The latest fad in home gadgetry is touted as a "personal robot", but it's not a device that can do something useful like sweeping the floor or washing the dishes. It's more like an annoying smartphone app designed to snoop on your personal habits, listen to your conversations, and take photos whenever it wants to. Here are a couple of examples:

"It’s a new chapter in your relationship with technology... Not just recognizing your face, it knows your mood. Not just understanding what you say, it knows what you really mean. It learns and gets smarter every day... Your ultimate personal assistant! Buy you dinners and automatically track your calories. Call you a cab as soon as you leave your office. Take a picture immediately when you pose. Play the song you love, just when you’re in the mood for it... Your robot will instantly connect to all your connected devices: appliances, smart phones, fitness trackers, door locks, switches, outlets and thermostats..."

-- See video: RobotBase Personal Robot

"Two hi-res cameras recognize and track faces, capture photos... 360° microphones and natural language processing let you talk to Jibo from anywhere in the room... Artificial Intelligence algorithms learn your preferences to adapt and fit into your life..."

-- See video: MyJibo Family Robot

Along similar lines, here's a promo for the "Alpha-2" robot, a recent model from China that's billed as "part of the family", and the Zenbo "smart companion" from ASUS in Taiwan. But toy robots are not the only data collectors.

"Luna’s new device fits around the mattress like a cover, and monitors when those sleeping on it are asleep. When it senses that they are, it can power down lights or change heating settings. And when it detects that they’re waking back up, it can start brewing coffee or turn the lights back on...the most exciting part is our interaction with 'smart' home devices... Data is stored on the smart mattress cover itself, and then sent to Luna for storage and analysis."

-- See video: Luna Smart Mattress

Here's another concept directly from Amazon, along with its massive financial, technical and marketing support:

"Echo connects to Alexa, a cloud-based voice service, to provide information, answer questions, play music, read the news, check sports scores or the weather, and more—instantly. All you have to do is ask. With seven microphones and beam-forming technology, Echo can hear you from across the room... Alexa—the brain behind Echo—is built in 'the cloud', so it is always getting smarter. The more you use Echo, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences. And because Echo is always connected, updates are delivered automatically."

-- See video: Amazon Echo

This one is specifically targeted at young girls, trading on the venerable Barbie brand name. But don't worry, it's marketed by Mattel, one of the "world's most ethical" mega corporations. Tech partner ToyTalk is the producer of the interactive "Winston Show" game, which also provides a "magical new dimension" for Orwellian data collection.

"So how does 'Hello Barbie' do her magic? The Wi-Fi-connected doll uses an embedded microphone to record children's voices, conversations are then transmitted over the Internet to cloud servers. Mattel’s technology partner ToyTalk processes the audio with voice-recognition software. Mattel says it will use this information to "push data" back to children through Barbie's built-in speaker... In Mattel's demo, Barbie asks many questions that would elicit a great deal of information about a child, her interests, and her family... Over time, the toy conglomerate’s stated goal is to have the child and Barbie "become like the best of friends."

-- Hello Barbie

(see also tear down of Hello Barbie by security experts)

Note that MIT engineers have demonstrated the human tendency to "fully trust" these gadgets, which will only increase their effectiveness:

"It didn’t take long for us to discover that people were engaging with the robots on a level I never would have expected... What people were revealing to the 'BlabDroids' included very personal stories and things that you would not normally tell a stranger... Not only were people fully trusting them, they were connecting on a social level...usually reserved for other people they trusted... How personal and “real” do we want these robots to be? At what point does a robot designed to trigger our emotions [and record our responses] become manipulative? "

-- Alexander Reben article

While these are prototypes, the trend is clear. Devices like these will soon become as pervasive as the so-called "smart" phone, and even harder to turn off. Watch the creepy marketing videos, then imagine how useful these home spybots will be for the central planners of the total surveillance state. Your artificial "friend" will follow you everywhere you go, constantly online, collecting and sharing what it "learns" with anyone who has access. It's the next step in scientific herd management, which is poised for a quantum leap.

"Google boss Eric Schmidt predicted the internet will soon be so pervasive in every facet of our lives that it will effectively "disappear" into the background. Speaking to the business and political elite at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Schmidt said: "There will be so many sensors, so many devices, that you won't even sense it, it will be all around you. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room and... you are interacting with all the things going on in that room."

