Jibo, the $899 'Social Robot', Tells Owners in Farewell Address That Its VC Overlords Have Remote-Killswitched It (boingboing.net)

Reader AmiMoJo writes: Jibo was a "social robot" startup that burned through $76 million in venture capital and crowdfunding before having its assets were sold to SQN Venture Partners late last year. Earlier this week, reporter Dylan J Martin tweeted a video of a $899 Jibo robot bidding its owner farewell, announcing that the new owners of his servers were planning to killswitch it; the robot thanked him "very very much" for having it around, and asked that "someday, when robots are more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said 'hello.'" Then, the Jibo performed a melancholy dance.

Comments

What did you expect?

[r2kordmaa]

The entire project was bs from the very beginning, no surprises whatsoever here.

Re:What did you expect?

[Opportunist]

Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.

Earlier, makers of appliances had to build their systems to last just long enough to make it through warranty, which is a gamble. The item may fail too early or, worse, too late. Now they can determine when it fails you.

Re:What did you expect?

[AmiMoJo]

A little bit of good news though: companies have started offering refunds when they shut down vital online services. Microsoft did it with their band fitness trackers, and Sony is doing it with a game that was supposed to be free to play online "forever".

We need to keep pushing for this to be the norm. Make retiring services that products depend on expensive for the manufacturer. Make them think hard about committing to long term support before making features dependent on cloud services.

Re:What did you expect?

[jythie]

If one is going to buy products that depend on someone else maintaining infrastructure for you, then yeah, when the manufacturer no longer feels like giving you free services, that is gonna stop.

Re:What did you expect?

[phantomfive]

Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.

It amazes me how many people seem used to that already and accept it as normal.

Re:What did you expect?

[DarkOx]

I don't think this will accomplish what you think it will. Look at it this way. They are refunding at most the purchase price, probably less in a lot of cases. In the mean time they get to hold your money, and collect the interest / investment revenues. They also get to monetize having you connected however they do that. Maybe is showing ads, maybe its in app purchases that won't be refunded, maybe selling your data whatever..

They are not going to let you disconnect, they are just going to structure the deal financially for them such that it works like whole or most formulations of universal life insurance. They know they are mostly going to have to payout eventually probably even more than they will collect in premiums directly but the deal is structured such that most of the time they will be able generate enough revenue off the capital over time to be profitable.

Re:What did you expect?

[Voyager529]

Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.

It amazes me how many people seem used to that already and accept it as normal.

Because they've been doing it for years.

Look, you and I and plenty of the Slashdot crowd know how to fix our own computers and run our own servers. How many people have depended on you / the IT guy at work / the Geek Squad to keep their computers running? Most of them. To them, 'trusting someone else with their data' is, ultimately, all they've ever done. To top it off, in most cases they end up paying less and getting better services in the process. If they've been burned in one form or another over the years, that effect is even more pronounced.

You and me and the rest of the people who prefer self-hosted solutions are in the extreme minority because we see services come and services go, and we invest our time and our data into them. The Snapchat crowd sees data as transient, and backups too complicated and generally unnecessary. I mean, they'll realize in 20 years that they have no photos of their lives to show their children, but 'long term thinking' is not a favored mindset at this point in time.

With everything disposable and transient, 'everything-as-a-rental' and no concept of the value of ownership, the fact that few consumers insist on self-hosted solutions is completely unsurprising to me.

Re:What did you expect?

[HeckRuler]

Get used to it.

No. I refuse. I will fight back against that cultural momentum of corporations redefining what "ownership" and "sell/purchase" actually mean. I prefer products that are open and free. I try to self-host where possible. I void warranties. (And that bullshit sticker isn't legally binding anyway). I repair. I avoid products I can't repair. I don't own a 1984 wall-screen just so I can scream "play music". (Those things might be a useful product once they no longer need an internet connection. But until then, fuck no). And no I'm not going to rent a modem from the ISP, are you nuts? I advocate for the right to repair. I lament to others about the walled garden. I've annoyed all my family with the analogy of selling a suitcase with a brick in locked compartment. (and yeah I should stop that). I've written my rep and gotten a bullshit form letter back. I donate to the EFF.

Just stop buying this crap.

Now... I still buy a lot of this crap. I gave into Steam a while ago and yes, it absolutely infuriates me when I can't play a game because I'm offline. So now I veer towards GOG when I can. There's a sliding scale of how much a company respects the customers, and each string attached moves it over. Any competitor that can do the same thing, but also give me more respect gets my business.

