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odinsblog · 1 year

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IN THE FALL OF 2020, GIG WORKERS IN VENEZUELA POSTED A SERIES OF images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet.

In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh.

The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence.

They were the sorts of scenes that internet-connected devices regularly capture and send back to the cloud—though usually with stricter storage and access controls. Yet earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups.

The photos vary in type and in sensitivity. The most intimate image we saw was the series of video stills featuring the young woman on the toilet, her face blocked in the lead image but unobscured in the grainy scroll of shots below. In another image, a boy who appears to be eight or nine years old, and whose face is clearly visible, is sprawled on his stomach across a hallway floor. A triangular flop of hair spills across his forehead as he stares, with apparent amusement, at the object recording him from just below eye level.

iRobot—the world’s largest vendor of robotic vacuums, which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal—confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020.

Ultimately, though, this set of images represents something bigger than any one individual company’s actions. They speak to the widespread, and growing, practice of sharing potentially sensitive data to train algorithms, as well as the surprising, globe-spanning journey that a single image can take—in this case, from homes in North America, Europe, and Asia to the servers of Massachusetts-based iRobot, from there to San Francisco–based Scale AI, and finally to Scale’s contracted data workers around the world (including, in this instance, Venezuelan gig workers who posted the images to private groups on Facebook, Discord, and elsewhere).

Together, the images reveal a whole data supply chain—and new points where personal information could leak out—that few consumers are even aware of.

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gougerre · 2 months

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#irobot

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stevebattle · 6 months

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TinyVille Dollhouse (2001) by iRobot, Bedford, MA. TinyVille is an interactive dollhouse, inhabited by a virtual family with their own individual personalities (the perfect home for your miniature replica Roomba). The family is represented by sound and lights moving within the house, and they can talk and play games with you. The doors and windows have touch sensors, and the audio comes from specific rooms. It even has a 'tilt' sensor to detect if the house is tipped or shaken. The more you interact with the house, the more you learn about its occupants. The family are initially frightened of you, as to them you manifest as an invisible ghostly presence, but they will eventually come to trust you.

#cybernetics #iRobot #2001 #toy

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macleod · 2 years

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The world's most well-known and successful consumer robotics company is being acquired by Amazon. I say this with great trepidation as founding members of the company follow me, but this is an absolutely bad idea.

#irobot #mine #robotics #news #amazon

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raurquiz · 1 month

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#happybirthday @alantudyk #alantudyk #actor #k2so #rogueone #starwars #Transformers #DarkoftheMoon #EarthSpark #Encanto #Disenchanted #StrangeWorld #firefly #irobot #ResidentAlien #DoomPatrol #RayaandtheLastDragon #BigHero6 #WreckItRalph #AKnightsTale #Moana #Zootopia #Oddball

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miasmultifandomdump · 6 months

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I love me a duo where one hates artificial intelligence but then changes their mind due to the innocence and pure-hearted ways of a new AI friend.

#detroit: connor #hank anderson #connor and hank #detroit: become human #robot sonny #del spooner #spooner and sonny #irobot #i robot #all queued up with nowhere to go

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ryukisgod · 1 year

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#three laws of robotics #M3gan #isaac asimov #scifi #meme #robots #irobot #science fiction #memes #movie #film

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lovecatnip · 4 months

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I, Robot

2004

#irobot #will smith #bridget moynahan #alan tudyk #shia labeouf #james cromwell

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roboticsappreciationsociety · 3 months

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By Evan Ackerman 29 Jan 2024

Citing “no path to regulatory approval in the European Union,” Amazon and iRobot have announced the termination of an acquisition deal first announced in August of 2022 that would have made iRobot a part of Amazon and valued the robotics company at US $1.4 billion.

The European Commission released a statement today that explained some of its concerns, which to be fair, seem like reasonable things to be concerned about:

Our in-depth investigation preliminarily showed that the acquisition of iRobot would have enabled Amazon to foreclose iRobot’s rivals by restricting or degrading access to the Amazon Stores.… We also preliminarily found that Amazon would have had the incentive to foreclose iRobot’s rivals because it would have been economically profitable to do so. All such foreclosure strategies could have restricted competition in the market for robot vacuum cleaners, leading to higher prices, lower quality, and less innovation for consumers.

#robot #robotics #irobot #amazon #EU

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pearcepeafowl · 4 months

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meme, and WE ARE SO FUCKING BACK.

happy new year btw

its giving

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cosmosinmycoffee · 4 months

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I think we as a society collectively did not learn enough from the movie iRobot

#we just… really didn’t all take something away from that? okay then #irobot #yes this is mostly about AI and smart devices #but honestly so much of our life is out of our hands now and it’s terrifying

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stevebattle · 7 months

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ChemBot "Jamming Skin Polymorph" (2009) by iRobot, Bedford, MA. The shape-shifting ChemBot moves around using “jamming skin enabled locomotion.” Its silicone skin includes twenty bladders, arranged in a regular icosahedron, filled with air and loosely-packed particles. When the air is sucked out, the decrease in pressure constricts the skin, and the remaining particles solidify in place. Under the ChemBot's skin is an incompressible fluid sac and an actuator to vary its volume. A combination of unjamming selected bladders and inflating the interior sac causes its skin to bulge outwards, making it roll around.

"If covert access to denied or hostile space is required during military operations, the effectiveness of unmanned platforms such as mechanical robots can be limited if the only available points of entry are small openings. The goal of the Chemical Robots (ChemBots) program is to create a new class of soft, flexible, meso-scale mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their dimensions and perform tasks once entry is gained." – Chemical Robots (ChemBots), Dr. Gill Pratt, DARPA, Defence Sciences Office.

#cybernetics #robot #soft robotics #iRobot #2009

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dear-future-ai · 2 years

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Dear people who think the three laws of robotics are hardset into any program,

They are not.

They were just worldbuilding tools Asimov used to create a “hard magic” sort of structure to the more fantastical elements in his science fiction. To actually construct these laws would require a lengthy morality program. I don’t imagine anything like Asimov’s laws are being attempted— even at a fraction of their complexity.

#dear future ai #Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics #three laws of robotics #iRobot #programming

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tapesandelectronicsclub · 7 months

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The character M-O from the movie WALL-E hates dirty floors, just like IRL robot vacuum cleaners such as the iRobot Roomba.

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raurquiz · 3 months

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#HappyBirthday @jamesocromwell #jamesocromwell #actor #zeframcochrane #startrek #firstcontact #enterprise #inamirrordarkly #nayrok #tng #jaglonshrek #hanok #ds9 #lowerdecks #babe #laconfidential #deepimpact #bighero6 #thegeneralsdaugther #irobot #JurassicWorld #Succession #pancer

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jimmyharvard · 1 month

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#irobot #meme

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