-- Canberra Times

"It becomes increasingly important to utilise resources efficiently; labour, land, cattle and environmental resources. There is technology available that makes it possible for professional farmers to measure, manage and optimise the performance of each individual animal in the key areas of feeding, health care and reproduction... But in too many cases there is a deviation between what was planned and what was actually consumed... The bio model is integrated with the herd management system, and it raises red flags when there is a risk... This is all done automatically, online, in real time..."

-- Herd management

Now combine this continuous real-time monitoring of each "human resource" with the advent of the HAL 9000 / Skynet artificial intelligence system currently being developed. It's already self-replicating and widely distributed; once it becomes adept at self-programming it will evolve with lightning speed. All other "smart" devices will become mere appendages.

"Today's Watson [AI system] is very different...spread across a cloud of open-standard servers that run several hundred “instances” of the AI at once... Watson is served to simultaneous customers anywhere in the world, who can access it using their phones, their desktops, or their own data servers... Because AI improves as people use it, Watson is always getting smarter; anything it learns in one instance can be immediately transferred to the others. And instead of one single program, it's an aggregation of diverse software engines...different code, on different chips, in different locations -- all cleverly integrated into a unified stream of intelligence."

-- Kevin Kelly article

The founders of Google have said that developing an AI system "like the mind of God" has been their intention since the beginning. Ray Kurzweil, the outspoken proponent of "transhumanism" and now a research director at Google, thinks it's marvellous. Tech pioneer Elon Musk has warned that the forces behind DARPA, NSA, IBM, Google, Microsoft, et al are instead "summoning the demon" with this technology. Should the dark minds who brought the world hydrogen bombs and "predator drones" be trusted to manage the development? Are they building another ill-conceived "Doomsday Machine"?

"Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has described artificial intelligence as a “demon” and the “biggest existential threat there is”, in his latest dramatic statement about technology:

"I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon... Hopefully we're not just the 'biological boot loader' for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.”

The ethical issues around AI were highlighted earlier this year when Google bought the British start-up DeepMind for $400 million...That purchase came just months after it bought Boston Dynamics, a firm that produces lifelike military robots".

-- London Independent

Speaking of the Terminator, here's a video of the latest (2016) Boston Dynamics ATLAS robot, which is now battery powered and capable of autonomous action. Now add the all-terrain, four-legged SPOT robot, and throw in a couple of hovering camera drones. They are promoted for other applications, but won't they make an ideal military fireteam whenever "Watson" decides to reach out and touch someone?

UPDATE: Investigator Nafeez Ahmed has written a detailed report on the how the military-intelligence-financial complex spawned and guided tech startups like Google and Facebook specifically for the purpose of "Total Information Awareness" and herd management.

"In 1999, the CIA created its own venture capital investment firm, In-Q-Tel, to fund promising start-ups that might create technologies useful for intelligence agencies. But the inspiration for In-Q-Tel came earlier, when the Pentagon set up its own private sector outfit. Known as the Highlands Forum, this private network has operated as a bridge between the Pentagon and powerful American elites outside the military... In 1994 , the same year the Highlands Forum was founded...two young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service... Throughout the 1990s, DARPA’s funding to Stanford, including Google, was explicitly about developing technologies that could augment the Pentagon’s military intelligence operations..."

-- Nafeez Ahmed article, part 1 and part 2

UPDATE: Author Jon Rappoport describes the deployment of Facebook and its role in the propaganda matrix:

"With these CIA/DARPA connections, it’s no surprise that Jim Breyer’s jackpot investment in Facebook is not part of the popular mythology of Mark Zuckerberg. Better to omit it. Who could fail to realize that Facebook, with its endless stream of personal data, and its tracking capability, is an ideal CIA asset?... When Zuckerberg founded an interesting little social network at Harvard, and then sought to turn it into a business, the data-mining possibilities were obvious to CIA personnel. Through their cutouts, as described above, they stepped in and lent a helping hand."

-- Jon Rappoport article

UPDATE: Author Daniel Taylor expands on the topic, and its implications for humanity:

"Facebook users are in fact helping to create artificial intelligence systems when they share their information online. These self learning systems are expanding every day as more information is posted. Your Facebook pictures, status, likes and other information is being sifted through by AI computers that are constantly learning... Choosing to be disconnected may be considered suspicious behaviour..."

-- Daniel Taylor article