Amazon launches Astro, its ugly and spooky robot Snitch

Amazon announced a group of Alexa-enabled home panopticon surveillance technologies earlier this week, and it was so bad. Every piece. Everything sucks. Suck suck suck.

Upcoming products include a security camera / teacher for your children’s room, “smarter” Alexa systems, an alliance of unholy Disney voice assistants, a diet monitor, and perhaps the worst of all, Astro– a creepy, invasive and always vigilant iPad with a cup holder welded to the ass.

Marketed as a cute house companion who can dance and wink at you, its primary purpose is undeniably to “proactively patrol your home, investigate activity, and send you notifications when it detects something wrong. ‘unusual’, which are Amazon’s words, not ours. To do this, it will use all kinds of motion sensors, recorded data and facial recognition technologies, the latter of which has been increasingly criticized since. algorithmic racial biases, among a host of other questions. This is one of the most spectacular steps yet in Amazon’s quest to become the sole “keeper” of your home and, by extension, all your valuable and valuable data.

It is also a horrible product. How do we know this? Well, Motherboard successfully published leaked documents simple hours after Astro exposed this detail of internal skepticism and utter loathing for the new robot, citing poor design and shoddy AI. “Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw himself down a staircase if the opportunity arises,” an anonymous source said, adding the $ 1,000 (yes, 1000 $) is “at best nonsense and absurd marketing and at worst potentially dangerous to anyone who uses it for accessibility purposes”.

You can pre-order the thing now, if you want. Please don’t.

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