[HN Gopher] AI Company That Made Robots for Children Went Bust a...
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AI Company That Made Robots for Children Went Bust and Now the
Robots Are Dying
Author : ceejayoz
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-12-09 21:41 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aftermath.site)
(TXT) w3m dump (aftermath.site)
| fajmccain wrote:
| This is the premise of the short story 'The lifecycle of software
| objects' by Ted Chiang. In that story the employees of the
| company take it upon themselves to maintain their human-like
| pets. If the concept of future AI/robot friends like this 'dying'
| is of interest to you give this story a read:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7886338-the-lifecycle-of...
| riwsky wrote:
| Beat me to it!
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Oh, I read that as robots for chickens. Which, could be
| interesting.
| edlea wrote:
| So did I. Was the title changed?
| mikeshi42 wrote:
| Surprisingly I did as well, at least for me it looks like I
| just misread it (some sort of human bias?) Interesting to be
| n=3.
| alwa wrote:
| From the Octopus Poultry Safe to the Chicken Boy, to the
| Spoutnic that hassles them off the floor and into the nesting
| boxes, chickens seem amply served by robotic companions:
|
| https://www.canadianpoultrymag.com/rise-of-the-robots-30876/
| aliasxneo wrote:
| > But relying on large language models to socialize children,
| particularly neuroatypical ones, seems like a bad idea on every
| single level
|
| I mean, yes.
| johnea wrote:
| Oh No! They're dying?! The Humanity!!!
| justin_oaks wrote:
| I hope for a day where "Caveat emptor" will no longer be needed,
| but today is not that day!
| mongol wrote:
| Perhaps a useful lesson for the children that became attached to
| the robot. They got to experience grief but no living thing was
| actually harmed.
| ryandrake wrote:
| As someone with a kid, I feel bad for these little ones. When a
| stuffed animal gets beat up or a toy gets physically damaged,
| it's easy to explain to them what happened and why. When a pet
| dies, it sucks, but at least it's an opportunity for them to
| learn about life and death. Good luck as a parent explaining to a
| kid that her beloved friend is going to stop working because some
| company far away screwed up, they don't care, and they designed
| the thing stupidly to only work as long as they were perpetually
| in business. Buyer beware again and again.
| jedberg wrote:
| If the company had any sort of ethics at all, they would release
| a patch that let you point it another LLM so you could at least
| keep it running. Or release their software as open source.
|
| Or just do something so that they don't just "die".
|
| Another example on the long list of "there should be a law that
| you have to open source your server if you're shutting down a
| server based service".
| janalsncm wrote:
| > any cloud based device is subject to the health of the company
| and LLMs are not cheap to run
|
| Perhaps the technical angle to this story is the promise of edge
| ML. If your language model runs on the device, your cloud
| inference costs go to zero and the device works as long as it has
| power.
|
| Aside from the financial benefits, there's a huge privacy upside
| as well since no audio or text is sent over a wire. Might be
| notable for a children's toy.
|
| Of course, this is very difficult for large companies and VC-
| backed startups to care about because 1) it involves hard
| technical problems rather than API calls and 2) as long as you
| can keep asking for money the inference costs don't matter and 3)
| there are no criminal consequences (prison time) for privacy
| violations.
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(page generated 2024-12-09 23:00 UTC)