Technology never ceases to amaze me. Enter the latest addition to our household – the Roomba.
After a lifelong love/hate relationship with vacuuming (I love clean floors, don’t really care for vacuuming), this big puck will autonomously crawl the floor, ridding my world of cat hair, crumbs and dust bunnies. All for 140$. And it does a great job.
Owning a Roomba to me is a momentous occasion; because it essentially is the first real “robot” I have ever owned… …or is it? Humans have been relying on machines to do their dirty work now for at least the last century. I, like everyone else, have devices that do my dirty bidding – the laundry, recording my fave TV show, brewing me some coffee. What makes this little vacuum robot feel so different from the rest of them? I think it is the fact that it makes decisions with no input from the user.
When I first brought the unit home from the store, I let it do its mandatory 16hr charge, and then the next morning, (like a kid on Christmas morning), I tore out of bed to go and give it a try. After unplugging the AC adapter (I got the cheap one without the docking base), I hit “clean”, stood back and watched with awe. Roomba crawled through the room, bumping things and taking different paths, spinning, cleaning and calculating (and occasionally scaring the cats). After watching for almost a half an hour, I was quite impressed with the results.
While watching it go back and forth, I realized that it appeared to be making decisions. It would go in a straight line then bump a wall. “Oh I better turn around, can’t go past here” - or it would decide “Hey this is an edge, why don’t I crawl along it and pick up some dust bunnies?”. On and on it went. “Oh this is a staircase, better stay away” –or- “this seems dirtier than that other area I was just in, I’m going to go over this a few more times”. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that this is just a series of algorithms that it is using that tell it what to do, based upon the feedback it receives from its sensors – but it seems more than that to me.
I use many devices to accomplish many things, usually they require minimal input from me, but they repeat the same set of commands over and over again, usually with little to no intervention. The devices don’t seem “intuitive” at all – they don’t usually compensate for changes in the environment when they occur. For example – if my food is burning, the oven won’t recognize this and shut off (even if it is on fire – lol!), or if my laptop is overheating, it doesn’t go after the program that is maxing out the CPU to try and slow it down.
We are entering an era of devices that are “situationally aware”, where they are able to make decisions for us, more and more, based upon current conditions, and adapt. Is it artificial intelligence or just fuzzy logic? We have devices that can teach themselves, we have vehicles that can park themselves, vacuums that can clean rooms without human supervision or intervention. It makes for pretty interesting times, and I am really excited for what is coming next.
On a more humanistic side of these technological musings, I can’t help but to meander down a little bit of more of an existential path – but that is a whole other blog entry. Meanwhile, without getting too deep – I’m just going to enjoy the fact I get to vacuum less now – Saaaaaaa-weeeett!
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