I recently found one of these babies at a friends place this past week.
Its called the iRobot Roombe and it cleans your floor, and afterwards goes back to its docking station. This may seem like “so what? ” to some people, but this blew my mind. Are we that far off from technological wonderland that was the 80′s cartoon, the Jetsons? When can I have robot cleaning lady who takes away my dirty dishes and puts in the washer? Hopefully by the end of this decade. Or is this convenience just another reason to be more lazy? I don’t think so.
We should embrace robots to do the things we don’t want to do, like cleaning our floors, so we can have more leisure time. This is the reason why we have cars, instead of riding horses, why they invented airplanes instead of ships to travel long distances. I patiently await the supersonic Maglev trains of the future. Imagine Tokyo to London in 3.5 hours.
Hollywood does an amazing job of portraying a Terminator 2 type future. A doomsday scenario where we will all be enslaved by robots. There is some merit to that. Aren’t we already to our cellphones? I’ve seen it countless times at restaurants, two people at a table busy texting to someone (maybe to one another, who knows) for up to 10 mins, instead of chatting to one another. Remember the film Wall-E? We become fat asses and just press buttons, that this eventual artificial world will separate us from nature. That is true if its used that way. The end of the movie showed that technology properly used will help humans cultivate their true nature – that it must be subordinate to human progress, and help move that along.
