Teach me harder, Sally!

Sally has always dreamed of becoming a teacher.

An attractive brunette with silicone skin, sensible blouse and cold lifeless eyes, Sally was set to kick-off her career in the Salamanca School District. But those dreams came crashing down when a bunch of pissed off parents got spooked about plonking a life-like AI robot into their childrens’ classroom.

Voicing concerns about ‘privacy’ and demanding stronger policies about how student data would be captured and used, these enemies of innovation also voiced some concern with Sally’s peculiar past.

Realbotix, the creators of Sally, was actually once known as RealDoll — a US company with a different kind of expertise: creating life-like “companions”, better known as sex dolls.

Realbotix is, of course, adamant that Sally is not a sex bot. And how dare you assume such a thing!

Judging by its layered corporate restructuring, Realbotix wanted to distance itself as much as possible from its sexy past. But those conservative buzzkills at the New York Teachers Union just couldn’t let the past be the past, man. Presumably a little uncomfortable about sliding Sally’s silicone body into a classroom of horny teens, their public pressure got the school distruct to pump the brakes on the project.

It turns out that not everyone is hot for teacher.

If Sally could feel emotions, one could imagine it would be disappointment. Her dreams are on hold for now. But while she waits, let’s explore how this bold educational gamble came to be.

Sex dolls become sex robots

For more than a decade, RealDoll mastered the art of manipulating silicone into life-like dolls that look and, according to reviews, feel excitingly real.

For $6,000USD, they’ll create you your very own companion, specced to your desires and shipped to your door (in what must be a most-unsettling unboxing experience). Until recently, RealDoll companions have been inert and brainless. But that hasn’t stopped men falling in love with them, and in some cases, even marrying them (presumably in Florida).

But with the rise of robotics and AI, something magical happened: RealDolls are now a lot more real. The company explains:

“Static dolls sit lifeless. Serenity [her name] moves with you. Her robotic head features eyes that follow your gaze, a neck that turns when you speak, and lips that move with every word. She reacts. She responds. This is what separates a sex robot from a silicone doll.”

That’s right, the days of duct-taping ChatGPT voice to your RealDoll’s head are a thing of the past. Now you can finally experience the warm fuzzy feeling of Serenity’s lifeless eyes following you around the room while she compliments your taste in music.

But what does this have to do with Sally? Well, according to Realbotix, absolutely nothing.

But the truth is far more interesting.

Man’s drive to have sex with robots

As it turns out, the craftsmanship of the Realdoll team filled a real hole … in the robotics market. A decade of focusing on the aesthetics, feel and experience of a doll has solved a key problem for robo-human interactions.

Most robotics companies are filled with robotics engineers. They focus on the mechanics of movement; building robots that can dance, jump, and most importantly, decapitate each other in a battle royale.

But while those engineers were hard at work ushering in humanity’s doomsday, the team at RealDoll were doing something a little different.

RealDoll never cared about how to affix a machine gun to a robo-death-dog. Instead they occupied themselves with equally difficult challenges, like creating the perfect set of D cups or trying to find the perfect shade of cock-vein blue.

And it’s a good thing they did.

Because if humans are ever going to interact with robots naturally they need to look, and feel, a little more human. Human-robo interaction demands a little more nuance, a little more feeling, and a lot less of whatever the hell this is…

‘GREETING HUMAN! I AM HERE TO SERVE AS YOUR COMPANION’

What if they could offer more than sex?

The fusion of robotic engineering and sex doll artisanship was inevitable. But, in what was a brilliant stroke of entrepreneurial insight, the brass at Realbotix/RealDoll recognised something groundbreaking: life-like sex robots could probably do other things too. What if you didn’t even have sex with them?

We’ll never know exactly how the lightning strike of insight arrived (one can imagine it was post RealDoll coitus), but this brilliant idea to pivot the tech into other industries is how we got where we are.

So, while the world catches up the idea of life-like AI robots replacing humans and jumping headfirst into a dystopian nightmare, Sally will just have to wait.

And in the meantime, at least you can rest easy knowing that our forests are safe, thanks to this new goat-headed centaur robot from Saytress designed to “make forestry practices safer for workers”.

Welcome to 2026.

‘HELLO HUMAN. I MAKE FOREST SAFE FOR YOU’

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- Adrian J. Stewart

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