Welcome to the “brand new world” of IOT hardware where you are the product and continued service depends entirely on how you can be monetized.
I’m assuming it runs on AI and the company has to provide the backend. So yeah, if you purchase something that requires a company’s infrastructure, it can certainly be bricked.
Which is why you should only buy stuff that relies on local APIs and on board processing.
99.99% of the people willing to buy an emotional support robot for their children will have no idea what the words you said even mean.
I’m confused how a robot even CAN be emotionally supportive. I didn’t even know this was a thing.
You should go watch Big Hero 6, then. You’ll get a very good idea of how a robot can be supportive.
Yep, and that’s a shame. There should be some sort of government rating or warning put on stuff like that.
Or just a straight-up ban.
Self-hosting makes more sense every day.
And this is the lesson here!
Take note folks.
Spoiler: No one writes down shit, this is the new normal
Strong alias!
Man those parents. Oof.
I do not wanna be in their shoes.
Telling your kid that needed an emotional support robot friend that the robot friend is going to take a nap for a long time and might not wake back up? Ooo boy.
Helping a kid through a divorce is hard enough. This seems like a terrifying nightmare.
To be fair, electronics break all the time, and living pets die eventually - both things everyone needs to learn how to cope with, including children. This is just the Venn Diagram of those two pieces of reality.
I imagine the children with these things are emotionally disregulated in some way shape or form. A small group of children sometimes don’t learn to self soothe when they are very young, others in ASD struggle with it for a lifetime. Some with ADHD have a very difficult time when their medicine wears off and their emotions kick back in to overdrive.
For all those groups I mentioned, the whole concept of this thing was almost brilliant. Something that they can go to knowing it will be able to help them guide through emotions while mom and dad are doing something necessary like cooking or fixing something outside, or in the bathroom.
If you haven’t had to deal with a child that has emotional regulation problems, then it is hard to explain the difficulty that the failure of this device will make. It is true that they will adapt it, they always do, that’s how things work. The problem is that the emotional disregulation leads to broken things at home, aggressive behaviors with peers, getting kicked out of preschool and day care, etc.
It truly is a nightmare scenario. The parents have to prepare for all of these things and a new way to help their child through the limited existing means.
A parent with autism is probably seeing it as another “could’ve been” that they get to toss out now, likely paid for by insurance.
I wonder how big that pile of products is, failed crap marketed to insurance companies and parents for autistic kids.
Big business.
Christ, even Amazon refunded everyone who bought a Glow.
It sounds like they literally can’t refund people because the company completely ran out of money and is gonna be liquidated. Sucky situation for all parties involved.
If only there was law demanding to refund broken products before liquidation.
Or a law stating that in the case fair refunds can not be provided that the software needed for running the hardware becomes public domain and is published and released on a git maintained by the library of Congress.
Yes please. And mandatory copy.
And who is going to pay for that? If they could afford to refund all their customers they wouldn’t be going bust.
The law would probably make sure customers whose products are being bricked are counted as creditors. Ideally after employees (unpaid wages) and before investors. They may not get full refunds, but they’ll be entitled to something if it’s possible.
Liquidatoon doesn’t mean they have no money. And they still have some assets.
Also that’s why we should apply mandatory copy laws to software too.
What they probably can do is issue an update that lets owners point it at third-party servers, and publish the API. They might even be able to publish the source code, though there’s a chance they don’t own all of it.
I bet they can
Unless they don’t have the money in which case they can’t.
And Google refunded everyone who bought Stadia.
But they both have deeper pockets than a startup.
I would like to think the community could work out the API’s and replicate them on a free server, but if this was just a glorified Alexa box, there is probably a lot more server-side processing that needs to happen to keep it running.
Wait, you can refund your kid?!
thanks for the good laugh
You can do anything if you complain loud and long enough
It is sad to give your child emotional support robot to begin with.
I get the feeling, but tools come in many shapes and forms. If this was truly helpful for any kid, it’s a fucking tragedy that’s bricked.
I assume it relies on external servers for processing, so it was a matter of time though.
See there’s the problem right there. They shouldn’t have sold the robot. It should have been a subscription model, with micro transactions. That would have kept the investors flocking in.
I’d like to say this is sarcasm, but unfortunately it’s the most likely lesson these ghouls will learn from this.
Daily slot check in, pull the arm and the eyes display the slots. Ez money make me a CEO.
I guess this device needed to connect to some remotely hosted server that enabled its functionality. And the company was losing money and hoping that sales would eventually pick up enough to make them profitable. But their latest investor decided not to put any more money in, and the company ran out of cash and can’t pay its bills anymore.
The entrepreneur thought he could get more investor cash and ran the business in such a way that it would fall off a cliff if he didn’t. And… He failed to secure more financing.
I have mixed feelings about products like this… If the device somehow needed to host an entire internet’s worth of data to function, it certainly wouldn’t have cost only $800. But when you buy a product that depends on the ongoing viability of the seller, you’re in a position of caveat emptor - You better vet them out yourself, especially if they’re new.
Hopefully the founders feel some emotional attachment to their product and the trust bestowed upon them by their unknowing customers, and release whatever on the back end makes the thing work so that motivated customers could reactivate their devices somehow.
Buy anything that must login to a web server not located at your house and expect it to get bricked when that server doesn’t work anymore. Simple…don’t. Plus they are clearly gaining something from you.
Shit, I’ve a house?! Where have you been all my life? /s
Nothing like this should ever rely on an external server.
What’s the opposite of “eating the onion”? I thought this was satire for sure.
Not earing the turnip?
Pooped the onion? Honestly, I’ve only ever seen these kinds of stories as notTheOnion.
wouldnt it be not eating the onion? or shoving up your rear end
Onionphobia I guess.
winning a vickrey auction
What are the genuine use cases for such a robot? For when the kid has issues communicating with other people?
A robot has infinite patience and will never get mad or bully a child for fun. Ideally, this should also be true of a parent, but it’s not. From a less grim angle, a robot doesn’t have other responsibilities like work.
For a kid who feels too shy to talk to people, a robot can be good for practice. But it requires a lot of attentiveness from parents to make sure the child doesn’t become dependent and moves on to taking to people once they get their confidence.
Back when drag was a kid, we used imaginary friends instead of robots. But a lot of parents and children don’t believe in imaginary friends, which is a shame, because robots are a lot more expensive.
Yeah, kids focusing too much on their robot instead of other people is one of my concerns.
A robot can teach the kid all the right things, but it will never give a kid the real social experience, which can get rough if a kid is not sufficiently exposed to it right from the start. Even now, as real human communication moves online in a large part, children grow up increasingly socially anxious and maladapted. From that position, I’m quite uncomfortable with “study from home” trends as well, as school is one of the key venues for IRL child-child interactions.
On the other hand, I wonder what would happen if all kids first developed with perfect robots and then started interacting with one another. But that’s a subject for yet another unethical experiment.
It’s also probably a developmental aid also. As someone with a child, you’d be surprised at how laser-focused parents can be with regards to developmental delays or issues and ensuring that their kids have every opportunity to meet specific milestones.
IMO while it’s absolutely not a replacement for human interaction, something like this with the right backing could be very useful to a lot of kids that need additional help.
I see!
Emotional support brick their CEO’s face
you come across headlines nowadays and have no clue this was even a thing people were grifting children about, man…
I hate people.
So does the startup.
