Karli brought the Roomba home today! It's a well-behaved early Model 800 Series, apparently too early in the product line for wifi access, but otherwise in excellent shape.
Ah, but I felt so bad the first time we pressed the CLEAN button! I'd put the charger in a quiet corner beside the wall unit in our dining area, and the poor thing was just confused - the table was right there, and the dining chairs, and Karli's mother had warned her that it got a little confused by things like that.
It got frightened
and hid under Karli's white chair, the one with the little fabric skirt,
but then it got caught on the cord for the Christmas tree lights - it
was SO SAD. So tomorrow night we're going to let it start in the
hallway, where it's nice and straight...hopefully that will makes things easier.
Jaq the Cat, who suffers a bit from PTSD for whatever reason, was surprisingly calm, although a little suspicious - I don't think he's going to be one of those cats that becomes internet famous by riding around on our new robot.
As you can see from the above, it's ridiculously easy to anthropomorphize Stabby* the Roomba as it trundles around the living room in an apparently random fashion, going back and forth in something rather like the pattern that a vacuuming human would use. Karli has suggested that we should get stick-on googly eyes for it, which I think is the best plan ever.
However, as with Opportunity, the defunct exploratory Martian rover, it seems like a bad idea to give robots like Stabby artificial intelligence. In the case of Opportunity, it was due to the danger of its task - in the case of Stabby, it's the opposite: boredom.
Stabby doesn't need to be able to calculate rocket trajectories or write Oscar-winning movie scripts, in fact, it would seem cruel to make Stabby too smart. Ultimately, if it were possible to give Stabby some level of AI, it would make sense to make him about as smart as Jaq, and with similar interests: taking pleasure in long naps, and deriving much excitement and enjoyment from chasing little pieces of dust around the apartment. But no purring - Jaq needs something to maintain his unique status, and Stabby will never be quite as cuddly as our little feline friend.
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