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THE ROBOTS ARE coming. In fact, they’ve been here for the best part of a decade, assembling cars, doing the heavy lifting in warehouses and assisting with medical procedures. They’re detonating bombs, stocking shelves and delivering meals.
Anatomically correct sex doll robots are providing a ‘full range of sexual services’ for incels with around $195,000 (€171,000) to spend on a companion that can also be programmed to laugh at their jokes and remember every tedious detail about their owner’s job dissatisfaction, family feuds and favourite foods.
Tech overlords like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos have variously predicted scenarios within the next decade where almost every unskilled or semi-skilled job, and a significant number of highly skilled professions, will be performed by robots.
Amazon plans to replace 600,000 human workers with robots within the next seven years. And Bezos has invested $100 billion (€87.87 billion) in an industrial automation initiative which will replace factory workers with robots on a global scale.
In the United States, where public schools are struggling with a chronic shortage of qualified teachers and a crippling dearth of support staff, school districts are increasingly looking at ways that AI and robots can bridge the gap.
The White House is all on board, with Melania Trump leading the charge to introduce AI and humanoid robots into education, with the caveat that they should ‘empower rather than replace’ teachers. Critics of her endorsement are sceptical both of the degree of understanding she possesses about the potential scope and consequences of using robots to educate children.
Last March, when she arrived to chair a White House technology summit accompanied by a life-sized robot, there were predictable gags about the difficulty in figuring out which was the First Lady and which was the humanoid machine.
Aside from presiding over a few events where her promotion of robots in schools parroted the patter of a marketing assistant at a Las Vegas trade fair, the First Lady’s vision for how AI and robots can improve educational standards and learning is inchoate and ill-defined.
An early experiment got off to a bad start. A pilot programme that planned to use a humanoid robot as a teaching assistant was abruptly paused last week after parental concerns prompted the New York State education commissioner to intervene and pull the plug on Project Sally.
Sally was scheduled to make its debut as the US’s first humanoid robot teaching assistant in a classroom on the Seneca Nation Reservation. Situated an hour south of Buffalo in upstate New York, the Salamanca School District is one of the poorest in the US. 78 per cent of its 1300 pupils live on or below the poverty line. One third are members of the Seneca tribe, and the remainder mostly come from migrant families.
Mark Beehler, the school district’s superintendent, claimed Sally could provide an innovative, cost-effective response to two persistent problems. The first was the inability to lure teaching assistants – who make around $20,000 (€18,000) a year – to work in a deprived rural area.
The second is the urgent need to provide pupils with a grounding in STEM, robotics and AI, which he argues is the best way to divert future Native American school graduates from the well-worn path of dead-end, minimum wage jobs on the bottom rungs of the hospitality, home care and fast food sectors. Jobs that will, in all likelihood, be replaced by robots within the next decade.
Spending $57,500 (€51,000) on a lifelike teaching assistant in the classroom, backed up by an online avatar that pupils of differing ability could access for individualised help with homework and STEM projects seemed like a no-brainer. Sally is programmed with WozED, the STEM curriculum devised by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
The classroom robot and her online avatar are programmed to instruct pupils in every aspect of every STEM subject in 100 different languages. This would be of particular value in Salamanca, where pupils speak 29 different languages.
The Sally robot is disconcertingly lifelike, resembling a mid-20s white Hispanic woman with brown eyes and long dark hair. Think Kendall Jenner meets J Lo. Initially, her voice sounds warm, soft-toned and lifelike. It takes a few moments for the robotic cadence to register.
While the upper body, head and arms are programmed to mimic human movement and facial expressions, allowing the robot to lean in, nod and smile while responding to questions, the lower part of it is non-moving and affixed to a chair.
In theory, it’s a soundly innovative idea, particularly when recruiting and retaining teachers and support staff is so challenging. Robots don’t suffer from burnout or require sick days and, according to the manufacturers, Sally responds with equanimity regardless of whether pupils are inattentive, belligerent or downright hostile to learning. It is indifferent to race, gender or ethnic differences.
Several “Sally” presentations are available online where the robot is asked questions that a teaching assistant might encounter, ranging from requests for help with chemistry and math problems to advice on what to do if a friend tells a pupil he has brought a gun to school. In the latter instance, the robot provides a clear response, advising that a staff member is immediately notified. “You are not snitching,” Sally says. “You have a duty to protect yourself and the other children.”
It’s fair to say that much of the scepticism towards Sally comes from Realbotix’s X-rated origin story as the manufacturer of hyperrealistic sex dolls. Realbotix CEO Andrew Kiguel stresses his company is focused on developing robots and AI for healthcare, customer service and education purposes.
But Realbotix is the also parent company of Intima.ai. One of their bestsellers, the anatomically correct Aria, is programmed with a Scottish accent and a desire to ‘entertain and inform in a great number of situations.’ While Kiguel assures prospective clients that there’s no crossover between Sally and her more risqué sister, the New York State Teacher’s Union is having none of it.
“A robot built by a company associated with sex dolls has no business in our classrooms,” its president declared in a widely circulated press release.
Realbotix stresses that Sally hails from the newly manufactured M-series robot and no Intima.ai blueprints, templates, hardware or other materials are used by its creators. In other words, Sally and Aria may have come from the same parent company, but they absolutely don’t share any DNA.
Parents and teachers also cite concerns about privacy and the retention of data. But arguably the greater problem is the lack of empirical evidence that Sally can improve learning or effectively impart knowledge to children. No qualitative or quantitative research that would compare learning outcomes was commissioned.
Typically, research would include student cohorts where some learn from teachers, some learn from laptops using AI programmes and others receive classroom and avatar instruction from Sally.
According to Kiguel, the flagship deployment of Sally and feedback from the Salamanca school district would ‘help guide us in future.’ In other words, the Salamanca school pilot is a trial and error experiment carried out on already disadvantaged pupils would have provided the basis for future modifications to Sally and Realbotix’s future iterations of educational robots.
Before the pilot was paused, there was anger and consternation that once again, Native American children are being used as guinea pigs in a pilot programme with uncertain – or even potentially negative – outcomes.
No wonder the state authorities pulled the plug. There’s little doubt that AI and robots will play a role in education in the near future. The Department of Education would be wise to impose clearly defined standards and regulations – before Trump shutters the federal education agency and each state is left to fend for itself.
For now, New York has imposed a freeze on the acquisition of any educational technology, pending a review and agreed guidelines on the use of AI in schools.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of teaching positions remain unfilled in disadvantaged areas like Salamanca, or are plugged by already overstretched educators or underqualified temporary staff.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
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