Temperatures have well and truly dropped – and the feeling of autumn are well with us. As the fuel crisis in the UK continues, I’ll share my Top Two Tech Stories of the week.
First up, let’s talk robots!
- Astro your Household Robot!
When Amazon unveiled a domestic robot this week, it promised that the Astro is capable of “many delightful things”. Tellingly, the first practical example given by Dave Limp, the executive in charge, was checking whether his dogs were cheekily sleeping on the sofa while he was out of the house. It may indeed be useful to dispatch a robot on wheels remotely to raise its periscope camera and scan for pets behaving badly. But it hardly rivals the superpowers of Astro Boy (originally known as Atom), the android hero of a Japanese manga series from the 1950s and 1960s, when human-like robots felt tantalisingly close. In 1967, the American novelist and poet Richard Brautigan imagined “a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labours . . . and all watched over/by machines of loving grace.” Brautigan was prescient about one thing: the task for which Amazon’s robot is best suited is surveillance, loving or not.
There is a well-known Punch cartoon of some Daleks from the BBC television series Dr Who at the foot of a staircase, cursing that their plans to conquer the universe are ruined. This machine suffers from similar limitations: it can navigate apartments but would be stumped by a two-storey house. Astro’s most human talent is recognising its owners.
Amazon has built into the device a screen and artificial intelligence, so that it can identify up to 10 family members, follow them around playing music or videos, blink its digital eyes and carry small items from one to another. In other words, it performs like a well-behaved toddler; it will even go away on command.
Where Astro outperforms the toddler is on sentry duty. It can act like a miniature guard, patrolling while the occupants are out and checking on unexpected noises, such as burglar alarms or breaking windows. If it finds an intruder, it will track him and observe the crime, unless he kicks it over. Astro is the latest surveillance device arrayed through smart homes, from video doorbells such as Amazon’s Ring and Google’s Nest to static internal cameras. Amazon is starting to sell its Always Home Cam, a drone with a camera that can fly around, taking video clips in each room.
2. Waze your way to the nearest Petrol Station!
Traffic app Waze is asking UK users to tell it which petrol stations have fuel available, amid the UK’s shortage of petrol at the pump.
Users of the app are receiving push notifications asking them to “help your community stay informed”.
This data is then plugged into the app’s live map for others to see which stations are open.
Similar measures have been criticised as fuelling panic buying and adding to the problem.
Many local Facebook groups and apps such as Nextdoor have been flooded in recent days with messages from people offering advice about which petrol stations have fuel.
Waze, a subsidiary of Google, said the feature to show fuel stocks was not new but the company “has made the decision to push ‘notify users’ to encourage its use”.
“Fears of disruption to fuel supply have created bumper-to-bumper traffic at petrol stations,” Waze UK manager Ru Roberts said.
“In some areas, speeds have slowed to as low as 3km/h (1.9mph) as drivers rushed to fill their cars.”
The push notifications “will enable motorists to guide others to forecourts which have remaining supplies, saving unnecessary journeys to those which have already run out,” he said.
So there you go… Waze to the rescue and Astro to the door!