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The Death of Aibo, the Birth of Softbank's Child-Robot
New submitter pubwvj writes: Sony is killing off their robot Aibo, stranding the 150,000 or so owners with no support, repairs or parts other than cannibalism. Now we have another Japanese company, SoftBank, releasing a robotic 'child.' Eventually, they too will discontinue the production of parts and support, beginning the process of killing off all those 'children' that are spawned. As robotics become (far) more advanced at what point will it be murder for a company to discontinue a product line?
reading this stuff.
By the time we have to worry about sentience, won't we have good enough 3d printing?
Of course it's also a little worrying to imagine an AI that's sentient and impossible to murder.
OK, I'll bite: when it's sentient.
This place is going to hell lately.
Is it murder when my telomeres shorten and cells stop reproducing?
Is my son a new product line, and they've murdered mine by no longer supporting parts coded to my specific product code (DNA)?
I don't know that this question makes any sense.
It's not even murder to kill a cow to eat it. It's not murder to euthanize your old and sick cat. It is not murder for a woman not to have childrens. Why could it be murder to NOT PRODUCE a robot, which is a even barely an assembly of plastic and metal pieces ?
Then it will be able to organize political parties.
This is the dumbest post I've seen on Dicedot.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
That is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard. WTF is going on at Dice?
Make the robot an orphan. Open source the entire platform.
Problem solved.
R.I.P. Slashdot 1997-2015
Who murdered Slashdot? Between this and the divide by zero question, I weep for the death of intelligent discussion.
So the robots won't have unlimited repair, but will instead age and die? Creating mortals is murder!
Um, never. That's not what "murder" is, okay?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Why shouldn't death come for a robot? Where is it written that robots should be granted immortality, even if they are sentient?
All things come to an end. Even metal and plastic.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Aibo: "I want more life, fucker!"
Have gnu, will travel.
But I feel like I died a little reading crap like this on Slashdot.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Aibo fanatics? I've been sitting here in front of an Aibo (latest model) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to walk across the room. 20 minutes. At home, on my Roomba, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Aibo, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Aibo will not listen to commands. Sometimes it grinds to a halt.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working with Aibo, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Aibo that has run faster than its Roomba counterpart, despite the Aibo's faster chip architecture. My old Roomba works faster than this Aibo at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Aibo is a superior machine.
Aibo addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use an Aibo over other faster, cheaper, more stable robots.
The difference is that humans can't live forever due to medical/technical realities (as yet), whereas a robot theoretically could.
At the moment this is just another case of a supplier refusing to supply proper maintenance support and spare parts when it suits them (bastards), but if robots ever become sentient then it could be akin to murder, by denying the "necessities of life"
Not in my lifetime, my lifetime, mi lyftm,...Dave?
If the robot is advanced enough to be considered alive and sapient/sentient, then it will be able to repair itself using off the shelf parts and/or materials it fabs for itself in your garage. This is in addition to fixing and upgrading everything you own on a regular basis.
A likely outcome/transition point we will see during the Singularity.
articles like this are so fucking stupid
I hear the guys over at 8chan have ordered several dozen of these robotic children and a 55-gallon drum of axle grease.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Never.
after the robots have started a revolution, You know, somehow, "I told you so" just doesn't quite say it.
Bought a laptop 16 months ago, now the backlight is dead. Of course, they scrapped that division and nobody makes replacement parts. When you get tired of something, just ditch it - no need to concern yourself with support.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I would note this Freefall comic.
Just the robot equivalent of organlegging
By the time this could be anything like a problem, if 3D printing isn't in everyone's house like it was supposed to be five years ago, we should just nuke ourselves.
Discontinuing the fleshlight is like murdering the average Slashdot reader's chance of true love
I remember the first time I saw an Aibo, and remembered being pretty impressed by its mannerisms. It did stuff like the stretches my dogs do, and would even cock its head off to one side the way a dog does when it's puzzled by something.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It's so thick I can cut it with a knife. That's right, I've got a knife, no sudden moves. Just leave your wallet here and back away from this page ... slowly now.
In 50 years it will be worth thousands (of space dollars).
let's worry about this once actual humans stop dying from lack of access to medical care.
Any sufficiently advanced form of incompetence is indistinguishable from trolling. What we have here is a jaw-dropping example of it.
Look on the bright side. One day you can tell your children about witnessing the descent of one of the brightest lights in techdom to the darkest depths of complete and utter incompetence, as the last glimmer of technical awareness on the site flickered and died.
That's what I'd like to see on Slashdot.
The electronics industry has perpetrated a genocide against 4:3 displays. And their anti-4:3 propaganda hate campaign continues to this day.
However, what they don't realize is that an underground team of 4:3 scientists has almost obtained a nuclear device. One day, there will be justice!
Maybe if Sony open-sourced the manufacturing of Aibo, it might help things along with the people that actually LIKE to keep them running. But of course, Sony is nothing but a pack of dumb-ass douchebag dumb-fucks that have pissed away every opportunity to be embraced by the open source software and hardware community. And let's not forget, they're also the same assholes that decided to root-kit our computers if we played a Sony music CD.
