MemeMachineGo!

Robots Without a Cause complains about technology for its own sake.

We used to invent things not to satisfy idle whims, but to change our world. The wheel, powered flight, the telephone - these were important developments about which one could get excited. Slippers with headlights (as featured in the doomed Innovations catalogue) and a remote control-operated sliding door for the new Peugeot 807 GLX 2.2 people carrier are not. Yes, you say, but what am I going to do with a kid in one hand and a tray of skinny lattes in the other? How am I going to get into my Peugeot then? And then: how did I manage before? So the fatuous becomes the essential, and we become more decadent, more hungry for diversion and suckered into buying things that will improve our lives negligibly, if at all.

One of its examples is the robot vacuum.

The people at Electrolux have spent the best part of a decade devising the Trilobite, the world’s first automatic vacuum cleaner, packing into it all kinds of ingenuity. […] But why did the clever people at Electrolux spend so much time and brainpower on the Trilobite? “Our intention is to make life easier for people,” says Michael Treschow, Electrolux’s president. “And what could possibly be easier than an automatic vacuum cleaner?”

But they seem to be providing the unexpected benefit of companionship .

More than half the owners of iRobot’s Roomba name their device, claims the Burlington, Massachussetts, company. Owners often talk to their machines, and many treat them as though they were alive, or semi-sentient, anyway. Some even take them on holiday, unwilling to leave them at home alone. “We have people who actually consider them their companion, even though it’s just vacuuming their floor,” said iRobot spokeswoman Nancy Dussault. “People get attached to them and think of them as part of their family. It’s almost a pet. It makes them feel like they’re not alone.”

Well, not unexpected by Peter Rojas of Gizmodo in this article from last September :

It’s easy to say that a robot that cleans is just another appliance, but it’s a mistake to underestimate the emotional attachment that can be made to an animate object.

Now if only there were a machine that could appreciate and care for our robot companions for us…