$800 kids robot due for bricking sees “potential” open source second life
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What's the odds this can run on a 4090 or the new 5090? is home hosting possible?
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They're highly aquatic omnivores that can hit 200 lbs and live 80 years. They're...a lot to deal with. I interned at a zoo that had one on display many years ago and man, that was an awesome animal but DAMN. The work involved! Not to mention that a baby I got now would outlive me.
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And collects & stores & does who-knows-what with the data (audio? Video? Text? Facial recognition? Emotional reactions to stimuli/situations?)
I mean, there aren’t any examples of companies selling collected data to insurance companies, data brokers, advertising networks, etc., etc.
This product is a privacy nightmare. Maybe what they’re doing is telling their developers to remove all evidence of the nefarious data they were collecting before open sourcing it?
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Developmentally, it's not healthy, though.
Socializing is a natural instinct in humans. We are a gregarious species, who tends to seek others who fit the "tribe" into which we were born or join. Social differentiation happens at a very early age, and often grows more different over time.
Starting off with something like this may well lead to the child expecting behaviors from their peers that do not happen. And even if the child exhibits good social interaction skills, reality will shape them to conform to the social interaction expectations of the tribe in which they end up. That's assuming their behaviors before then don't place them in a tribe where intolerance of non-conformity to the tribal behaviors is the norm.
Since kids have virtually no social filters, school is fucking brutal to kids not perceived as "cool" pretty much from day one - howsoever "cool" that metric is set by the peer group. "Cool" is also very difficult to maintain for long, with ONE incident enough to go from hero to zero in nothing flat. And one's human peer group very quickly sets the social behavior standards that a toy is unlikely to accurately emulate or teach, which could cast a child into a social group that they'd rather not join.
Not having social expectations and behaviors before joining a peer group would allow a child to develop them more naturally, among real kids with real differences in how they interact. Just as one example, racial differentiation is are minimal among young kids, but if a child is socialized with a mostly same-appearing playmate, the social expectations for color are increasingly biased. Wide exposure to other races (not to mention religions, accents/languages, habits, intellects, behaviors, etc.) at an early age helps create more acceptance of others as they are - at least as long as such integration is actively and positively promoted.
As for what they're doing wrt them preparing their products for the shutdown, that's a hell of a lot better than most startups that crash and burn. So at least there's SOME lifeline available for users. How well it works out for those users remains to be seen.
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I'm curious, what's you're background here? Because one of the explicit targets for this device are kids who have trouble developing normal social skills and thus are already uncomfortable with other kids their age.
For a kid like this, trying to throw them into social situations and hoping everything just works out and they socialize normally can be a recipe for disaster, and may well produce the opposite result. A kid thrown into a new social situation, who isn't quite processing the same social queues as others, can easily wind up with an experience that teaches them similar situations are best avoided in the future.
If you're looking for a developmentally unhealthy experience that right there is about as bad as it gets. Even more so when a caregiver doesn't understand what's happening and keeps trying to do the same without taking steps to address the underlying issues, assuming the kid will just get it eventually. The thing is, sometimes they don't, and now you've engrained the idea from an early age that social situations are best avoided in general.
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I'm wondering if it's high time for an abandonware law, where abandoned projects must be opensourced when certain criteria is met (contentious, as it may be).
It could be incredibly complicated, given the soup of proprietary frameworks from still-active companies, that would not appreciate their bankrupt client from opensourcing.
Lots of pandora boxes to untangle, figure out, etc. But should be eventually figured out before important history get permanently lost in the cloud.
That Year 2032 Top #1 Game, cloud-dependant game whose source code is permanently deleted in 2055 because the company went bankrupt in 2054 and the cloud bill was not paid? Or your favourite small-company robot appliance that's about to be bricked because a rich competitor flooded the market and bankrupted that small company. Ouch.
It's going to be tougher to be a preservationist without some improved abandonware law.
