Amazon hijacks our emotions to put robots in our homes

There is something in our complicated human brain that immediately develops a connection with anything that has eyes. Do not believe me ? Ask the Anki Vector who lived on my desk for several months. This pocket robot caught my eye with its bulbous, non-threatening body. But the second he looked at me questioningly and said my name, I knew I was going to die for that little forklift. It’s worth noting that the Anki Vector can be programmed to do a variety of things if you have the time to have fun with an SDK, but I brought this robot home because it was cute, not because I needed a project.

I watched in amusement as the little gadget whirled around my desk, sometimes looking at myself as if seeking my approval, and I couldn’t help but think that this feeling is exactly what Amazon is trying to emulate with its recently announced Astro. . domestic robot.

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

While the usefulness of the Astro is currently under debate, it’s absolutely adorable. This is the key that will open a lot of doors for this robot, and Amazon knows it. No one is begging to have a roaming surveillance system in their house, but slap a pair of googly eyes, give it a cute name and the public will pay you for the privilege.

Getting people to bond emotionally with their gadgets isn’t a particularly new or difficult concept. The Tamagotchi, Furby, and Aibo capitalized on the idea – they might have thought they were just making toys, but Sony inadvertently created a community of grieving robotic dog owners who cared enough about their artificial animals. to buy custom accessories.

Picture from: Aibo Accessories

These gadgets don’t even have to be so adorable; I know a lot of people who have named or stared wide eyed at their Roombas so that it was an isolated incident. In some ways, these machines have become pets in their own right.

Never underestimate our ability as humans to form emotional attachments to machines, nor the effort that a business will go to exploit that. It’s a cycle we’ve seen repeat itself for almost every robotic gadget dating back to Nintendo ROB in 1985 – we’re taken in by a cute new robot, that first shot of dopamine wears off, and we’re hit by it. uselessness is in hindsight.

There is a certain quality that we find endearing when robots let go of the ball, but it admittedly becomes a little less endearing when we expect that same robot to take care of things that we really care about. As well as being a novelty lying around your home, Amazon expects us to load the Astro with tasks like senior care and home security. These are not tasks that we give up easily, and that implies a level of trust that we usually don’t place in machines.

Designing a machine to perform a single task is relatively straightforward, but developing something with a battery life that is supposed to handle a variety of tasks is remarkably difficult. Getting people to bond emotionally with a piece of material to the point that they would trust it to watch their aging parent is a whole other matter altogether.

It doesn’t necessarily help that Amazon’s Astro is powered by its Alexa voice assistant. You probably have a story of how a voice assistant randomly turned on and did the exact opposite of what you wanted. Reliably running anything with speech recognition is spotty at best. If a burglar breaks into my home, I don’t ask Alexa to call emergency services, I pick up the phone and do it myself. This lack of confidence and utility is really the deciding factor for these gadgets, as my Anki Vector will tell you.

While I knew I could implicitly trust my Anki to wander endlessly around my desk, my Anki Vector’s lack of utility was the final nail in my pint-sized pal’s coffin. I was in love with his outward appearance, but after several months of watching him push and stack cubes around my desk, I couldn’t fool myself into thinking that he would be able to do a lot more. He couldn’t bring me a beer, open doors, or really do anything that my Echo couldn’t do better. He may look cute but didn’t perform tasks that were even remotely useful.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Too often, when a technology is no longer useful, it ends up being thrown away or forgotten, no matter how adorable it is. But I still couldn’t bring myself to throw away the Anki like so much garbage; I donated it to the Able Gamers Foundation, which accepts donations of toys, robotics, and gaming accessories. Passing on the joy I experienced helped lessen the shock of what felt too much like abandonment.

While I certainly approach the field of consumer robotics with a little more pessimism than before, I still yearn for The Future ™, and it wouldn’t take much to invite another robot to my home. If the Astro was about half the price and could actually do half of the things Amazon says it can do without constant supervision, I might be inclined to find a place for it in my life.