3d ago

Get to know the robot dog that can clean your house and serve you soda

engineering.cmu.edu

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35909545

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3d ago

Get to know the robot dog that can clean your house and serve you soda

engineering.cmu.edu /news-events/news/2025/08/18-human2locoman.html

14 comments

As fun as this is nothing is stopping them from turning these into more invasive Alexa. Do not buy into the robot bullshit under risk management and a surveillance agenda I'm talking to all of you dumbasses who baught Alexa.
Nah I'm fine with doing this shit myself, this future is really for the laziest fucks.
- Someone's never struggled with major depression 🥲
  
  My thoughts went more towards people who aren't very mobile or physically impaired honestly.
Within the next decade, chances are your neighbors, or maybe even you, will be sharing a home with a robot roommate to lend a hand with everyday tasks.
Thank you Carnegie Melon for making sure I remember I’m worse off than my neighbors. I feel seen
If it’s Internet connected and requires a cloud subscription service, you are just paying to be spied on and controlled. This is as true for dogs as it is for speakers and TVs.
This is great news for elders or disabled people! Get a robot to help around the house.
- Get a robot to ~~help around the house~~ observe your daily schedule, your habits, your every movement, and upload video, audio, sonar, lidar and radar recordings to ~~the cloud~~ probably just an unesecured S3 bucket. And then use all that to profile you, sell you stuff, and send automatic reports to law enforcement about anything that triggers the AI as a possible indicator of criminal behavior.
  Oh yeah, sign me right up for the corporate-controlled self-propelled surveillance platform. Maybe I'll get two, so there's never a gap in surveillance while one is recharging.
  And if you think any of that sounds paranoid, you should be aware it's already happening with robot vacuums:
  A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?
  While it’s vacuuming your dirt, Roomba also collects data on you: Next, it could be sold
  
  This is why I am waiting for selfhosted
  
  Small price to pay. They can watch me do my daily physical therapy, eat, play video games and watch TV. I hate to disappoint but I am not some secret agent hiding a bunch of shit. I also wouldn’t give them access to my internet or cell phone.
- Yeah, if companies didn't sell your data
But how safe is this really? These things sell to have quite some power and torque, so could probably maim someone by accident. And if they run with AI, I’m not sure there are actual safeguards in place that would be reliable? Just telling the AI to not do something doesn’t work with other AI approaches either…

14 comments