CHARLES WOOLEY
The arrival of a robotic vacuum cleaner prompts questions about the future of humanity
Ideally a column needs a good opening line to grab the reader. How about this one from my wife Donna when I arrived home from a fishing trip: “Charlie, I want you to meet my lover.”
She beamed as she pointed to a flying saucer-shaped object 7cm high by 30cm in diameter whizzing around the floor of the living room. “Well, at least I love him,” she said. “When I want, he works all day without any complaints or dramas, and when he’s finished he puts himself away and I don’t have to hear from him or bother about him until the next time I put him to work. He is the ideal house-husband. That’s why I love him so much.”
I remember a long time ago when Donna gazed as fondly on me as she now does upon this interloping piece of sci-fi technology.
“Women, what is it they want?” Dr Freud once mused after a lifetime of pioneering sexual psychology. Well Sigmund, it’s taken me a long time too, but now I think I know. I reckon Mrs Freud, just like my wife, would have been delighted with the handy “iRobot 600 Series Vacuum Cleaning Robot”.
And why not. “Lover Boy” (hereafter known as LB) is certainly a piece of work.
A side brush under his rounded cowling sweeps along the edge of walls and into corners. Two “counter-rotating brushes” scoop up dirt, hair, dust and other debris into an internal bin, while a powerful vacuum sucks up the remaining particles “leaving the floor spotless”. If this reads like promotion material that’s because I studied the owner’s manual to understand how this gadget works its wonders. And wonders they certainly are. The floors up on High Dudgeon have never been so tidy.
Unlike my own desultory attempts at cleaning, LB works equally on all surfaces – wood, vinyl, carpet, tiles, whatever – moving without complaint from one medium to the other. I must confess my initial jealous hostility has very quickly turned into a man-crush. Especially after I realised I couldn’t kill him. He is indestructible. I nudged him in the direction of the staircase, towards which he rushed at high speed like a robotic lemming.
“So much for you LB,” I whispered, cruelly. “Man triumphs over machine!”
But on the very edge of the cliff, he abruptly stopped, turned around and went off cleaning in a different direction. He won’t clean the stairs, but nor will he fall down them.
This future-shock only occurred after Donna saw her doctor about a sore back. She was advised to do no more vacuuming and as little bending as possible. The doctor, hopelessly out of touch with mainstream Australia (as people so often are down in Lower Sandy Bay), assumed one of the men of the house would step up. Which is how a deeply cynical Donna came to purchase the iRobot, taking High Dudgeon into the 21st century.
I was a little surprised to learn that LB cost a touch over $500. But he does come with a 12-month warranty and Donna reminded me that a cleaning ‘person’ would cost $100 for just a few hours.
I have to admit LB is good value, but like most blokes he’s a one-trick wonder. He doesn’t mop floors, but for another $600 his brother, the iRobot Braava 380T Floor Mopping Robot, will perform that task.
Perhaps I watched too many Terminator movies but I retain the same niggling fears the Liberals have of illegal immigrants – you let one of these buggers in and there will be no stopping them. They will take over.
I mean, do you seriously think these fiendish machines will be content to do only menial jobs like cleaning, accounting and maybe journalism? Or will they want to run the show? I’m with Stephen Hawking who suspects the latter. Hawking, always the smartest guy in the room, has warned that: “We cannot know whether we will be infinitely helped by AI or ignored by it and sidelined, or, conceivably, destroyed by it.”
While artificial intelligence is a hotly contested matter in the academic scientific world, in the real world the debate is meaningless with delivery drones and driverless cars already at work. The practical science is way ahead of the ethics. Robotic manufacturing plants are now producing cars and whitegoods, and robots will soon replace humans in all mass-production jobs. As Hawking has warned, in no time robots will be designing and building smarter robots, and so on ad infinitum. Then where do we fit in?
Still, for the present, all seems well at my place where the robot has revolutionised the tedious work of housekeeping.
There’s just one thing that still bothers me. While I love his work, I’m not sure I like the way LB looks at my wife. I’m sure it was probably just an accident, but the other day he almost pushed me down the stairs. Meanwhile, I do have a growing concern about the strange noises coming from the vegetable plot. It’s the ‘iBandicoot Don Burke Gardening Robot’ and I definitely don’t like the way it looks at my wife.