Security alert

After a seriously craptastic day yesterday, when I pulled out my mobile to check Twitter on the last third of my ride home, here’s what caught my attention:

Because—even with the March of Progress, whose first harbinger was Roomba—this is not something we see every day.

Naturally one’s first thought upon seeing a robot in the shallow end of the cement pond, with two uniformed guys in Wellies gazing upon the lifeless corpse, is that this is some kind of stunt. But it turns out that this is truly a security robot—made by a company called Knightscope, whose business model is RaaS: Robots-as-a-Service—lying amidst the pennies and nickels of some fine local atrium’s water feature.

Not six months ago, when that story was written, Knightscope was ticking over, touting its product on the job at Microsoft, the Kings Arena, and a Santa Clara Mall. I’ve been to the latter, and there’s no water feature, so the robots apparently weren’t tested under a range of situations.

Oopsie.

Well, the Twitter thread that followed the original post is certainly worth a read. At time of writing, Knightscope had not chimed in. But there was this:

Listen—after three hours of Cigna (including someone from their social media team wanting me to give him/her my DoB, SSN and account number so s/he could access my account to give me a list of providers that are actually really in-network for purposes of having costs reimbursed, and not in-network in name only; which—if their damned website didn’t throw nothing but error messages, I could have found on my own. Not that I trust anything coming from that outfit at this point), I was ready to join the little guy in the drink.

Actually—a drink sounds pretty good right now.