Hey capitalism, how’s it going?
But soon, none of those features will be available, making the pricey children’s toy virtually useless. According to Embodied, Moxie can’t perform core functionality without cloud connectivity. Worse, owners apparently have an uncertain and limited amount of time until the devices are bricked.
… oh
Since Embodied marketed Moxie as a companion and development toy for children, there’s concern about kids potentially suffering an emotional toll after the robot abruptly becomes inoperable. Embodied has responded by promising to provide a guide for telling children about Moxie’s demise. Online, however, customers are already sharing videos of their sad kids learning that their robot friend will stop playing with them, as Axios pointed out.
“Good. Kids should learn young not to expect things can’t be taken away in a moments notice and that in the real world they should be spending less time forming emotional attachments to things and more time working!”
The sad part is this thing supposedly helped autistic kids.
Thankfully people are trying to open source it’s programming before it bites the dust.
it was for autistic kids? kids with a tendency to form deep, personal connections with inanimate objects?
bro. bruh. brother. i fucking hate capitalism, and I hate tech companies most of all. the way there’s zero plan for the permanent loss of internet connectivity for hardware before the hardware is shipped is a massive reliability failure, and the fact that there’s zero accountability for it when it shuts down boils my blood. especially for medical products. as a reliability engineer, there really needs to be some sort of licensing board for the entire software engineering field, it’s disgustingly irresponsible to not build that level of offline operability into your product in the first place.
Side tangent about medical hardware: I’m still haunted by an article I read a few years back about a bionic eye company shutting down and how there are blind people with defunct hardware surgically implanted in their heads. at the absolute very least (even under capitalism) the company should be required to open source their server code or at least document their API so people can self-host those servers and shit. bionics companies in particular should be required to operate (even just for support) for the entire lifetimes of everyone who has the hardware.
Just out of curiosity, how would you expect a hardware eye company that goes out of business to keep current customers replacements working?
IIRC they didn’t go out of business, they were bought by a larger company that discontinued the program because they didn’t think it was profitable enough.
Of course the real solution is nationalize them all and set up a bureau to provide permanent maintenance services for any defunct-but-still-used medical devices or to handle their replacement with new ones. Anything less is at best a bandaid that shouldn’t be considered anything more than an emergency stopgap solution.
I’d suggest a law that companies providing medical equipment should reveal all their blueprints, code, etc. to some national regulator. If the company goes belly up, the regulator releases these into the public domain so other manufacturers can provide spare parts, maintanence, etc. The inventors / programmers can be given a reasonable compensation for their work being nationalised.
Require them to retain a sufficient number of support staff. If they “don’t have enough money” for it, take it from the board, executives, and vc firms who backed it. Imprison and/or execute them if they fail to do so.
it was for autistic kids? kids with a tendency to form deep, personal connections with inanimate objects?
Believe or not, there was some research being conducted in the 2010s seeing how differently abled children could learn social skills leveraging social robots such as NAO by aldebaran. I actually got into engineering programming NAOs. They called the interfaces “Wizard of Oz”. There is some neat papers on it.
My only complaint was that NAOs were using Intel atoms. Good lord they were slow lol.
Embodied has responded by promising to provide a guide for telling children about Moxie’s demise
Hey someone get an intern to ask an LLM to write a guide on how to tell children their emotional support robot got Old Yeller’d.
We’re probably going to get robotic eye implants that go belly-up and brick people’s eyesight.
Over and over.
Engineers need to look at this and let it motivate them to unionize and build co-ops. You know the people working on this project loved it, that they wouldn’t have abandoned it of their own accord. There is no way that whatever bullshit their paymasters have them on now is as spiritually fulfilling as working on the Star Trek visor, making a genuine attempt to improve people’s lives and engender technological optimism.
“Good. Kids should learn young not to expect things can’t be taken away in a moments notice and that in the real world they should be spending less time forming emotional attachments to things and more time working!”
Maybe the real lesson kids can will take from this is that they should never trust a corporation and become communists.
