Sorry kid, we killed your robot — Embodied goes broke, AI social devices will stop working
Embodied, Inc. produced a nice AI use case: a pet “social robot” called Moxie to entertain and teach children with social difficulties. It specifically marketed the $799 gadget as a “Robot for Auti…
Ah man, if there's one thing autistic kids love, it's the sudden and arbitrary removal of an object they depend on!
I can't tell you how happy it would have made me to feel abandoned as a kid
100% designed to scam investors. The product could never be viable in the long term.
Using cloud ai api services for a toy is ridiculous. They have to pay a fee for every action the toy does. Voice recognition, text to speech and the access to the LLM. Every time the kid interacts with it, it's a couple cents going away.
Something like this needs to be 100% offline or require recurring subscription/usage credits from users. Otherwise it's a Ponzi scheme where the cloud bills from existing users are paid by new users buying a new device
If I was in charge of shutting everything down, I definitely would've made all the robots have a very dramatic death, complete with screaming and coughing up blood and "promise me you'll remember me" just before they stop working.
...There's probably a reason nobody's let me be in charge of anything like that.
promise me you’ll remember me
I'm partial to Avenge me! as last words myself.
this is... your fault...
This article someone posted the other day was on a similar topic except it explored (via anecdotes from interviews— long-form journalism style) companion chatbots for adults and how various companies going under or changing their tech/goals was impacting the people using the software.
Super interesting how quickly people anthropomorphize them— though the fact that people get sad when you name a pencil then snap it in half seems consistent with this behavior.
The unexplored part of the Diamond Age, what if the A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer servers are shut down.
E: Btw, you yourself will need to imagine a rant here about this kind of tech comes for the vulnerable first, and then is often removed from them when they could be depending on it without much fanfare as well. See also the people with eye implants who are no longer supported by the people behind them.
Diamond Age is an interesting idea, the original Primer was for the elite and used distributed encryption to farm out the qualified work to skilled artisans. In the end though, a cut-down primer (using some sort of AI? it's been a long time since I read it) is used to educate and train the girl army used by one of the faction in the final battle.
It's not really explained but I suspect the OG Primer had a robust payment model that ensured that the service oculd be kept solvent.
You are right, the OG Primer was a bit bespoke yes. So I doubt that could have failed without large parts of the whole financial system falling down. It was more a reference than a real 1 to 1 comparison, and it certainly doesn't fit neatly. Prob should have just made it a reference to the girl army thing, but I coudln't recall enough of that.
At best you end up with the Gunther Hermann story from Deus Ex, forced into retirement and made disposable when last generation's top-of-the-line becomes this generation's unusable trash.
Yes at best sadly.