Governing Humanoids in Healthcare and Education

Discussion with Aman Bandvi

With nearly three decades in software, strategy, and emerging technologies, Aman Bandvi has shaped responsible adoption through roles with the India Blockchain Alliance, India AI Alliance, and the Emerging Technology Council. Now leading Edge of Possible, he focuses on making AI, robotics, and quantum practical. In this article, he explains why humanoids in clinics and classrooms must be governed with rigorous audit trails, reliable human overrides, and ethics-first safeguards.

Building Contextual Integrity into Audit Trails

The ‘move fast and break things’ mindset doesn’t fit healthcare or education, where small errors have lasting consequences. Bandvi argues that audit trails must evolve into Contextual Integrity Audit Trails, systems that provide a complete picture of decision-making, including model versions, training data lineage, transcripts of interactions, sensor inputs, and confidence scores.

This kind of comprehensive oversight ensures institutions don’t just capture decisions but also the influences behind them. “We just don't want to record any decision. We need to capture the provenance of influence”, Bandvi explains. Such trails transform auditing from a reactive tool into a proactive safeguard, giving regulators and institutions the ability to detect when systems drift outside safe boundaries.

To make this possible, Bandvi proposes a Regulatory API: a secure, standardized data stream that humanoids transmit to independent oversight bodies. This allows regulators to act like epidemiologists, spotting patterns of risk across thousands of interactions in real time. For hospitals and schools, this means fewer surprises, faster interventions, and stronger public trust.

Establishing a Chain of Accountability

When humanoids are deployed, who is responsible when something goes wrong? Bandvi argues that accountability must be shared, not blurred. He calls this a Chain of Accountability, where responsibility is divided among manufacturers, deployers, and insurers. This ensures every party has both an obligation and a liability tied to their role.

Manufacturers are responsible for intrinsic issues such as faulty design, biased training data, and cybersecurity gaps. These problems must be identified and addressed before deployment. Deployers, including hospitals, schools, or universities, hold responsibility for contextual misuse, failing to train human overseers, ignoring system alerts, or applying humanoids in environments for which they were not designed. “The deployer should bear contextual liability”, Bandvi stresses.

Insurers serve as enforcers, requiring transparent audit trails and certifications before underwriting policies. By making safety measurable and insurable, insurers align financial incentives with ethical outcomes. “Safety should be a market differentiator, for humanoids, how safe they are must define their value”, Bandvi emphasizes. Together, this model makes accountability enforceable and actionable.

Engineering Reliable Human Overrides

Human oversight can’t rely on a symbolic ‘big red button’. Bandvi proposes a Three-Layer Override System for stress, speed, and accessibility. The first layer, Friction for Critical Decisions, requires humanoids to pause before high-stakes actions and explain their reasoning, forcing both system and supervisor to slow down when it matters most.

The second layer, Proactive Uncertainty Flagging, prompts humanoids to seek human input when confidence is low, reducing the risk of unchecked errors. The third, a Dead-Man’s Switch, allows anyone, even a patient or child, to trigger an immediate shutdown if they feel unsafe.

Bandvi stresses that overrides must be tested regularly, like fire drills or medical simulations. The real value of these safeguards lies not in how rarely they are used, but in how effectively humans can reassert control when they are needed. “The human override is the most critical part”, he notes, framing oversight as an everyday operational tool rather than a last resort.

Stress-Testing for Ethical Failures

Testing humanoids before deployment should be as rigorous as clinical trials. Bandvi advocates for Adversarial Provenance Testing, where red teams deliberately attempt to trigger ethical breakdowns. “From now on the red team process should be to induce ethical failures”, he explains. The purpose is to surface hidden risks that conventional quality assurance often overlooks.

These scenarios probe questions beyond technical performance: Can a student robot create dependency? Could a healthcare robot prioritize efficiency over patient care if manipulated? Exploring such edge cases helps organizations identify and mitigate subtle risks that may not show up under normal testing conditions.

