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A New York District Just Paused America's First Classroom Humanoid — Hours After the State Education Commissioner Wrote In · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the robot teacher got a contract before it got a permission slip. Ten days after New York Focus broke the story, a rural district halted America's first classroom humanoid on July twenty-fourth.
• 0:16
  [Guest] Salamanca City Central, a district on the Seneca Nation reservation.
• 0:20
  [Host] What were they actually buying?
• 0:22
  [Guest] Fifty-seven thousand, five hundred ninety dollars to Realbotix, a Toronto company. It's called Sally. Silicone skin, sits at a desk, doesn't walk.
• 0:31
  [Host] So what does it do all day?
• 0:34
  [Guest] Talks. Facial expressions, real-time conversation. Plus an avatar tutor called Optio on student laptops, homework help around the clock, starting in AI and robotics classes.
• 0:44
  [Host] And the district killed it.
• 0:46
  [Guest] Paused, not cancelled. The notice says on hold pending enhanced student data privacy agreements with the state.
• 0:53
  [Host] That sounds like paperwork, not values.
• 0:55
  [Guest] The paperwork was the lever. Lacey Pihlblad, who teaches there and runs the teachers' union, asked the narrow ones: how the software is secured, where the data goes, what it records.
• 1:07
  [Host] The district had answers. Superintendent Mark Beehler told his board it runs on a closed system, off the internet, no identifiable student data to Realbotix.
• 1:17
  [Guest] He told Inc. the robot solves limited problems. But an assurance offered after the questions go public isn't enforceable.
• 1:25
  [Host] Who widened it out?
• 1:27
  [Guest] Melinda Person of New York State United Teachers: a robot built by a company associated with sex dolls has no business in our classrooms.
• 1:36
  [Host] Who's in that classroom?
• 1:38
  [Guest] Thirty-two percent Native American, per New York Focus. Sierra May Abrams, a substitute, told the Guardian they chose to experiment on Native American children yet again. She meant the boarding schools.
• 1:50
  [Host] Set the robot aside. Is the tutoring good, or is the union anti-technology?
• 1:56
  [Guest] Bloom's 1984 two-sigma result never replicated. VanLehn's 2011 review put human tutors near point-eight, computer tutors almost even. But nobody measured the face, and Realbotix told Inc. it has no evidence the humanoid body improves learning.
• 2:10
  [Host] Realbotix calls it equity.
• 2:12
  [Guest] CEO Andrew Kiguel told GovTech not every parent can afford a tutor at fifty dollars an hour. Per New York Focus, seventy-nine percent of Salamanca's students are economically disadvantaged.
• 2:23
  [Host] So the face is a bet the district was funding. Then why did a privacy form stop it, not that argument?
• 2:32
  [Guest] Both, in order. The board had already approved the purchase in June, then the questions went public and Albany moved: Education Commissioner Betty Rosa wrote Beehler that the Department remains concerned about the effect a humanoid robot may have in a high school classroom. New York Focus says the pause came hours later.
• 2:53
  [Host] So Albany killed it, not the parents.
• 2:56
  [Guest] The letter ordered nothing. It leaned on the one signature the district still needed, and that leverage existed only because locals made it public first.
• 3:06
  [Host] There's an article on unscarcity dot ai called Data Center Moratoriums: Who Vetoes the AI Buildout? Same shape, one level up?
• 3:14
  [Guest] Same shape. The veto sits wherever the last required signature sits. Here, a state privacy agreement, not a federal law.
• 3:22
  [Host] What does a parent do with that?
• 3:25
  [Guest] Ask your district what it signed, and where student recordings would live. In Salamanca that question, asked out loud, put the contract in front of a regulator.
• 3:36
  [Host] Realbotix picked its flagship where resistance looked cheapest, and that room still held a signature it didn't control.
• 3:43
  [Guest] Patrick Deglon's book Unscarcity asks what school is for once a machine can teach the content. For more on where AI deployment gets stopped, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.