Some news is both sad and dystopian at the same time, and this is one of those cases. Moxie, a start-up selling $800 emotional support robots intended to help children is shutting down operations since it can’t find enough money, and since their robots require constant connectivity to servers to operate, all of the children’s robots will cease functioning within days. They’re not offering refunds, but they will send out a letter to help parents tell their children “in an age-appropriate way” that their lovable robot is going to die.
If you have kids yourself, you know how easily they can sometimes get attached to the weirdest things, from fluffy stuffed animals designed to be cute, to random inanimate objects us adults would never consider to be even remotely interesting. I can definitely see how my own kids would be devastated if one of their favourite “emotional” toys were to suddenly stop working or disappear, and we don’t even have anything that pretends to have a personality or that actively interacts with our kids like this robot thing does.
We can talk about how it’s insane that no refunds will be given, or how a company can just remotely kill a product like this without any repercussions, but most of all I’m just sad for the kids who use one and are truly attached to it, who now have to deal with their little friend going away. That’s just heartbreaking, and surely a sign of things to come as more and more companies start stuffing “AI” into their toys. The only thing I can say is that we as parents should think long and hard about what kind of toys we give our children, and that we should maybe try to avoid anything tied to a cloud service that can go away at any time.
What amazes me is how many businesses seemingly worry about making money later. And some, like, WAY later. So ultimately, if this did not have a real plan for sustainability, it should have never seen the light of day. But then we have the Reddit’s etc who take nearly 20 years to turn a profit. It boggles me. But I know why. I work for myself and could never imagine servicing the debt these companies do and proclaim that they are successful.
It’s the cable TV aka “and grab” business model. Expand now to lock-in users to your service/app store and make money later by milking said users.
You mentioned Reddit. Reddit has become the default replacement for the forums of old, and it’s unlikely all those users will abandon their Reddit accounts and all the info and achievements in them for another service unless Reddit does something really dumb (no, charging for API access doesn’t count, most users don’t care and Reddit forced open any sub-Reddits that had gone dark).
The winner will be the hacker that re-animates this in the most primitive way possible. Im thinking plastic disks with pits in the groves read by reed switches. I mean sure, some guy will interfaces this with chatgpt api but thats just so predictable.
It’s Alive!
Just what the world’s kids need, less parenting!
I won’t ever buy such an expensive device that requires the cloud to work without an offline mode. I would perhaps consider it if it’s from a well-established company. I am still angry that my smart scale ceased to be smart and can’t do what my older “dumb” scale could do (%fat, water ..) since Adidas bought and ruined Runstatic.
Thom Holwerda,
This has been my staunch position on cloud dependencies since forever….however it’s a futile war, nobody really listens or cares about the warnings even when explicitly informed. People just keep throwing money at clouds and it’s these cloud companies that won the “survival of the fittest”. Companies that work on local products that leave owners in control are becoming rarer and rarer, they are the endangered species at this point.
A parent who owned one of these moxie robots posted a video discussing the role these robots play as almost being family members. He goes over many of the technological issues and I found the video interesting and informative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbs8g7QpgUo
Very interesting, but troubling, the same. If you’re a parent, BE A PARENT! Not entrust your role and responsibilities to third parties, as this is also a privacy nightmare also.
spiderdroid,
Ouch….although it makes me curious whether you have kids and if so how you are managing with their social needs. It’s a full time job.
Not only is parenting in the cross hairs, but teaching is too.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/kids-and-ai-mansfield-middle-school-teacher-is-at-the-forefront-of-integrating-artificial-intelligence-in-the-teaching-process/ar-AA1tUxu8
The trouble is more and more governments are strapped for cash and laying off teachers. While it’s their responsibility to teach the kids, student:teacher ratios can mean there’s no way to give students individual attention and feedback, which is a real systemic problem in education too. AI is very likely to become more integrated into education. Although this warrants scrutiny,, I don’t think it’s all bad and I think there are great opportunities to increase interactivity and custom lessons and feedback in ways that simply aren’t realistic without having one on one tutors.
I know people will be agitated by this, but the discussion needs to happen and I think we have to consider the possibility that AI could take over education one day. And furthermore we have to consider the possibility that AI teaching tools can actually improve the quality of education. Of course I expect (or at least hope) that we would test this using fair metrics.
I also appreciate the risks of AI becoming corrupted to serve political agendas. This concerns me greatly. Extremist ideologues are already legislating education today and this risk can only increase under authoritarian regimes. I do wonder if these agendas can be pushed through AI more effectively than pushing them through human teachers. On the one hand it can speak to the effectiveness of AI, but on the other hand it’s important that the goals being programmed into AI aren’t used to essentially brainwash people farther.