It could be incredibly complicated, given the soup of proprietary frameworks from still-active companies, that would not appreciate their bankrupt client from opensourcing.
Lots of pandora boxes to untangle, figure out, etc. But should be eventually figured out before important history get permanently lost in the cloud.
That Year 2032 Top #1 Game, cloud-dependant game whose source code is permanently deleted in 2055 because the company went bankrupt in 2054 and the cloud bill was not paid? Or your favourite small-company robot appliance that's about to be bricked because a rich competitor flooded the market and bankrupted that small company. Ouch.
It's going to be tougher to be a preservationist without some improved abandonware law.
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Heh, I'm unwrapping exactly this sort of thing with my therapist from my own childhood, both social situations and caregivers/parents not helping that out well.
Not that this necessarily would have helped, I have no clue, but maybe. But especially for those with poor social cues capabilities and especially with parents who have active involvement to try and help, I can definitely see how this could potentially help train social cues.
BTW, I recommend the term neuro-spicy. I like it better than neuro-divergent, since I don't think in most cases there's anything particularly wrong, usually. Just difference in how processing and thoughts and emotions can get expressed.
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Interesting. A sanctuary I donate to has a Sulcata tortoise — a former pet until his owner realized that an animal that can weigh 300 pounds and live for 80 years doesn't make a great house pet*. Godzilla is fairly low maintenance. As long as he gets enough fruits and veggies and gets his shell brushed occasionally to ward off fungus, he's happy. (Especially when being brushed, which triggers a tortoise happy dance.)
The only real complication is that Sulcatas live in burrows in the wild, so Godzilla loves to dig caves, especially under the concrete slab that his heated shed sits on. Still, he's a lot less work than their tigers and lions. It sounds like tortoises area lot easier to care for than turtles.
* They've taken in a lot of former pets over the years, including a bunch of bobcats, at least one tiger, and a cougar / mountain lion who belonged to a long-distance trucker and rode shotgun in his cab.
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"Still, this isn’t an ideal solution for parents who invested in an emotional support toy for their kid and may not have the know-how or time to keep it alive after Embodied closes."
Well, I see a niche for a toy to emotionally support the parents then! /s
Well, I see a niche for a toy to emotionally support the parents then! /s
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"...saying that people who used to be part of Embodied’s technical team are developing a “potential” and open source way to keep Moxies running..."
The work is being done by former tech employees. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the former tech workers are good with math and lousy at socializing; and they fully understand how beneficial the robot is for kids that need it. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that the devs are not getting paid and are doing the work for altruistic reasons. Or I'm just projecting.
The work is being done by former tech employees. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the former tech workers are good with math and lousy at socializing; and they fully understand how beneficial the robot is for kids that need it. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that the devs are not getting paid and are doing the work for altruistic reasons. Or I'm just projecting.
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Indeed, he is, since only a minority of his 12 children openly state they hate him. And then there's his 3 ex-wives...
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Given that the company is out of money, it's 100% certain they're doing this for free, which is why they can't guarantee anything. If some of the key people get another full time job they may no longer be able to work on it.
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Not to mention the potential legal problems that could arise if they offer guarantees for work they’re doing in a personal capacity, and then for reasons beyond their control they can’t live up to those guarantees.
If I was them I would be making it very clear that this work is being done on a best-effort, no-guarantees-whatsoever basis too.
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Well, to be fair, the ones who aren’t alive and well are not here to post nonsense, are they?
Existence bias.
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I have a alligator snapping turtle plush as well. Got him from Cabela's I think?
My view on this is "you're an adult. Act like it. If something makes you happy and doesn't hurt others enjoy it and who cares about the opinions of others."
Read a bit more, I hear you on wanting a alligator snapping turtle. Think you might like this about the common snapper from Clients reptiles. Great YouTube channel.
View: https://youtu.be/CqPvKx86LuI?si=_Ae3827QgfBePl5y
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I have aphantasia like about ten percent of the population. We already had our imagination robbed, this would have been great.