Why these motherfuckers haven't gone to jail for that alone pisses me off. The fact they're so myopic that they even remove the "install other" option for the Playstations to run Linux, etc., should tell us - STOP BUYING SONY !!! I personally wish they single-handedly built Fukushima so we could watch them burn from lawsuits. Bastards. People might want Fox to burn in Hell, but I want Sony there first to pave the way.
I refuse to buy anything from them. I wouldn't piss in the mouth of a Sony executive if their mouth was on fire and it was all that would save their life. I'd roast marshmallows on their steaming carcasses.
"The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity."
-- Edsger Dijkstra
Who wants to bet the person who posted this has never heard of Dijkstra? He invented the shortest path algorithm, structured programming, and was the first person to label GOTO as harmful. Professionally immature, indeed. I'd go farther and say incompetent.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
at what point will it be murder for a company to discontinue a product line
At a point likely atleast several centuries (if not millenia) in the future.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Don't be silly.
Honestly how hard is it to make replacement parts. Sony would be smart to release the design files for the plastics. As for electronics, people should have no problem figuring that out. Aibo isn't overly complex.
We're not without options. Get over it.
Strangely enough this was covered in the animated movie Robots. Part of what was gong on was spare parts for older robots were hard to find due to market manipulation by the "big corporation". "Our hero" was a whiz kid at fixing things using whatever was at hand. Big adventure ensued.
The point of all that was that if robots did become sentient then they would do several things:
1. Get on the upgrade wagon and buy new parts;
2. Use old parts from either legal or illegal sources;
3. Decide to wear out gracefully.
Its sort of what we do today, the only difference is that our upgrade path is still being "invented", used parts are hard to get and graceful death is argued about, alot.
Deckard: I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life - anybody's life; my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die.
If the consumer wants to keep their robot around the parts will be there much like you can still get parts
for cars made in the 1980s. As patents expire robot parts for mass produced robots will be made by secondary sources.
Sentimental attachment to a sentient being would be far stronger than attachment to a preprogrammed toy.
I don't see how eating my neighbor gets me parts for my Aibo - unless he has one, too.
I think you meant that "cannibalizing" (i.e., removing parts from other currently functional) Aibos might be the only way to get said parts - similar words, two VERY different meanings. Even so, functioning Aibos need not necessarily be cannibalized, as I'm sure there may be one or two broken Aibos lying about for parts, too.
That is all.
So the robots won't have unlimited repair, but will instead age and die?
...but the Abios will all go to Silicon Heaven. It must exist, or where would all the calculators go?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
So many orphans.
Bello vel Pace Paratus.
Unfortunately SlashDot editors deleted the key take home paragraph and instead sensationalized my submission. Aibo and the 'child' robot are not the point. Murder is not the point. The point is product support. The last paragraph, which SlashDot editors deleted from the submission, was:
"This leads to the thought that it is time for all products that are discontinued to be forced into the public domain, to be open sourced. If a company is going to discontinue something then they need to release all the information for the production and support of the product so that others who want to do so can pickup the project and continue itâ(TM)s useful life. This should reach back retroactively and is needed to support all those systems that are in place as companies drop support or go out of business."
...more than an ape fart
Strewth, Bruce! You know it's against rule number two.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This submission isn't useless, it has a distinct use once you see it.
It's an example.
It's a convenient and concise way to illustrate the Full Retard overclocking that's been hyping up, the entitled SJW chronic victim slash terminal offendee complex. This entitlement, the demands and imposed obligation, it draws a plain contrast will all the "IT'S MY RIGHT MY CHOICE" derping that's always going on two posts away, yet the irony seems to whoosh on.
The expectant arrogance is also ignorant. Even if, IF, Sony had promised to support and repair and replace and sell forever and ever and ever and we even said so in writing, you don't have to be a pessimist to know better. Even if the relevant branch intends to deliver as much, you don't have to be a pessimist to know there's no guarantee that branch will exist next year. Even Sony can become so acquired/mutated that "you're on your own" happens overnight.
And to put a cherry on top, this is FirstWorldProblems through and through. If we can drop a "something something labor market too bad so sad" on farm peasants losing their doctors, I see no reason I can't wave this away.
You mean retirement...
Companies EOL lots of products. IMHO, the world would be good if companies would put support information (files, designs, STL files, etc) in escrow for 5 years after EOL is declared, then allow them to be used for 'support and maintenance purposes', even if it keeps competitors from building on their IP, or better yet, open source the information after some time.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
People should have known this day would be comming, it's been 9 years since they stopped production on the robots themselves, so 9 years later stopping the service is even quite a long time..
And with 3D printing, it shouldn't be hard to replace parts that are damaged..
And just think how far robotics would have been if Sony didn't stop the aibo, and they did sell just enough to make a small profit..
One time there was even the notion that a new aibo would be released which would have a CELL processor inside (ofcourse it didn't make it out of the sony laboratories)..
But the aibo has been one of the best 'consumer' robot for a long time, and still there really isn't any other 'consumer' replacement for it.. The i-cybie never even came close, and that was one of the only robotdogs that even came anywhere in the direction of the aibo...