Oak Forest - The Archive: press release for The Physics of Privacy by Gabriel Dean Roberts.

In his second feature on Roberts’s work, writer and photographer Peter Koloff visits the studio where MARS is being assembled, and describes a project approached the way an artist approaches a life’s work - with code, cameras, language models, screens, and eventually robotic bodies as the materials.

“Privacy is the starting condition; continuity is the destination.”

The piece follows the work from Acorn Mobile to a sovereign household intelligence whose conversational mind now runs on private hardware inside the home, and takes seriously the question the Robotics Guardian Standard exists to answer: whom does a machine in the home serve, and what must it be structurally forbidden to do - not only for the person who paid, but for everyone it can see.

Gabriel Dean Roberts - roboticist, artist, and founder of Oak Forest Robotics - has published The Physics of Privacy: The Case for Autonomy in the Age of Digital Totalitarianism. The book reframes the defining question of the AI era: not whether we can trust the companies watching us, but whether we can build a world in which they physically cannot.

“Privacy isn’t a policy we lost. It’s physics we can rebuild - enforced by architecture rather than promises.”

At its center is a term Roberts introduces to the field: estate intelligence - a sovereign, on-premises class of artificial intelligence that serves a household privately, running on the owner’s own hardware, with nothing leaving the home.

Roberts holds a Master of Interdisciplinary Arts from the University of Washington, studied business through Harvard Business School Online, and has completed advanced robotics coursework at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. His art and photography have appeared in Vogue and VICE and been exhibited at MoMA PS1.

The Physics of Privacy is available now on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover editions.

Oak Forest Robotics has published The Robotics Guardian Standard, a conformance framework and public pledge for safety, privacy, and human dignity in home robots and ambient artificial intelligence. It is, the company believes, the first standard written for robotic guardianship in a private residence.

“The danger of a home robot is not that it senses. Your phone senses you all day for the seller’s benefit. The danger is the direction.”

The framework sets out eight design dimensions, among them individual sovereignty over a person’s own data, a fidelity floor so the machine cannot be turned against a family member at the owner’s instruction, and a structural incapacity to capture or store intimate imagery of people in the home. Each is grounded in law that already exists across the United States and the European Union. Makers rate themselves on every dimension, and the headline score is the lowest of the eight, so a company cannot advertise its best feature while hiding its worst.

The pledge, the registry listing, and the seal are free. Oak Forest holds itself to the same ruler in public, scored at Level 1.

The First Edition is published under Oak Forest Robotics Press and deposited for permanent citation at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21538862.