Making robots outlive their creators
Business ethics of a robot’s death
The shutting down of Jibo and Anki, the two consumer social robot makers, triggered an event that hasn’t quite happened to the consumer tech world before. Owners of Jibo robots and Anki’s Cozmo and Vector robot trucks faced the prospect of eventual death of their devices, following the stoppage of paid cloud services.
Discontinuing of products happens all the time, resulting in thousands, sometimes millions of disappointed enthusiasts (two examples being Polaroid cameras and Toyota FJ Cruisers).
Social robots are arguably different from other consumer products. The degree of personalization that social robots strive to achieve and the social bond being one of their key performance indicators, both make the discontinuing of such robots perceived as less of an excuse to upgrade to a newer or a competitor’s product, and more of a loss of a member of a social circle. In the words of users, it’s a robot’s death.
Photo by Sammy Stuard
Do robots have to die following the demise of their creator companies? Apparently, no. Jibo robots, as well as Anki-made Cozmo and Vector trucks are still “alive,” months after their companies announced their closures.
The futures of Jibo and Anki robots, however, look quite different.
SQN Venture Partners, the company that acquired assets of Jibo Inc., have not communicated its plans of support for existing units. The Jibo robots remain somewhat alive thanks to a volunteer effort of the company’s former employees, who upgraded its offline mode to eventually become a default one (while also inserting a bit of a tear-jerker farewell message).
Anki’s new owner, Pittsburgh-based Digital Dream Labs, just made an announcement today (5-jan-2020) that can set a milestone in the social robot industry’s young history.
First, they plan to enable users to “move and set” remote service endpoints, removing the need to rely on the company’s cloud.
Second, they will unlock the robot’s bootloader, enabling users to install their own onboard software.
While the details are still vague, the announced initiative puts Digital Dream Labs on the forefront of defining the ethics for the future social robotics businesses.
Allowing to hack both cloud and embedded sides of the robot are major steps towards making the robots an open platform for third-party developers. I am excited to see how Digital Dream Labs will be solving the challenge of building a business out of an ethical social robotic platform.
