“This is a big ethical question for robots that are specifically designed to be lovable, marketed to children who may form deep emotional bonds with them.”
Embodied sold Moxie as a therapy companion for kids who struggle socially, built and marketed specifically to create emotional attachment. Then the company ran out of money, the servers went dark, and every kid who’d bonded with the robot got a death with no warning and no explanation. A device engineered to be loved has no business running on a startup’s cash runway. That was always the failure mode, not a surprise ending.