Meet Amazon Astro, The Robot That Will Hurl Itself Down Stairs If “Presented The Opportunity”
Coincidentally, none of the promo shots feature staircases.
Amazon’s new home robot ‘Astro’ has been described by developers as “terrible”, and known to “almost certainly throw itself downstairs if presented the opportunity”. The ‘Alexa on wheels’, which kind of looks like a roomba with an iPad on it, or a hotter version of WALL-E, was announced during a product launch on Tuesday.
Don’t be fooled by its wee little face though — a robot made by a top 10 company in the world following you around the house all day can only mean trouble. A source who worked on the project reportedly said in their opinion that Astro was a “privacy nightmare that is an indictment of our society, and how we trade privacy for convenience”, according to VICE.
Leaked documents seen by the outlet have already raised eyebrows because Astro is “designed to track the behaviour of everyone in your home to help it perform its surveillance and helper duties” — including memorising faces, tracking behaviour, and ‘investigating’ strangers by aggressively following them around, which is partly comforting in an emergency home invasion situation, but mostly narc behaviour.
Developers also noted that “at any given moment it’ll commit suicide on a flight of stairs” and called Astro “absurdist nonsense”. Presumably the steps situation was or will be resolved before its US-based release in 2022 but Amazon is yet to officially confirm this blaring flaw.
In 2017, a robot security guard rolled itself into a fountain in Washington DC and drowned itself, and Boston Dynamic’s creepy robot ‘dog’ comically kept slipping on banana peels and failed to get back up.
More tragically, another little robot named Jibo broke hearts two years ago, when he had to announce his own impending death after its server shut down, telling owners: “maybe someday when robots are way more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said hello.”