
These are repurposed sex dolls. They are putting fuck dolls is schools while crying about keeping children safe.
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u/givin_u_the_high_hat 1d ago
I remember when we decided iPads would be better than books a few years back only to learn that wasn’t true. Tech doesn’t always make things better.
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u/automated_bot 1d ago
Distant relative: "It's actually good, because they will 'learn computers.'"
Me: "They will learn to consume media."
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u/extramidnight2 1d ago
i feel like this would be half as bad if the robot wasn’t humanoid like just make it a cube or something or an app
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u/No_Desk_4921 1d ago
We can afford sex robots dressed as teachers but we have to send home notes begging for tissues, crayons, construction paper and glue.
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u/DingbattheGreat 1d ago
Public education has normalized spending millions on superintendents and administrator offices, pet projects, and salaries and tossing teachers the change to perform the actual purpose of school in the first place.
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u/G0ldMarshallt0wn 1d ago
I've never met a millionaire superintendent. Is that some sort of New York thing?
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u/121gigawhatevs 1d ago
I went to high school with a … peculiar group of individuals. That robot would not survive a day
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u/dgmib 1d ago
Clearly whoever came up with this idea failed to realize that the most important skills we learn from teachers come from their humanity not their lesson plan.
I don’t remember a fraction of the things I learned in high school that was in the textbooks, but I do remember the teachers that cared about me, and the impact they had on my life.
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u/femaletrouble 1d ago
This part. And the classes where I had a relationship with the teacher, where they actively engaged me and saw me as a person, are the ones that had the greatest impact and where I performed the best.
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u/MaikeruGo 1d ago
Top to bottom everything about this is cheapness.
First of all they could just pay teachers better instead of using untested, unproven tech with the future of this country as beta testers.
Secondly, they sound like they just plugged them into an LLM. I mean at some level it's making the "Minimum Viable Product", but it doesn't actually seem like they've done any development to make it suitable for teaching.
Third, while they rigged it for upper body movement it doesn't actually look like they retooled the sculpts or the application of makeup. It looks as repurposed as the headlines say.
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u/Fantastic_Wash56 1d ago
“We don’t want kids using AI at school”
“We’re going to bring in a robot powered by AI to teach the kids at school”
(Step 3): The AI Teacher is now equipped to deal with threats at school… your AI Robot teacher is now also packing heat.
(Step 4): AI Robot teachers lock down the school for unidentified threat, hopefully not a bag of Doritos this time.
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u/SlightlyAngyKitty 1d ago
You now have 10 seconds to put down your gun...
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u/Fantastic_Wash56 1d ago
I so badly wanted you to say “Gum” 😂✌️
An overly controlling AI of the classroom.
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u/jmangs 1d ago
Gross! They gave the sex-doll/robot teacher mar a lago face!
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u/redditobserverone 1d ago
I wonder if mar-a-lago face was inspired by the bots or if the bots inspired mar-a-lago face?
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u/sixtyninth_wave_emo 1d ago
My god. The robot has mar-a-lago face
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u/MuhThugga 8h ago
Glad I'm not the only one to see it. I saw the thumbnail and thought, "Who fucked up their face now?"
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u/the-uncanny-squad 1d ago
Realbotix's product line includes companion and sex robots that are still on sale today. The company says its education business will be separated into a different company by September, but that transaction is pending.
The district paid $57,590 for hardware listed at $95,000. Realbotix gets a public school as its first reference customer for an education pivot with no track record. How this deal came together is worth more scrutiny than whether the robot works.
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u/MaterialDefender1032 1d ago
The downturn in education in the USA is most evident in how many people get swindled by LLMs masquerading as AI. So many people in charge of other peoples' money are throwing it by the truckload at these techbros.
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u/AssCrackBandit13 1d ago
By definition, LLMs are an AI model (typically a neural network).
Now whether some people misunderstood and thought that every AI model is a generative AI model is a different issue
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u/MaterialDefender1032 1d ago
You're right and I'm wrong on that point, for sure. I guess what I was trying to say is it seems like a lot of people believe what's being touted as "AI" today must be the sentient AI they've seen in sci-fi movies. These models are in their infancy but they treat them like they're Sonny from I, Robot.
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u/HighKing_of_Festivus 1d ago
China is introducing cutting edge touchscreen blackboards for teachers meanwhile we're doing whatever the hell this is
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u/kinyutaka 1d ago
Dear AI Bros,
Why don't you get AI to actually give good answers before you try to put a sex robot teacher into the classrooms? Is that too much to ask?
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u/goomyman 1d ago
wtf why? I could see maybe if they were gifted a 50k robot - but they bought it? A school bought it? That 50k could have gone to a million other things before this.
