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Astro is Amazon's first 'household robot', powered by the megacorp's Alexa technology. As if smart speakers weren't enough of a privacy nightmare, now you can get one that follows you around the house. Great! Except this thing can also recognise faces and map the layout of your apartment, so it's even worse. It has a 10-inch display for a head, an extendable periscope camera, and will cost around $900 when it ships later this year—increasing to $1450 after an unspecified introductory period. I'm making pointed use of 'it' here, because I refuse to acknowledge that this thing has a personality. Amazon has given it a face to try and convince us that it's a little friendly AI pal, not the data-harvesting dystopian nightmare bot it actually is. I'm not buying it. This thing is evil and it must be destroyed.
There's nothing charming about those cold, staring digital eyes. Astro is the stuff of sci-fi nightmares, and I do not want one in my house, ever. Imagine turning around and seeing it sitting there in silence, watching you expectedly, awaiting a command, with those big circular eyes boring directly through your soul. There's something highly sinister about a surveillance device with a face, and I really can't imagine a world where I invite something like this into my life. I suppose one small mercy is that it doesn't have arms, so it can't interact with its surroundings in any meaningful way. Give it a decade or two, though. The Astro 20 will probably be a full-size, Amazon-branded replica of a human—and next thing you know it's being hacked and it's got you in a headlock.
One of Astro's main features is home monitoring. The camera can extend to 42 inches, sending a video feed to a phone, which you could theoretically use to, say, check on a sleeping baby. Just think of that: a child opening their eyes after a nap and seeing a lens at the end of a stick peering at them. You can also set it to patrol your home when you're away, alerting you if it senses any unusual movement or sounds. If I were a burglar and I saw this thing bleeping at me, I'd simply kick its face off and resume ransacking the owner's house. I wouldn't even steal it. If you don't want it monitoring certain rooms you can set them as 'out of bounds', but I don't trust it to obey my orders. When I had an Echo, I lost count of the number of times it played the wrong song or otherwise misinterpreted a command.
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According to developers who allegedly worked on Astro, speaking anonymously to , the robot is "terrible", a "disaster not ready for release", and "potentially dangerous." One source says the facial recognition technology is "unreliable at best", making the "in-home security proposition laughable." Another source claims the robot is much more fragile than its significant retail price would suggest, with the camera mast frequently getting stuck in place, and it will "almost certainly throw itself down a flight of stairs." Oof. Pretty damning stuff. If these claims are accurate, Astro could be a disaster for Amazon. I'm personally looking forward to all the videos of it tumbling down stairs and getting stamped on when it invades people's personal space after it's eventually released into the wild.
Amazon seems obsessed with getting as many cameras and microphones into people's homes as possible. It acquired video doorbell company Ring in 2018 for $1 billion, and recently launched a Ring-branded surveillance drone that buzzes around your house while you're away. I want no part of this future. I don't think it's paranoid to find the proliferation of this kind of tech extremely disturbing. There are genuine security applications, sure. But with a colossal, faceless corporation like Amazon running things behind the scenes, putting your faith into these devices feels ill-advised. I loathe Astro and everything its stupid little blinky, bleepy face cynically represents—and if I ever see one rolling around your house, don't be surprised if it ends up in the microwave when your back is turned.