Re:What did you expect?

[barc0001]

> We need to keep pushing for this to be the norm.

Or, crazy thought: maybe we should be demanding instead that a lot of these "smart" service devices don't rely on cloud systems that will one day be retired and render all the devices useless.

Case in point, I just jumped into the smart light tech pool at home. I went with the Philips Hue system instead of any of the many many many competitors out there that are way cheaper. My starter kit with 4 RGB lights and a Zigbee bridge was $200 CDN, compared to 4 wifi RGB wifi lights from an Amazon Favorite for $35 CDN. But here's the thing: those Amazon lights call home to a cloud server for every single action, when you use the app you're not talking directly to your lights from your phone, you're instructing the cloud service to tell them what to do. My Hue lights by comparison communicate with the local bridge. This means if my internet goes down, I can still control the lights. If Philips abandons the Hue product altogether, my system will still work with all the hardware I have.

On the other hand, if the maker of those Amazon favorite lights I mentioned goes tits up and shuts off the cloud service, or decides to discontinue it, your bulbs are worthless. Same with those $25 smart plugs people are buying in droves.

Or...

[RobertNotBob]

Or, you could tell your future-self to have your new robot hack Jibo to refer to a virtual server spun up ad-hoc by the new unit instead of the long-dead remote servers. PRESTO, your new robot has 2 avitars instead of one. ( ok, one has a lot less capacity than the other. But a hack that was set up with a long-game of years is always worth doing)

This is getting out of hand

[thereddaikon]

It really is an internet of shit. Not everything needs to be connected to "the cloud". I actively avoid cloud based devices because I cant truly own them. Why would anyone spend close to $1k on something that could stop working at any time?

Re:This is getting out of hand

[geekmux]

...Why would anyone spend close to $1k on something that could stop working at any time?

Because like most other products, the non-cloud version (if available) would cost $15K, making the cloud version seem like a bargain.

That's why.

Re:This is getting out of hand

[fluffernutter]

You totally miss the point. It's not the consumer's problem that the non-cloud one would cost too much and that the cloud one is "a bargain" by comparison. If consumers don't feel comfortable buying it, then it isn't a bargain in a commercial sense.

Re:This is getting out of hand

[Ol Olsoc]

...Why would anyone spend close to $1k on something that could stop working at any time?

Because like most other products, the non-cloud version (if available) would cost $15K, making the cloud version seem like a bargain.

That's why.

That's the best description of cloudthink I've ever seen. Majick bits and bytes that for some reason only run on machines that have the special cloudsprinkles applied to them by a high priestess of cloudiness.

Re:This is getting out of hand

[AmiMoJo]

To be fair this thing is an ARM SoC, similar to a phone, so actually a lot of what it does relies on fast servers with hardware accelerated speech recognition and huge databases of knowledge to answer questions.

It's kind of interesting how back in the mainframe age science fiction assumed that there would be one massive all-knowing computer that everyone in the world could ask questions of via a terminal, and then when microcomputers came along it switched to everyone having a robot with the entirety of human knowledge in its positronic brain.

What actually happened is that we have a large number of specialist AIs shared between everyone, living in the cloud. Hopefully processing and storage will continue to advance fast enough to make having a local copy feasible.

Re:This is getting out of hand

[GameboyRMH]

Why would it cost $15k for the manufacturer to provide the server software for a user to run locally, and add a way to point the device to a different server? The server software doesn't have to run on the robot itself.

Re:This is getting out of hand

[stealth_finger]

...Why would anyone spend close to $1k on something that could stop working at any time?

Because like most other products, the non-cloud version (if available) would cost $15K, making the cloud version seem like a bargain.

That's why.

It's only cheaper because they cover it in ads.

Planned obsolescence

[QuietLagoon]

If there is the ability for a company to turn it off remotely, it should not be a surprise when that ability is used.

Everybody's gotta get burned a few times

[Sloppy]

Everyone eventually has their own proprietary-software-abandoned/fucked-me experience. Some peoples' experiences are delayed, some people have it quick. Some people lose $20, some lose $200, some lose $2000. Some people get attached and then angry at the loss; some people shrug and let it go. Some people need simply a larger quantity of lessons than others.

It took me a couple decades, from about 1980 to somewhere around 1999-2002, before I finally had enough, so I'm not going to mock the people who threw away $900, I guess. But I would ask 'em, "Is that enough yet? Or do you wanna go for another round of abuse?" Whatever floats your boat, man.