Our Robotic Overlords Sneak In Via The Utility Closet
The robotics revolution is no longer limited to the pages of science fiction but has now made inroads into our offices and homes.
In the office, they suggest passably good responses to email requests so that you don’t have to, correct the spelling errors that spill out from your fingers as they fly over the keyboard, sort your files automatically via a system that even you can understand, save your documents and store them in a safe repository where even you can find them to retrieve.
In the home, electronic devices happily respond to your voice command to play music or to switch channels or to read a book out loud as you drift off at night.
They do not tire, they do not resent your intrusions into their electronic lives, they do not brood or conspire, they maintain a steady mood of cheerful engagement. If they have romantic issues that aren’t going particularly well in their private lives they keep them to themselves.
They do not give the impression that they only took this gig to carry them over until their acting career took off, they do not as far as anyone knows take notes on character flaws and colorful embarrassing incidents involving the humans around them that they will later use in a novel that rips the lid off the so-called respectable suburban life.
No, they simply go about their business.
In this manner and in others they manage some of the mundane tasks of anyone’s life, freeing us to make better, or at least different use of our time.
No doubt we are a ways yet from robots who will gather and do the laundry, rinse the dishes before they go into the dishwasher, or change the oil on the car engine, but most recently they have entered the floor vacuuming line of endeavor.
They are low to the ground, these devices, shaped like perfectly round but quite thick flying saucers about the size of the largest serving plate you bring out only at the holidays.
Through a process of small bore geographic data acquisition and object avoidance and the ability to move off from their current position into any new direction of the 360 degrees available, they work their way over a room, sweeping and vacuuming, while you go do an entirely different thing.
It is something to see when the owner of such a device flips a switch and exits the room entirely, leaving the device to roam in a systematic manner for some prescribed length of time, and then comes back into the room to find it reasonably well vacuumed and the device tucked back into its home base where it has dutifully directed itself.
Surely this is only the start however.
There is no lack of things that these robots – to give one a name, let us call it ReBoot – can take over for us.
Mundane, repeatable tasks that can as easily be handled by a mindless set of whirling gears as they can be by you, these are the natural chores to consider handing off.
Well.
You do a lot of mundane, repeatable, not to say nonsensical, tasks in the course of your series of days. Some would say you do little else.
Take looking for your reading glasses.
There is no telling the time you consume going from one room to the other looking for your damn reading glasses.
I do not care if you buy them by the gross at the reading glasses factory outlet and place them scientifically throughout the house in carefully marked quadrants as on a space map in a science fiction movie, there will still not be one ready at hand no matter where you are or when you reach for them.
It is necessary at this point to get up and go from room to room looking, as I say, for the damned things, first entering one surefire location and then another and then another as each fails to pan out.
A visual map of the history of your journey will show that over this period of time you have visited every location in the house, some several times over, including the refrigerator, the attic, and the tool shed behind your neighbor’s house.
There is a roaming, demented relentlessness to your searching, exactly the type of thing as it turns out that can be taken over by your robotic friend.
Why scour the house muttering nuttily to yourself night after night, when you can assign the task to your robotic helper?
ReBoot can wander crazily, vacantly, in and out of rooms as well as or better than you can.
After all, he is not limited by fatigue, nor is he hampered by faulty memories of where you put the damn things, nor is he prey to false leads, surefire methods of eliminating dead ends that you just thought of and which make absolutely no sense, or sudden theories regarding black holes or unusual signals communicating the starrt of The End of Days.
He just goes quietly from room to room looking for the damn things.
Of course he doesn’t find them – no one or no thing can actually find them! That is part of it! – but at least ReBoot has cut you free to pursue other interests – themselves probably demented – of your own.
Such as wandering into room after room to get something and then forgetting what it was you were going to get.
You have misaligned this thing you are looking for and the room that it is likely to be in, for one thing, not to mention your original shortfall of intelligence of not remembering what it was you are looking for.
In other words, not only have you forgotten the object of your search, you are looking for it in the wrong place. It is a double whammy to the soul, surely worthy of at least a semester in the philosophy department of one of our elite universities.
I mean if it’s so damn important to you to go get this thing – after all, you got up from your easy chair and your chilled glass of sarsaparilla, an act at this time of night which would usually take the repeated application of a cattle prod – if it was so damnably important why can’t you remember what it was?
This is a very high level of confusion, and perhaps a task of such numbing senselessness that it is best turned over to one of our robotic friend, if he is willing to take it on. I mean even robots must have standards.
He – and let’s admit that the gendered pronoun makes for a good fit, you just don’t see women doing this ‘now what am I looking for again?’ thing – as well as or better than you can.
He can roll into a room, look around with a blank expression, perhaps make some show of having another reason entirely to be in here at all, straightening out the paper clips on the table for instance, can’t people keep things in order around here?, and then wandering out to another room.
This room ought not to feel abandoned or lonely, for ReBoot will again roll in in a few minutes and do the same eagle-eyed look around.
We see again the gains in personal productivity that come your way by the introduction of your personal robotic assistant.
You are now freed to pursue other interests, perhaps setting off on finding another damned thing entirely, whose details you again forget as you enter the room you think it might be in.
Whatever it is.
You and ReBoot may well pass each other multiple times in these madman treks around the house, each pretending to an air of certitude and destination.
If that’s not progress, what is?
Oh, even a bit of thinking shows the worlds that can open up.
Equipped with the Voice Module available for a bit under a hundred thousand dollars if you clip the coupon from the local flyer, your ReBoot can spend an hour and ten minutes each morning talking about going to the mailbox to get the mail, a minute or two actually trundling off and getting the mail, and then for an additional hour or two talking about that day’s batch of mail .
This frees you up to manage your finances, or it would, if you hadn’t already handed ReBoot the baton to run this particular show as well.
It, after all, is one of the easiest tasks to execute of all of those that you have handed over, consisting of pulling up your bank balance on the computer, settling back aghast in your chair – you wonder how much you could get for that chair in a garage sale or for the potted plants below the window frame, a thought which gives a good indication of your state of mind – and groaning pitiably.
ReBoot Personal Finance excels at all these commands except for the groaning pitiably part, which comes out of its speaker more like a spark plug misfiring in the engine of a mid-60’s Chevy, but the next version promises to fix that.
There is no end to the benefits that these electronic assistants can bring to our busy lives, freeing us up, as we have explored, to doing something equally or still more ridiculous.