Alongside this, Bandvi emphasizes the importance of Contextual Bias Audits by accredited third parties. These audits measure how humanoids perform across diverse local settings, such as classrooms in Delhi or clinics in Nairobi, ensuring systems operate fairly in real-world environments. Publishing results, he argues, should be mandatory for licensing, enhancing transparency and public trust.

Embedding Privacy in Humanoid Design

When humanoids are capable of reading emotions,the old notice-and-consent model collapses. Bandvi argues emotional and biometric data need special safeguards, proposing Guardianship-Based Privacy built on two principles: Ambient Data Rights and Vulnerability-by-Design

Ambient Data Rights restrict the use of emotional and biometric information to the immediate task at hand, prohibiting storage, reuse, or commercialization. This ensures sensitive data is never treated as an asset for secondary purposes. Vulnerability-by-Design, meanwhile, requires systems to automatically enforce stronger protections when dealing with sensitive groups, such as children or patients.

This model flips the burden of proof from individuals to developers. It requires those building humanoids to prove data use is necessary, beneficial, and strictly limited. “If a machine can interpret your emotional state, then the traditional notice and consent models don't work”, Bandvi notes. By embedding privacy into design, institutions ensure protections are proactive, not reactive.

Redefining Safety Metrics for Boards

Boards must rethink how they measure safety. Traditional uptime metrics, often touted as signs of reliability, fail to capture ethical or contextual risks. Bandvi instead suggests focusing on what he calls Ethical Vital Signs, a set of indicators that better reflect safety and fairness in real-world conditions.

The first metric is Override Rate and Cause, which captures how often humans intervene and why. Rising override rates should be seen as early warnings, not failures. The second is the Drift Coefficient, measuring the performance gap between lab testing and real-world application. A widening gap indicates concept drift that requires urgent review.

The third is the Equity Impact Score, which assesses whether outcomes are consistent across demographic groups. “I need to understand from intent to impact whether it has treated everyone favorably”, Bandvi insists. By focusing on these measures, boards can engage in meaningful oversight rather than symbolic compliance.

Using Procurement as a Governance Tool

Procurement, Bandvi argues, should be treated as a governance tool, not just a cost-saving measure. Two clauses are especially critical: “What is non-negotiable? The right to repair and retrain and ethical escrow”, he notes.

The Right to Repair & Retrain ensures organizations can adapt humanoids to their own datasets and evolving needs. This prevents vendor lock-in and empowers institutions to maintain control. The Ethical Escrow, meanwhile, guarantees access to critical algorithms and audit trails through a neutral third party if a vendor fails or changes direction.

Bandvi points to India’s offset clauses, requiring foreign vendors to use local parts and build partnership, as inspiration. Applying similar principles to humanoid procurement would safeguard sovereignty, encourage local innovation, and reduce over-reliance on foreign technologies. Procurement, in this sense, becomes a strategic tool for resilience.

Preventing AI Colonialism

Emerging markets risk becoming dumping grounds for substandard technologies if they lack their own standards. Bandvi’s solution is the establishment of sovereign certification regimes, rooted in localized benchmarking, mandatory knowledge transfer, and regional alliances.

Localized benchmarking ensures humanoids are tested on culturally and demographically relevant datasets, not just foreign baselines. Mandatory knowledge transfer requires every deployment to build local capacity, ensuring skills and infrastructure grow alongside adoption. Regional alliances, finally, allow countries to negotiate collectively with major tech vendors, strengthening bargaining power.

“The dependency will absolutely go away once localized benchmarking is done and this offset part of the mandatory knowledge transfer happens”, Bandvi annotates. By asserting ethical sovereignty now, the Global South can avoid becoming a permanent technology colony and instead position itself as a full participant in the innovation economy.

Key Takeaways for Executives

• Shift from reactive ethics to proactive safety engineering: Build safeguards like Contextual Integrity Audit Trails and Regulatory APIs into systems from day one.
• Use liability and insurance to align incentives: A Chain of Accountability backed by insurers makes safety a competitive advantage.
• Assert ethical sovereignty now:  Create sovereign certification regimes rooted in local context and values, ensuring technology serves communities, not the other way around.

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