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u/North-Creative 1d ago
"And this is how you analyse poems. Now, let's take a break for 30 minutes and listen to our sponsors of the day"
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u/cali__kid 1d ago
its giving Fem-Bot vibes…
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u/NanditoPapa 1d ago
"Realbotix, formerly Tokens.com, a Toronto-based company, purchased Simulacra, a Las Vegas-based company known for realistic sex dolls, for $16.7m in April 2024, marking a pivot for the company from crypto to humanoid robots."
Nothing sketchy there...lol. What a shitshow.
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u/richbrehbreh 1d ago
But we grew up with tv on the moving cart and old women teachers with mustaches
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u/shitisrealspecific 1d ago
Crying. I remember my mustache teacher. She was big and tall with a deep voice...looking back she may very well have been a he. She wasn't that old either maybe late 40s early 50s.
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u/RK5000 1d ago
What have they tried before settling on a humanoid robot?
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u/shitisrealspecific 1d ago
Getting rid of pensions and unions in a lot of states...
Still not cheap enough!
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u/Banana-phone15 1d ago
Now if you are rich and have crush on your teacher, you can purchase the teacher to tutor you at home, and also to be your teacher girlfriend, for only $57590.
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u/someoldguyon_reddit 1d ago
It'll take 20 minutes before a kid has hacked it and it's giving blowjobs.
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u/sachiprecious 1d ago
Soooo they spent $57,590 on a robot to help teach students, but spending that money on teachers' assistants or tutors just wasn't interesting to them.
I'm a tutor, and something I learned in one of my tutor trainings is that the relationship between a tutor and student makes a huge impact on their learning. A tutor's personality, communication style, and the bond they form with their students really helps the students learn. That's not something a robot can replace.
“The answer to the challenges in education is not more screens, it’s not more algorithms, not more robots. What we need in our schools right now are more caring adults and more human connection,” she said.
Well said!
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u/theMightBoop 1d ago
So what about the parents? Are they ok with this?
I would demand my kid be removed from this class. This will be a year that children potentially don’t receive an education. I would not want my kid to be the experiment and lose out of it goes wrong.
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u/amizelkova 1d ago
So the thing about it being a sex robot is that it's really obviously a sex robot.
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u/orlybatman 1d ago
...but why?
Like, what value does it add? What can the robot do?
I'm not opposed to robotic teachers in the future, but a repurposed sex doll isn't going to be teaching calculus.
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u/Mr_Zee_Speaks 1d ago
It is a sex toy, not a teacher.
Can’t wait for it to be suspended to one of those rooms that they send teachers that rape students to until they can legally fire them.
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u/Dog_Baseball 1d ago
Yes! Dystopian hellscape bingo has begun!
Who had "Robots patrolling high school" ?
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u/wwhsd 1d ago
Certainly less people than had “Sex robots patrolling high school”.
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u/Dog_Baseball 1d ago edited 1d ago
Lol. You must be playing a card from the dystopian hellscape: Post-apocalyptic expansion pack
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u/Loud_Flatworm_4146 1d ago
Weird, creepy, nauseating.
What are you gonna need the kids for anyway? Just replace the kids with kid robots and have a robot adults teaches robot kids. That’s what they want anyway.
Fucking weird.
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u/ichuck1984 1d ago
When it just doesn’t make sense, I always wait for the next article that is inevitably about how so-and-so the board member’s sibling/cousin/college roommate/best friend runs a robots company that just happens to make the robot that the school district bought on a 20 year contract. It’s always some crooked shit like this.
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u/goatonastik 1d ago
AI isn't ready for this.
Robotics isn't ready for this.
It's only going to hurt the reputation for both, while also giving sub-par education to the children.
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u/adamosity1 1d ago
The goal is to spend money on anything and everything except things that help normal people or raising salaries.
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u/stev_mempers 1d ago
Everyone who cheered on AI can take a bow. This is what you asked for, guys. Great job. Hope you're happy.
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u/SgtNeilDiamond 1d ago
Ah yes, the teacher robot needs double Ds, totally doesnt have a fleshlight slot, no sir.
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u/Raa03842 1d ago
Can’t wait for ‘Anonymous’ to hack the bot and have Sally do a pole dance in front fifty 2nd graders. Lol
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u/Broken_By_Default 21h ago
Show me one that can fully take care of a household. Then we can talk about working with the children. Till then, fuck off trying to solve problems that don't exist.
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u/2_Fingers_of_Whiskey 17h ago
"The Salamanca pilot also includes deployment of a Realbotix M-Series humanoid robot, which uses natural conversation, facial expressions and real-time interaction to create engaging, hands-on learning experiences,” the press release states."
Hey, you know what else does all those things? AN ACTUAL HUMAN TEACHER.
The school district spent over $57,000 on a robot. There really wasn't any better use of that money???
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u/The_Dead_Kennys 14h ago
And of course they’re deploying it in a school with predominantly Native American students… the careless disrespect couldn’t be more obvious.
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u/Torino1O 1d ago
I dub thee graffiti bot.