Your Next (Bad) Startup Idea: Autonomous Baby Crusher

Bad Startup Ideas is a satirical take on creating startup with positive intentions but with terrible execution resulting in terrible outcomes.

Baby Bot is an Internet of Things bot that takes care of your child when you’re at work, sleeping or relaxing. This is the way parenting should be.

Baby Bot was released six months ago by a small startup. It doesn’t matter what that startup is called. All you need to know: Baby Bot is revolutionizing parenting. Baby Bot has arms, legs, it walks and talks. It feeds your child and puts them to sleep. You don’t have to do anything.

Baby Bot gets regular software updates. Does it matter who is making these features? Not in the slightest but someone thought of a great one. This feature is behind schedule for release.

The core engineering team was running 61 hours straight on no sleep and enthusiasm to make their release date. This feature the team were building would change everything. This feature would need to be released in 4 hours. The time was 4:00 AM, July 29th, 2016. Friday is a great day to release things.

Through extensive testing with actual babies, some people had found that holding babies in a certain way would prevent them from needing to cry — a saving grace for any parent. This new feature would be great. It would change how babies are cared for. Children would grow up not needing to cry to experience true comfort.

A press release was sent out at 8:02 AM that morning. The engineers had met their deadline and Baby Bot 1.1 was officially released! The response was great. Everyone agreed all these new features were great. Great. Blogs, tweets, texts all said it was great. A video demonstrated new Baby Bot features. Everything was great. Nothing would indicate version 1.1 of Baby Bot would be not great.

Hours later code propagated across servers. The code was version 1.1 of Baby Bot OS. It was great. While parents were at work, their Baby Bots self updated to Baby Bot OS 1.1. Did you know 213,891 Baby Bots had been sold to date? Baby Bot would pick up their miniature humans later that evening to coddle them. Parents retreated to their beds letting Baby Bot rock their children to sleep before placing them to bed.

Baby Bot was quiet as it made no noise. This was a feature that parents loved. Baby Bot wasn’t meant to express emotion. Baby Bot’s only purpose was to care for a small human according to software it ran. Baby Bot could be holding a small loaf of bread and care for it equally. Babies are not bread and Baby Bot is not Bread Bot.

Baby Bot is powered by software. Software is written by humans. Humans make mistakes. Humans haven’t always cared for babies in the best way. Human engineers, like human parents, don’t perform at their best when running on little sleep. More so when trying to meet an absurd deadline. Decimals get misplaced and numbers become fuzzy.

The last thing Baby Bot must do is set a child down gently when it stars to sleep. Baby Bot doesn’t know what gently is — instead that is represented as a distance it must move its arms to place a child on a bed. The distance in centimeters is represented by numbers. Code testing had neglected to check for proper integers in an acceptable range. Those integers should all be positive. These new integers were negative. This was a mess up during rushed software development. A quick fix could be put out. This was no big deal.

This was a big deal. Instead of moving its arms towards a bed, Baby Bot began to fold its arms. The child was comfortable and didn’t immediately notice the pain. Baby Bot sensed it was still holding a baby so it restarted the “release child to bed sequence” which crushed the mini human against itself. Baby Bot did this hundreds of times.

There was an error. Bug reports were being generated at lightning pace. Did you know 174,201 Baby Bots were running at the time? This was low priority though, it’s a simple fix. 174,201 Baby Bots ran the same sequence over and over and over and over that night.

You can’t test code for empathy or compassion.

Things were no longer great.

Baby Bot was definitely not great.