We have a robot in our house. A domestic robot. It’s very hard-working, but there are some flip sides to having an electronic slave.
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This is no Rosie The Robot from The Jetsons. It’s an iRobot which, set loose, wanders around the house, humming quietly to itself, cleaning the floors.
It can get into all the bits and places we humans don’t think to look and when its powerful battery starts to run low, it just toodles off to its sleeping dock, backs onto the charger and has a little snooze until its ready to go again.
It’s very clever and surprisingly entertaining.
The corgis hate it.
It is alien and scuttles around the house, seemingly bossing them about, making them move again and again.
Mind you, it doesn’t help when we thought it’d be fun to sit a stuffed toy corgi on top of it and laugh ourselves sick while it glided all over the place. The live corgis thought this was just an outrage and disappeared out the back to herd the cats.
On the internet, there’s a much-watched clip of an iRobot going round and round in a kitchen while a cat sits on top of it. A cat in a shark suit.
It is the corgis’ own fault. How can a dog the size of a shoe box shed enough hair to fill a shipping container? The iRobot has found enough to knit a circus tent. It loves it.
I mentioned flip sides. Our little robot has exposed us to the world of international spying and electronic warfare, apparently.
It was recently revealed that America’s National Security Agency could use an astonishing range of household things to gather data on us. These include your Smart TV, your computers, your mobile phones (Always mistrusted those little buggers. I reckon they whisper among themselves in the dead of night.), and even fridges, lights, anything with a remote control … and robotic cleaners.
Samsung even warned consumers not to discuss sensitive stuff in front of its latest TV, as it was listening and could pass on that information to third parties! We keep our voices down when the iRobot is nearby just in case. You never know what ASIO might make of conversations about what we need at the supermarket and whether the chooks have been fed yet.
TV sports presenter Mark Berretta commented on appliances being used to steal our privacy, remarking that he had an old Ab-Circle Pro that he was worried about.
Robotics has seriously interested me since I was a kid and began reading the works of Russian-born US science fiction writer, Professor Isaac Asimov. But in his imagined worlds, robots were usually humanoid, not shaped like little flying saucers.
In fact, one of Asimov’s most famous works was a series of nine stories I, Robot. My knowledge of this work leads me to be relaxed about the potentially dark ways of our little iRobot.
Asimov spent a lot of time thinking about the ethics of robots and he set down the three principles of robotics. These principles now genuinely guide robot design.
“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”
However, it says nothing about harming corgis.
WAYNE GREGSON