Hacker News Reader

Comment by natemcintosh | Hacker News Reader

I would love to have something like this for all the chores around my house. But I also have serious reservations about the increased level insight into my private home life this could provide to the manufacturer. Look at cases like the ring camera security violations [1]. A moving robot could be an order of magnitude more invasive of your privacy. If I were to purchase this, I would want serious privacy guarantees.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...

View on HN

You mean like the Roomba robots enabled with cameras that have sent embarrassing images back to the mothership where employees have access to the footage and then share on their socials? No, not could be. They already are. I never did follow the home security system with a drone that would fly around your home with a camera. Not sure if that died a glorious death because it was just dumb or what happened to it. I was just waiting to hear about it leaking all sorts of things too.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/podcast/2023/01/a-private-...

You're exaggerating. The images were from paid staff who had the vacuums in their homes to collect data, including images. They knew that was happening. iRobot said the devices were labeled with a bright green sticker that read “video recording in progress,”

I'm exaggerating? I provided receipts. If you have an exaggeration issue, it's not with me, and you'd do well to improve your aim

What you said is an exaggeration of the information you linked.

In what way? The first graph of the article says what happened. Later, it says that the images were taken by people participating in a beta test. It also says they felt misled.

Regardless, if an employee posted images acquired from customers, testing users, or anyone else to their personal social media platform of choice, they are still assholes. And the company that allowed for that to happen is an asshole as well.

"Figure 03 also includes 10 Gbps mmWave data offload capability, allowing the entire fleet to upload terabytes of data for continuous learning and improvement."

Yeah I'll pass thanks.

It's the only way this kind of robot will ever be successful. It's a bit like the driverless car approach -- get the hardware out into the real world with minimum viable performance, then desperately snaffle up as much real-world training data as you can to feed into your model, and hopefully your model will improve enough before your VC funding runs out / your product fails on the market / your product gets regulated out of existence / etc.

Simulation isn't sufficient for ML in robotics -- and they simply don't have enough training data.

I love how they make simple things complicated, it's just 5G man, much like how they made a cinematic video about how they solder and put together battery packs like some technology breakthrough.

I would want the robot to be programmed to immediately leave any room a member of our family enters, always cleaning only the empty rooms

I have decided I will be getting a robot once they are useful. But my plan is for it to only come out when no one is home or when everyone is upstairs (but not allowed to come in rooms where people are sleeping). It can do dishes while wearing a headlamp. They move so slowly it should be fairly quiet.

My fear is it's remotely hacked/operated and it kills me in my sleep

Or a Tesla remotely operated to run over your children.

I suppose a car could gain enough speed and drive through a house that would be a sight to see on camera, leaves your garage then comes back at 80mph

A more simpler/realistic scenario is it happens while driving

It'd be better if it comes back at 88mph

Forget privacy, imagine what someone like @elder_plinius could get up to if you invited them over to dinner. All of the "AI Safety" issues get a lot more real once the AI's have bodies.

These robots have cameras in their hands, so they can get stuff out of cupboards, but that can also be used to see around corners.

Going to be a wild ride.

I suspect these concerns will rapidly disappear on the societal scale once the robots can have sex.

Tell me you haven't seen Chinese humanoid robots' exhibition without telling me.

What a carefree life you must lead to have time or energy to care what a robot manufacturer thinks of your home.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com