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In a situation like that, what stops someone from releasing their own code and leaving it up to people who receive the code from buying their own licences to the relevant libraries, or rewriting it to remove the dependency?
Are there NDAs which prevent you from even releasing the code which simply calls into the relevant APIs, even if you don’t actually publish copies of the relevant library files, headers, or source-included frameworks?
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Right to repair laws should require companies to either OSS the firmware or to do what moxie is doing and make a locally available version.
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macosandlinux
Ars Tribunus Militum
Would it not be part of the core features (before ever launching) to have a minimum window of functionality as it's an emotional support toy! Who wants their kid's dog (eg.) to die after a year ? Planned obsolesce for the worst product ever!
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Ironically what YOU'RE describing is a kind of "planned obsolescence." The company itself clearly didn't set a minimum nor maximum lifetime in the design, meaning it was supposed to operate indefinitely (not to say "forever," just not constrained by a fixed time period).
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I am tempted to contribute to the project. Don’t have the hardware but that shouldn’t be an issue.
But there are also plenty of open source servers that reimplement the Chat Completions API which you could run at home. Then you just edit whatever base url they are using in their codebase, pointing it at your own thing. Might even have an option for it.
The inference can’t be done on device because it’s not powerful enough.
Depends on what their backend is. If it’s OpenAI you don’t need much of anything. A pi zero or even a microcontroller can shuffle the data back and forth. Not a lot is needed. The hard work is done at OpenAI, which is efficient.
But there are also plenty of open source servers that reimplement the Chat Completions API which you could run at home. Then you just edit whatever base url they are using in their codebase, pointing it at your own thing. Might even have an option for it.
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In all fairness you could spent $20 on a soft push toy and save the remaining $780.
This is just an expensive toy.
Kids need humans for emotional support, not objects.
This is just an expensive toy.
Kids need humans for emotional support, not objects.
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Yes but the only kids betrayed by teddybears were going to have problems anyway.
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Do not buy ANYTHING that requires a cloud subscription. Period.
Exceptions might be set-top devices and phones.
Exceptions might be set-top devices and phones.
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In my case it was a just a hobby-project niche game that peaked at 200 active users.
At least one of the proprietary libs from a for-profit partner was secured with a security-through-obscurity set of function names, so I would've had to scrub anywhere that hinted at that mapping.
My options as I saw it were:
-Release a version of the code as-is, minus the libs we'd been handed and after carefully minimally scrubbing. This obviously wouldn't compile or run, and wouldn't be that helpful
-What I did: do a bunch more work to make a toy version of the app minus any proprietary stuff, with clearly delineated interfaces where they could plug in something to accomplish what I had decided to take out.
In the end I don't think anyone ever went anywhere with the code I posted, but after reaching the point of deciding to end the project I certainly didn't want enraged partners coming at me whining about "you posted our secret stuff! prepare for letters from lawyers!"
For this robot, I could see them having licensed someone else's research or missed a patent they infringed. So just doing a push to a public github repo might take some gumption without having to pay money they no longer have to lawyers to make sure they're ok.
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Canterrain
Ars Praetorian
This actually is just like what happened to Vector robots. And those too eventually got an open source method to bring them back to life.
I made a video demonstrating how, and its a joy of mine how often people manage to get their Vectors going with it.
So now it's my mission to get ahold of a Moxie and repeat the same, if they really do release open source as promised.
I made a video demonstrating how, and its a joy of mine how often people manage to get their Vectors going with it.
So now it's my mission to get ahold of a Moxie and repeat the same, if they really do release open source as promised.
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Honestly? I know this is orthogonal to the conversation y'all were having, but what makes it different is that a company could not reach out and alter or disable a teddy bear, or even a teddy ruxpin, whereas this thing... Was never under the control of the family to begin with.
