Tech corporations are sure that you really want a private robotic to your dwelling, regardless of all proof on the contrary. Amazon is giving it a shot with a bot named Astro who lastly solutions the query: “What if Wall-E were real, evil, and knew how to beatbox?”

Astro is a tiny dwelling assistant robotic that Amazon executives menacingly described through the occasion as “our first robot, not our last,” which is sensible, provided that this factor is so small and has so little utility that we possible nonetheless have not less than three or 4 more and more sinister iterations to go till we arrive on the cyborg assassins from Terminator.

At its most important, Astro capabilities like some other dwelling assistant would: With built-in Alexa, it could play music, inform you the climate, and reply random questions, with the added capability to scoot round your home on wheels, memorizing its ground plan, your loved ones’s faces, and the rooms the place your kids sleep. It can transfer at as much as one meter per second, and makes use of SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) expertise to select its approach across the contours of a room in order that it’s not tripping down your stairs or over your canine. Astro additionally has a periscope arm with a digital camera that it could elevate up out of the highest of its head so to do issues like verify to just be sure you turned the range off earlier than you left the home. Also, it could beatbox.

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Much fanfare has already been made in the blogosphere about the device’s wide, soulless eyes and the “personality” its creators have imbued it with, and Amazon itself has claimed that the device is capable of evoking human emotions like empathy when people use it. But the fact that Astro has eyebrows (which is what I’m guessing empathy means, in this scenario?) is not enough to offset the threat to privacy that an ever-expanding network of home security devices capable of consorting directly with the police poses to consumers. Just like its other Alexa devices, Amazon has designed Astro to become smarter and more capable over time—which means that people are about to start buying 20-pound robot servants for their homes that can recognize their faces, learn their habits, and even use third-party accessories to take their blood pressure.

Seriously, has no one seen a movie before? Like, ever?

Astro also comes with a microphone and camera kill switch that customers can press whenever they want to disable the device from recording or scurrying around like a little narc butler, which is I guess supposed to be enough to allay every single one of the hundreds of privacy concerns this thing raises.

Astro is coming to market later this yr for $1,500, however members of Amazon’s Day 1 Editions program will be capable of snag it for an introductory value of $1,000 with a 6-month trial of the Ring Protect Pro subscription thrown in. What a steal.