Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be first. iRobot, the maker of the Roomba, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and been acquired by Picea, one of its Chinese suppliers, Lauren Almeida reports at the Guardian. The company’s value has cratered since 2021.
Given the wild enthusiasm that greeted the Roomba’s release in 2002, it seems incredible. Years before then, I recall an event where a speaker whose identity I don’t remember said that ever since he had mentioned the possibility of a robot vacuum sometime like the 1960s he’d gotten thousands of letters asking when it would be ready. There was definitely customer demand. It helped that the Roomba itself was kind of cute as it banged randomly into furniture. People named them, and took them on vacation. But, as often happens, the Roomba’s success attracted lower-cost competitors, and the first mover failed to keep up.
I got one in 2003. After a great few months, I realized that Roombas are not compatible with long hair, which ties them into knots that take longer to cut out than vacuuming. I gave it away within a year and haven’t tried again.
At Mashable, Leah Stodart warns that although the Roombas people already have will continue to work “for now”, users can’t be confident that this state of affairs will continue. Like so many other things that used to be things we owned and are now things we subscribe to (but still think we “buy”), newer-model Roombas are controlled by an app that the manufacturer can change or discontinue at will. She calls it “unplanned obsolescence”. Her advice not to buy a new one this year is sound from the consumer’s point of view, but hardly likely to help the company survive.
If generative AI is so great, why is everyone forcing it on us? The latest example, Luke James reports at Tom’s Hardware, is LG “smart” TVs whose users woke up the other day to find a new update had installed “CoPilot: Your AI Companion” without asking permission and that there was no option to remove it. The most you can do to disable it, James says, is keep your TV disconnected from the Internet.
There are of course many more, the automated summaries popping up everywhere being the most obvious. Then, Matthew Gault reports at 404 Media, a Discord moderator and an Anthropic executive added Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to a community for queer gamers, who had voted to restrict Claude to its own channel. Result: major exodus. Duh.
And, of course, as Lance Ulanoff reminds at TechRadar, there is “AI slop” everywhere – music playlists, YouTube videos, ebooks – threatening people’s livelihood even though, as Cory Doctorow has written, “AI can’t do your job. But an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can’t do your job.” For a while, anyway: Microsoft is halving its sales targets for AI.
And thus we get “slop” as the word of the year, per Merriam-Webster. Any time companies are this intent on foisting something on us – chatbots, ads – you have to know that they’re intent on favoring their interests, not ours.
Last week, Customs and Borders Patrol published a notice in the Federal Register proposing new rules for foreigners traveling to the US on an ESTA (“Electronic System for Travel Authorization”) as part of the visa waiver program. It has drawn a lot of discussion in the UK, which is one of the 42 affected countries. Under the new rules, applicants must install CBP’s app, into which they must submit a massive load of “high-value” personal information. The list is long, allows for a so-far-imaginary future of DNA sampling, and expects you to be able to give five years’ worth of family members’ residences, phone numbers, and places of birth, and all the email addresses you’ve used for ten years. CBP thinks the average applicant should be able to complete on their smartphone in 22 minutes. I think it would take hours of painful, resentful typing on a stupid touch keyboard, and even then I doubt I could fill it out with any certainty that the information I supplied was complete or accurate. Data collection at this scale makes it easy to find an error to use as an excuse to deny entry to or deport someone you want to get rid of. As Edward Hasbrouck writes at Papers, Please, “Welcome to the 2026 World Cup”.
“They have to be planning to use AI on all that data,” a friend commented last week. Probably – to build social graphs and find connections deemed suspicious. Privacy International predicts that the masses of data being demanded will in fact enable the AI tools necessary to implement automated decision making and calls the proposals “disproportionate for “a family’s visit to Disney World”,
One of the problems Hasbrouck highlights while opposing this level of suspicionless data collection is that CBP has not provided any way for would-be respondents to the Federal Register notice to examine the app’s source code. What other data might it be collecting?
As Hasbrouck adds in a follow-up, the rules the US imposes on visitors are often adopted by other countries as requirements for US travelers. In this game of ping-pong escalation, no one wins.