The future of home robotics wasn’t supposed to be this dumb. We were promised K-9 companions, Baymax best mates, tiny droids with built-in projectors and nights out with Bender, the ultimate party robot. Instead, we got several different incarnations of vacuum and self-driving cars that can’t drive themselves. Elon Musk’s latest creation wishes it was sophisticated as the robotic Richard Simmons from The Simpsons.
Now, we have Astro, a three-wheeled robot that’s less android buddy, more RoboCop if he ran the local neighbourhood watch.
The Astro, announced on Tuesday, is billed as a convenience tool, a robot butler that, according to its own advert, will be used to check if the hob has been left on and lets users video call grandparents. It moves at one metre per second, detects movement wherever it patrols and can be linked to a Ring home security system.
It can care for the elderly, says Amazon’s hardware chief Dave Limp. It can be steered via your phone, allowing the owner to peer through its camera like a periscope. Through its facial recognition software it can detect intruders it doesn’t recognise (which may come with some depressingly predictable problems). It’s also kind of cute, a rectangular headed puppy that stares up at its owner with glowing, Wall-E eyes.
Alongside Astro, Amazon also announced a flurry of new smart gadgets designed to invite Bezos’s company further into the family home. There’s a £45 Alexa-compatible thermostat, an interactive tablet for kids and a £60 Fitbit rival watch. All are controlled using the Alexa assistant.
Robots aren’t all stupid. They provide jobs for paralysed individuals in Japanese cafés. They could help children with autism improve their social skills. Robot puppies do flips, which is nothing if not novel, and only in rare cases do they lash out and attack the elderly.
Many social robots, such as the ElliQ ‘aging-sidekick’, Jibo and the Paroseal, a £5,000 pet-therapy robotic purring fuzzball, serve seemingly good purposes, but have failed to make any sizable impact. Amazon, meanwhile, sold 1.4 million Ring doorbells in 2020 alone, and has signed agreements with more than 2,000 US police and fire departments. Indeed, Alexa is now available in more than 80 countries.
In the domestic robot market, the sheer size of Amazon means it has a better chance of succeeding where others have failed. But where other robots offer clever little companions for lonely grandparents or fluffy seals for children to cuddle, Amazon’s message is clear: ”You want to keep your family safe? Our products can help.”
Fearful someone might steal your post? Buy our $30 mailbox motion sensor. Going on holiday? For $5-a-month Alexa Guard Plus will listen out for noises in your home and play the sound of barking dogs.
Half of the products announced in Amazon’s 2021 showcase were linked to home security. Astro and the now available Ring Always Home Cam indoor security drone serve little more purpose than to snoop. A fully automated snitch-bot that turns its owners into nosey neighbours.
“Techno-snitching is definitely a thing,” says Dr Kate Devlin, senior lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London. “We’re encouraged to weaponise data by sharing it with law enforcement, or by naming and shaming online. Often, that is done with little regard for the consequences because it’s seen as being for the good of society. But the huge issue with bias in AI systems means that there are members of our society who face active discrimination from these same systems.”
Under the broad definition of ‘home security’, Astro and its syncable products are tapping into very real, but very conflicting, concerns for millions of people. The global smart home security market is expected to grow to $2.7 billion in 2021 and $5.05 billion in 2025, despite people’s perception of worsening crime differing from reality. Amazon’s new products address these fears. But do they also fuel paranoia?
“We are living in a comparatively safe time – but an unsettling one, given what the world is going through,” says Devlin. “Scare stories are amplified on the news. People are naturally wary of others during a pandemic where they could get ill. It’s comforting to think that a piece of technology could provide peace of mind.” Could a robot really alleviate such concern? “It could certainly provide a veneer of comfort,” says Devlin.
At the moment, much like its robotic peers, the Astro is also not that smart. Sources who worked on Astro told Vice that the robot is ‘heavily flawed’ and will ‘almost certainly’ throw itself down a flight of stairs given half the chance. In a follow up statement given to The Verge, Amazon suggested that the information is outdated.
Amazon itself isn’t entirely sure how it will be used, either. Amazon’s David Limp has said its aim for Astro at the moment is to introduce it into the wild and identify ‘unique use cases’, a field experiment conducted in people’s homes that could influence future robots.
Not a great deal is known about how the data collected by Amazon’s new products will aid it behind the scenes. But it will gather a lot of it, from voice notes and customer behaviours, to a full map of a user’s home and the faces of everyone who visits it.
Amazon insists that all of the map processing and storage will happen locally on the robot. Facial recognition data is also stored locally, and early users will have the ability to delete voice data, or a map made of their home, daily.
But we’ve been here before. Take Boston Dynamics, the robotics company that parades its machines as goofy titanium skeletons that paint pictures and dance to The Counters in viral videos. Its products, however, have been tested by the French military, and some of Boston Dynamics’ early robots, such as Atlas, were funded by the US military's DARPA arm.
“A smart fridge that detects if you're running low on milk is a neat feature, but think about who could be interested in knowing your eating habits,” says Sandra Wachter, associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. “A fridge company probably aren’t too interested in that, but a health insurance company might be.”
The biggest risk in adopting an Astro, says Wachter, is, of course, privacy. Smart home products are rife with security flaws. A map of the home is “ideal for thieves,” says Wachter, and who would want to see a camera on wheels staring up at them during their most intimate moments? Well, 22 per cent of people at the time of writing would, according to a Buzzfeed poll at least, but is all this justified in the name of home security? “I don't think I would feel safer if I had a robot in my house,” says Wachter. “I'd rather have a dog.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
