Some news is both sad and dystopian at the same time, and this is one of those cases. Moxie, a start-up selling $800 emotional support robots intended to help children is shutting down operations since it can’t find enough money, and since their robots require constant connectivity to servers to operate, all of the children’s robots will cease functioning within days. They’re not offering refunds, but they will send out a letter to help parents tell their children “in an age-appropriate way” that their lovable robot is going to die.
If you have kids yourself, you know how easily they can sometimes get attached to the weirdest things, from fluffy stuffed animals designed to be cute, to random inanimate objects us adults would never consider to be even remotely interesting. I can definitely see how my own kids would be devastated if one of their favourite “emotional” toys were to suddenly stop working or disappear, and we don’t even have anything that pretends to have a personality or that actively interacts with our kids like this robot thing does.
We can talk about how it’s insane that no refunds will be given, or how a company can just remotely kill a product like this without any repercussions, but most of all I’m just sad for the kids who use one and are truly attached to it, who now have to deal with their little friend going away. That’s just heartbreaking, and surely a sign of things to come as more and more companies start stuffing “AI” into their toys. The only thing I can say is that we as parents should think long and hard about what kind of toys we give our children, and that we should maybe try to avoid anything tied to a cloud service that can go away at any time.