If a robot can teach the lesson, what is school actually for?
A rural New York district is putting a $57,000 humanoid robot named Sally into a classroom this fall as lab equipment, not a substitute teacher — but if machines can eventually deliver the content, does school become about the human parts we can’t automate, or does ‘assist the teacher’ quietly become ’need fewer teachers’?
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In today’s episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts (July 19, 2026), we dug into the Salamanca City Central School District’s decision to bring a Realbotix humanoid named Sally into its high school AI and robotics classes this fall. The superintendent’s argument is that banning AI is the lazy answer — kids route around it anyway — so schools should teach students to meet their first humanoid in a lab, not at a job interview. But we kept circling the harder question underneath: once a machine can reliably deliver a lesson, the value of school shifts to whatever is irreducibly human, and nobody has cleanly defined what that is. The pilot’s promise to ‘assist, not replace’ teachers is exactly how every automation story begins. Give the July 19 episode a listen and tell the forum where you land — is Sally the future of learning, or the first crack in it?
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