Last year, Jibo—“the world's first social robot for the home”—began to lose its mind. First came memory problems. The bot started to spend less time swiveling its head like the animated Pixar lamp and more time staring blankly at the wall. Its cognitive demise was slow, then fast. At one point, Jibo itself delivered the fatal diagnosis: “The servers out there that let me do what I do will be turned off soon,” it said in its computerized voice.

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