It's DANGEROUS to get your kid attached to a toy that talks to them--potentially, even converses with them--while said toy is under the direct control of some other entity. This thing getting bricked is honestly one of the LESS horrible potential outcomes!
Look at what happened to people who got attached to Replika AI models for an example of how it can go worse. Replika was originally intended to train on the conversational data of a deceased loved one. But then the company found out more people were interested in humping it, so it leaned into that. Suddenly, people's dead Nanas were getting... frisky.
Which was bad enough, but then the company started not liking the reputation it was getting, so it pivoted sharply AWAY from "romance." Now, people's Replika models started getting outright hostile to them if they thought anything sounded flirty... Even if it wasn't intended that way. People felt like trusted friends had turned on them.
You get the picture. It is NOT safe to build attachment to a model under somebody else's control. It's even less safe to let KIDS build that kind of attachment. What if Moxie had been bought out rather than simply failing? Then you'd have to worry about changes the new owners made to the existing models. Maybe they start telling kids how much they need a certain toy. Maybe they start "teaching" political lessons. Who knows? Sky's the limit.
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For me its that blankets and stuffies encourage the kid to involve imagination play. This is more like putting your toddler in a room with a tv that talks to them (and yes I know that people do that).
We toy that encourage imagination and building are a great vehicle for other people to join in and bond over.
This reminds me of the toy robot line that was around in the 80s, I think it was called the Omnibot.
Citation: I was raised by Television and have a craft table ready to go at all times.
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Oh yeah, there is definitely lots of room to discuss whether the cloud-connection/AI/tech (or cost) angle is a good idea. (it's not) Probably some good discussion to be had on that aspect. If the cloud requirement could be removed (or controlled) I could see it being helpful for a niche group.
But I feel we should call out the gatekeeping from the folks coming in with the 'Kids these days' bullshit. Usually paired with 'I didnt have one as a child, so nobody should have one' or ' I dont see a need, so nobody else could possibly benefit from this'
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No.
There is a clear difference between an entirely inanimate object that cannot respond interactively to a child's speech (as are most of the examples you gave above) or an object that has a clearly preprogrammed level of interactivity (Teddy Ruxpin), and something like Moxie that attempts to mimic human to human interaction.
The important point is that for inanimate or limited/unidirectional interactivity objects, the child IS strictly anthropomorphizing. A cloud server attempting to provide companionship based on algorithmic response blurs that line significantly. The child almost certainly does not have the ability to fully understand that what is pretending to be human-like is not actually human. This is borne out empirically by the reactions that children have had to loss of Moxie in the article itself.
I think that you would agree that you would find the behavior of a single adult (presumably emotionally mature) who has developed a intimate emotional or personal relationship with a computer to be odd at the very least. Imagine if one of your adult friends told you that they were receiving life advice or emotional comfort from Siri or Alexa.
I think you would also find it very odd if that adult began making real-world decisions based on "experience" from that sort of relationship. This situation is no different, except for the fact that a child has even less ability to determine the authenticity of such a relationship due to their lack of life experience. You could argue that the child would not necessarily be harmed, but there is no evidence that the child's emotional development will NOT be harmed.
In addition, you are entirely reliant on what a third party company has determined the correct responses to a given situation should be. While those responses might not necessarily be wrong or inappropriate (or even simply not based in best psychological practices), they certainly could be. I doubt that a company as close to bankruptcy as this one apparently was/is was able to fund an appropriately large psychology operation to fully vet the potential impact their product might have on childhood development (and especially long term...these things just haven't been around long enough to know).
A portion of Google's AI summary of Moxie states the following:
"Emotional support: It actively validates children's feelings and encourages positive self-esteem by offering compliments and encouragement"
...but not all feelings necessarily need to be or should be validated. Deciding what feelings and emotions should be reinforced and what should be discouraged is part of parenting.
The effects of this sort of human-machine interaction are not well defined on adults, and the long term effect on children just can't be known. Maybe it's fine...maybe it's not.
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