Today in dystopia: another story about a school deciding that the one thing their classroom really needs is a weird AI-driven robot. Who’s today’s lucky winner? Step forward Salamanca City Central School District in Western New York, which, according to Techspot, will spend $57,590—”discounted from the $95,000 list price,” so that’s nice—on a thing called “Sally.”
As with the classroom robots in a San Diego charter school, on which we reported last month, it seems that the robot will essentially function as a mouthpiece for an LLM. Quite why anyone thinks this is a good idea, let alone a necessity, remains unclear—even if for whatever reason a teacher decides that they want their student to have access to a chatbot, why drop tens of thousands of dollars on a robot when a laptop and an internet connection would achieve the same thing?
The company manufacturing the robot is Realbotix, which was known as Tokens.com until May 2024. This is worth knowing, because a month before this rebranding, the company formerly known as Tokens.com acquired the company formerly known as Simulacra Corporation. That company is now known as Abyss Creations, and we’ll get to what those creations are in a moment.
First, though, let’s look at Realbotix’s website. It lists a bunch of “use cases” for its creations, one of which is “Companionship.” The copy here is genuinely depressing: “Our robots and AI,” proclaims the company, are ideal to tackle North America’s staggering loneliness epidemic.” Companionship is one thing, but if you’re after, y’know, companionship… well, Robotix has that covered too, via the aforementioned Abyss Creations.
So what does Abyss do? It manufactures the RealDoll, and if you’re blissfully unaware of what that is, I’m about to ruin your day: it’s a life-sized sex mannequin, which you’re welcome to Google at your own convenience. (The results will be NSFW, obviously.) There’s one thing to note here, though: since at least 2018, Abyss Creations has been previewing a coming AI upgrade that will turn your $6,000 sex toy into a robotic “companion that responds, evolves, and reflects … not just physically, but emotionally and experientially.”
So, yeah, that’s weird. But apart from the sex robot aspect of this whole situation, there’s also a broader question here. Beyond the purchase/rental revenue, what’s the benefit for these companies of having their robots in classrooms? It’s hard to imagine that the endgame here is anything apart from robots that can replace teachers, and it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which whatever a classroom robot sees and hears gets used to train future iterations of their AI features.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Realbotix is doing this. But if I was a principal who somehow got strongarmed into accepting one of these robots, I’d be making sure I examined the robot EULA and similar documentation very, very carefully. After all, it’s not like AI companies have shown any respect for other people’s work in the past; it’s the fact that they happily scraped the entire internet for training that created this nightmare timeline in the first place.
But look on the bright side: this is real vertical integration, people! Just imagine a future in which the same company can sell you a) a robot to teach you at school; b) a robot to compensate for the fact that you never learned to make friends at school; and c) a robot to gratify you because you’re lonely, alienated and your job just got automated out of existence! Who wouldn’t want to live in that world? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to drink heavily and then start a new life under the sea.