Azonei (@azonei.bsky.social)

Aside from creepy surveillance, what are ‘consumer-ready’ service robots actually for? | Samantha Floreani For A$30k you could have a remote employee see inside your home via a walking, talking machine with a chilling blank face. Count me out There’s something particularly dystopian about watching the mute headlines of daytime television play at the gym. It feels like a movie montage; pop bangers streaming, surrounded by sweaty hotties, I watch the latest horror unfold. News of war, the pandemic, death and destruction slide across the bottom of the screen below chatty hosts. It’s here where I first see NEO, the “world’s first consumer-ready humanoid robot designed to transform life at home”. I watch as the hosts gleefully introduce its creepy, soft, grey body and chilling blank face with puny camera eyes. As though exercising my corporeal form wasn’t trial enough, now robots? Who in their right mind would want a walking, talking surveillance machine inside their home? The privacy invasion required for such robots to function goes far beyond your smart speaker listening into your conversations, your automatic pet feeder capturing footage, or your Roomba mapping the inside of your home and sharing it with Amazon. Beyond sensors, cameras and pervasive data collection, Neo – just one example of humanoid “service” robots now on the market – relies upon “expert mode” for the tasks it can’t quite manage on its own. That’s code for a remote employee being able to see inside your home and control the robot through a VR headset. Creepy. Samantha Floreani is a digital rights advocate and writer based in Melbourne/Naarm Continue reading... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/16/consumer-ready-robots-home-ai?CMP=aus_bsky