How Amazon's Astro Robot Will Track Everything You Do
CYBER
VICE
4 • 645 Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2021
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Amazon's new robot called Astro is designed to track the behavior of everyone in your home to help it perform its surveillance and helper duties, according to leaked internal development documents and video recordings of Astro software development meetings obtained by Motherboard. The system's person recognition system is heavily flawed, according to two sources who worked on the project.
The documents, which largely use Astro's internal codename "Vesta" for the device, give extensive insight into the robot's design, Amazon's philosophy, how the device tracks customer behavior as well as flow charts of how it determines who a "stranger" is and whether it should take any sort of "investigation activity" against them.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Got the music and everything. |
| 0:07.5 | Taffin, it's got the code it's going to launch. |
| 0:12.1 | It's a unit system. |
| 0:14.5 | I know this. |
| 0:16.5 | It's all the files of the whole park. |
| 0:18.7 | It tells her everything. |
| 0:20.5 | Sir, he's uploading the virus. |
| 0:23.2 | Eagle One. |
| 0:23.9 | The package is being delivered. |
| 0:30.5 | Hey, Cyber. |
| 0:31.6 | This is Motherboard Editor-in-Chief Jason Kebler, and I've got Joseph Cox here with me. |
| 0:36.9 | Hi, Joseph. |
| 0:40.2 | Hey, thanks for having me on. |
| 0:47.4 | First time ever. Yeah, this is I believe our first ever emergency podcast, which is hopefully not going to be much an emergency from now on, but we're trying something new. We are going to try to do |
| 0:53.8 | some more live and timely podcasts where we break |
| 0:59.3 | stories and then get on Twitch and start talking about them. So to everyone that's watching us on |
| 1:04.3 | Twitch, thank you for being here. This is the first time we're trying this. So please bear with us. |
| 1:08.7 | And to our cyber listeners also please bear with us because we're trying this, so please bear with us. And to our cyber listeners, also please bear with us |
| 1:11.5 | because we're trying to bring you news as it happens as opposed to, you know, a few days later. |
| 1:18.6 | And so today we're going to be talking about Amazon's new Astro Robot, which I will let Amazon set the |
| 1:26.6 | scene here. This is from a keynote speech that they gave today. |
| 1:32.5 | To tell you about one last device that delivers peace of mind and a whole lot more, here's Dave. |
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