Does LG dream of electric sheep? The Self-driving AI Home Hub is an adorable nightmare

AI-powered robots are nothing new – there’s usually at least a couple of them rattling around every tech show – but 2024 is the year that generative AI really took off, which does make this particular robot a little more interesting.

The LG Self-driving AI Home Hub (a cutesy, child-friendly shelf name presumably yet to be decided upon) was shown as part of the South Korean tech giant’s IFA 2024 showcase. While it was far from the only piece of tech on display – including some other interesting approaches to AI – the Self-driving Home Hub stood out to me, simultaneously as one of the more unique products at the showcase, and one of the most sinister.

Before we get into what exactly sent a chill down my spine, let’s back up for a moment and talk about what this thing even looks like. As we’ve seen with just about every other brand’s swing at a robot assistant, the LG Self-driving AI Home Hub (they really need a shorter name) is primarily composed of white plastic, with sporadic black accents giving it a suitably futuristic aesthetic.

The main body is a widened sphere, roughly the size of a cantaloupe – or, at a guess, around a foot wide in old money. Front and centre on the body is a pill-shaped display that serves as the robot’s “face”. Shown on here are two simple circles for its eyes, as well as a third, smaller, circle just below the left eye. The function of that circle is currently unclear.

When interacted with, the robot’s eyes will change in accordance with the context of the conversation; thank it, for instance, and the blue-white circles are replaced with pinky-red hearts as it tells you that you’re welcome in a chirpy, high-pitched voice. It’s cute enough for purpose, in a mildly ghoulish, uncanny valley kind of way.

The cantaloupe body sits on two squat legs, with thin struts coated with a ridged rubber material meeting more of the white plastic, moulded into two sturdy wheels that look like they could have come off of an office chair. Finally, two circular panels sit on either end of the main body, extending above into something resembling a carry handle – either that or the design team was aiming for a tall headphone aesthetic.

The demonstration initially showed the LG Self-driving AI Home Hub to be not all that far from any other smart home system; ask it to initiate sleep mode, for instance, and it can dim the lights and activate other routines, such as LED star lights. So far, not much need for it to be rolling around of its own volition.

The rest of the showcase didn’t demonstrate why exactly the robot needs to be mobile either but, after showing it at CES earlier this year, LG did clarify that the robot includes a patrol mode, in which it can roll around your house when it’s home alone and send you reports on the status of each room. That already feels weird to me but by the end of the showcase, it was the least of my concerns.

That’s because the Self-driving AI Home Hub is designed with much more in mind than simply home management and letting the laziest of us avoid getting out of bed to turn off the lights.

A good chunk of the demonstration focused on the ways in which the Self-driving AI Home Hub can tag in to help parent your children, and this is where both my interest and my reservations emerged. Smart assistants like Alexa can already tell your kids jokes and play games and such, so how does generative AI take things to the next level? The answer is a blend of image analysis and large language models, the result of which is both impressive and concerning.

In short, the robot can use the cameras beneath its eyes to analyse a drawing that your child has made – let’s say for the sake of example, a drawing of three young geese playing poker in an old wishing well, normal kids stuff – and then create a story around what it sees. It can spin a yarn to your child about how those geese came to be playing poker in that well, who’s winning and what happens when the other goslings find out that Ryan was cheating the whole time.

That might be a little convoluted for a kids’ story but as with other language models, I expect that you would be able to interject and make suggestions that the AI can then build on. If you want just a plain old story, or your kid is just really awful at drawing geese, you can also show the robot a book and ask it to read the story aloud. It won’t actually read off the page but rather find the story online and read out from that.

The example shown was Anne of Green Gables, so I’d imagine that this party trick only works with books that are out of copyright – so no robots will be reading the latest Gillian Flynn thriller for your kids’ bedtime story, unfortunately.

The technology was undeniably impressive, merging image recognition with story generation to bring a child’s imagination even further to life is a wonderful idea. It just really rubs me the wrong way that this example child is having that experience with a hunk of plastic and wires, rather than a parent or other human in their life.

And this is where the dystopian chills start to set in. I have enough of a problem with AI creeping into every corner of technology but, while most smart home applications are at least useful enough to warrant giving the option to people, the idea of robots taking over child rearing is a deeply unsettling one. People are concerned enough about screen time as it is, and the answer is not to empower the screens with more functionality that eat further into the unique role of the parent or caregiver.

I don’t begrudge any tired parent a night off from storytelling, of course, but this feels – to me, at least – like another nail in the capitalist coffin, pushing us further towards a status quo in which people have neither the time nor the energy to spend precious moments with their children but hey, here’s a soulless product that can pick up the slack.

I have misgivings with most AI-focused announcements, and I still don’t know exactly what direction I want to see the format go. I just know that this is not it, cute as it may be.