What makes this even harder is that so many people (esp parents) are already brainwashed against science… I don’t know how this happened, maybe the internet and social media did this? But in any case, I have to consider the possibility that AI could exacerbate it. It really depends on what the AI is programmed to teach.
Moxie actually looks like a neat product, reminds me of an improved “Teddy Ruxpin”. Except this damn cloud dependency perpetuates the same flaw that so many electronics have these days.
This is why FOSS is better. Even if a company shuts down, FOSS makes it possible for alternative communities to support themselves without said company. The end of the company would still be “sad” for some users, but with FOSS it doesn’t have to be the end of innovation for a product. The unfortunate reality is that most corporations would rather peruse business models where consumers don’t have alternative options even though this goes against user interests and puts us at drastically higher risk of products becoming prematurely obsolete and becoming trash.
Unfortunately the law — and bankruptcy proceedings in particular — can work against finding a solution that works best for customers and the commons. I have no idea whether it applies in this case, but my (European) experience is that liquidators aim to internalise value by maximising return on assets. They can use this to justify blocking a company from open-sourcing code or opening APIs.
There are things a company can do to avoid this without making themselves less competitive (document APIs, allow server end-points to be reconfigured), but once a company is in trouble it can be too late.
Saw a video on X of a little girl crying as her dad explains that Moxie will stop working. Broke my heart.
Unlike Thom, and perhaps most of you guys, I’m not cynical about AI tech, but this was always a bad idea. I mean how smart does this toy really need to be? Just have it recognize facial expressions locally and echo the emotion, plus a few more tricks here and there.
In fact, having something as elaborate as Claude or ChatGPT, I would argue, is bad. This needs to be a toy, not a “friend”. Can’t be friends with a corporate product, and don’t even get me started on privacy!
The case of Pebble springs to mind, where the community took control of online services to create rebble.io. I don’t know to what extent it was planned for before Pebble was sold to Fitbit… I’m sure there’s a fascinating story behind it.
Facts to learn about from this news:
1) There are robots that offer emotional support to children
2) Parents to provide support to their children who are sad because they stopped receiving emotional support from robots
3) A for-profit entity ceased selling robots that provide emotional support to children, and is now offering emotional support to parents
Anything worrying about humans to know about?
For me it’s shocking that there are parents out there who trust technology so much they’re allowing it to provide emotional support for their child. A bleeding edge research, untested, unproven, given to a child, to test it. Technology that requires to be online all the time, so brittle, in a world where half of the online projects don’t even survive first year of operation.
antonone,
Yes, that’s understandable. It might be easy to suggest they should be kept off all social technology and point out that it’s better to encourage real world play, but sometimes that’s really hard for parents to do given the realities of modern living. Also, many children will end up exposed to the internet with no guardrails at all, which seems so much worse than the catered experience offered by this type of companion. As a parent, it can be hard to stay on top of everything and I think I’d be more comfortable with a friendly & playful AI assistant than the raw internet and social media sites that many kids are using.
Of course none of this is a great substitute for real world interactions, it’s just that few parents are able to offer that 24/7 for their children. So while it’s easy to judge, I do understand the needs.
I wonder how many of these little critters were sold and whether there are enough to support a hacked second life? This is indeed sad to hear, and whilst it is right to be cynical about the firm itself, it must be better than simply giving the child an ipad and setting them off into the WWW.
Hopefully one of the engineers who put so much care into the product (toymaker is something of an archetype in literature, think Pinocchio, etc) will leak the source code somehow. Although Cory Doctrow always claims that even to use such code to unlock your product is an enforceable offence.
“The only thing I can say is that we as parents should think long and hard about what kind of toys we give our children, and that we should maybe try to avoid anything tied to a cloud service that can go away at any time”
That’s true for every member of the family 😀 toys and appliances so tied to cloud services must be avoided at all costs
lucac81,
I’m not optimistic about calls to action, but society really need this to happen to empower owners. If we had an effective boycott of everything that got locked to cloud services, then companies would be forced to stop designing products this way. Otherwise the control companies have over owners is just going to keep getting worse if we don’t collectively wisen up.
Edit: It’s not just toy robots, but more and more everyday electronics/appliances/cars/etc.
“Is Moxie going to the farm like Rover, mom?”
“Noooo honey, nonononono. Moxie is going to the great big Amazon warehouse in the sky, where it can run and run down the longest hallways with its friends!”