Seriously, what the actual fuck.

Sex bots being deployed as public school teachers is so fucked up even fiction authors wouldn’t touch it.

Like ffs this is so dystopian it’s one of those things they don’t put in the history movie 200 years later because it’s unbelievable

I’m curious how Van Halen would feel about the robosexual youth’s take on “Hot for Teacher”.

Bot for teacher

Reading the article makes me feel like it should be in Not The Onion.

Why did they make her look like she’s about to terminate the waiter at Chili’s who brought her soggy fries?

The clanker in the pic is from a CES demo. I did not see whose skin the classroom terminator is supposed to wear but it is supposed to have dark hair.

Anything but paying teachers a decent wage…

$10 says it's a "repurposed" sex hot and it would've taken a whopping week for a more techy student to hack it and say profanities or something similar...

It is interesting that they couldn’t replace sex workers with their unskilled robots, but they think they can replace teachers!?

These companies are so out of touch with reality that they deserve to go bankrupt. Their investors are so out of touch that they deserve to loose their investment.

The wealthy have a huge incentive to want unskilled teachers. They’d probably rather go back to the days when only the wealthy were educated at all, but creating a bigger gap between the quality of education of the rich and the poor is a passable short term goal for now.

Remember, the point of a company isn’t to make a product, it’s to make a profit. It’s more profitable to have a dumb population that unquestioningly buys whatever you advertise to them, and if you sell a few crappy AI teaching robots along the way, that’s just a cherry on top.

I think the company is less of an issue than the school who even considered this to start with.

You really need to see just how bad these things are:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJlxkLawZrw

It’s a slightly animatronic mannequin. They’re so garbage. This is what they brought to CES to show off, like they’re proud of it. Tickle Me Elmo was more life-like.

Right before the AI boom really started to take off there was a robot "companion" named Moxie that I thought struck exactly the right balance - it was nowhere near the uncanny valley, staying firmly on the cute robot side, and it used a projected cartoon face that was simple but expressive. Unfortunately the company's timing was rather poor, they went out of business right before the AI back end would have been able to make full use of an avatar like this. I'd love to see another version of this approach.

It’s the robot from M3GAN 2.0?

Yup. IIRC they paid the movie's producers for the product placement, and then the company went under before the movie's release date. So it ended up advertising a defunct product. But at least it fit perfectly into the movie's plot.

I don’t know, Moxie feels like a DreamWorks character popped inside of a plastic casing. Especially with that image, it comes across like a render or a movie character than a real thing.

Personally, I’m more partial to robots that don’t have a human-like face at all. Like Jibo, whose “face” was a simple flat circle on a screen. Cosmo might be the upper end, where it has two “eyes” (squares) on a screen, but no other features.

IMO there’s a bit of a mistake in trying to have human faces on robots. Not only do you then have to contend with the uncanny valley, but you don’t really need those to convey the same thing. Pose and things like that work equally as well.

We don’t have people walking around trying to put human faces on cats and dogs, but we can understand them well enough all the same.

Cat girls after reading your comment: “Shooketh, niao”

Here's an unboxing video, this timestamp skips straight to Moxie coming online. Moxie is a real product. And the video is from three years ago, before convincing video generation AI was a thing, in case that was a concern.

Moxie does pose as well, its various joints are motorized. The arms exist entirely to point and gesticulate, they don't have grippers.

We don't have people walking around trying to put human faces on cats and dogs, but we can understand them well enough all the same.

They do have faces, though. Dogs literally developed additional facial muscles compared to wolves apparently as a means of improving their communication with human companions. Moxie's face isn't a human face, it's highly stylized.

This is absolutely pathetic. Love the way they have no idea what to do with their arms, but desperately try to do something anyway, at a glacial pace, I assume because any faster could throw them off-balance… And they just end up stuck in the most awkward, unnatural poses anyway.

I read this as “each class gets 1 free sex toy to play”

30% of the country already acts like they were taught by a brainless joytoy and are no doubt going to say shit like yowza I wish my 3rd grade teacher looked like that .

This half decade is really the official start of america as a cyberpunk dystopia and I gotta say its way fuckin stupider than I imagined.

It’s not good regardless of the connection to sex bots. It means classrooms would be monitored to make sure teachers and kids “behave” and don’t pose any risk to the establishment by straying from the curriculum into conversations that question the status quo. And it would allow creeps to spy on kids and gather information on them.

And since it’s corporate property, you can just bill for damage and replacement and maintenance and don’t need to deal with human issues.

Good education? You won’t need that to serve the ruling class.

That thing would get vandalized, hacked and flashed back to a sexbot firmware in no time. Funnily enough, the improved fleshlights these things normally have can be bought standalone, so maybe even a hardware upgrade would have been in that abominations future.

I, for one, welcome our new sexrobot overlords.

Well, it might help with the behavioral issues which are attached to male puberty, maybe reducing bullying and sexual harassment. It could also be used to teach about female anatomy, a thematic complex that seems to be sorely lacking in the US in general.

Ok, end of sarcasm. Simply putting this thing there as a bad substitute for a real teacher is not even a bad joke. It is insulting towards both the students which deserve to be taught by someone they can relate to and who is invested in their growth, and it is insulting towards teachers by showing them that they are seen as nothing more than information dispensers.

Teaching is so much more; the most important lessons i learned in school weren’t the information i was getting or the stuff i was asked on tests, but the continued impulses to make sure i think for myself, to be critical towards my surroundings, to make sure i don’t just accept incoming information, but also making sure to see who is feeding me that information and WHY i get this information fed at all.

It was an inoculation against bad actors and propaganda. I know i am still not immune to it (noone is), but i often just realize why a specific piece was written, being able to read between the lines, without much effort. This is what is needed for a functioning democracy, and it is obvious that exactly this ability is under attack from all sides.

Teaching is so much more; the most important lessons i learned in school weren’t the information i was getting or the stuff i was asked on tests, but the continued impulses to make sure i think for myself, to be critical towards my surroundings, to make sure i don’t just accept incoming information, but also making sure to see who is feeding me that information and WHY i get this information fed at all.

That’s exactly what the war on education is trying to eradicate.

pauses plan

In other words, “We’re gonna wait until people forget about this, then do it anyway.”

I bet that a bunch of techy kids would just hack in to them or destroyed them lmao

Also the new hairpiece makes Larry King look a lot younger!