My family’s cat is a current sufficient transplant from Dublin. He enjoys exploring the grounds and roasting himself up in front of the burner quite well in the countryside. In his first months of living in his new home, he showed his appreciation by bringing home a dozen “gifts,” such as the remains of a little rabbit and a glassy-eyed keyboard. Roger’s cat flap simply enables him to enter the car, so neither offering ever made it into the home. But, a friend just had a bad luck when her two young cats accidentally brought a winged friend and a little rat into the kitchen. As the cats sat up and observed how unappreciative their mortal peons were, chaos broke out.
A brand-new machine has the potential to have prevented the circumstance. A European start-up company created a rabbit cover that uses AI to identify your cat’s mouth and determine whether it has any prey in its mouth. If so, the flap won’t let you in until it comes back empty-handed. Finally, a use for AI that doesn’t involve taking our jobs or miring us in ethical concerns, unless the cat is particularly fussy about privacy and its digital pawprint.
As a blogger, new buzz around AI has been disconcerting. One of the simplest ways to demonstrate how relational artificial intelligence functions is by using a system to create artwork or text. It’s tempting to panic about how rapidly millions of jobs could be replaced because tech is moving so quickly. Yes, AI may provide advancements in medicine, always needs a day off and is accurate and useful. But, it lacks imagination and emotion, comes with unlimited social concerns, and encourages more and more over-reliance on technology. Despite my fears, I would still prefer to be “all watched over by models of caring grace” as long as I could use a machine to carry out the laundry.
Where are the robots who can figure out the meals for the week, find the best deals at the mall, and then come home to clean the bathroom and dust the leaves of the subsidiary grow? It’s all well and good, showing how AI you write a guide in the vein of Lord of the Rings or make a “deepfake” picture of Simon Harris perfecting a hip-hop TikTok party.
It may never be possible to own a robot that can handle the intricacies of housework because of the human input required by AI.
Only the humans who created artificial intelligence are as awful.
I recently took a trip to my childhood home to watch as the robotic lawnmower trundled around the front garden while laughing. It spends the entire day going out and back to its charging station before eventually capturing every patch of grass and maintaining it at an even level. While on holidays my mother checked in regularly, not only on Roger but also on Gladys, the robot lawnmower. “She got stuck under the hedge”, I replied. Her bumper was encircled by some discarded slates, and she needed to be saved. Before reminding myself that she’s a machine that doesn’t feel the cold and that a Four in the Bed omnibus is about to debut on the television, I felt quite sorry for her out there under the hedge in the rain.
Gladys navigates the garden using a guide wire along the perimeter. Essentially, she’s a basic bitch. Existing lawnmowers are being produced by companies that use AI to identify areas of grass that require mowing without the use of boundaries or wires. According to one US-based company called Electric Sheep, its mowers cut grass using “common sense” to cut grass. What the robots are actually using is information that humans have inputted to analyze their surroundings and make decisions accordingly.
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It may never be feasible to own a robot that can handle the technicalities of housework due to the human input required by AI. Cleaning may seem like a tedious and mind-numbing task, but it actually requires a lot of physical and mental exertion. When we’re cleaning, we’re constantly checking and readjusting and resourcing. If we don’t create a way to make them dangerously sentient, is the ultimate robot house servant out of reach?
I do have a robot in my home that thrills me. My little robot hoover travels a lot like Gladys, picking up dust and dirt at a mediocre rate and only getting stuck about every six minutes. I enjoy simply watching it bumbling around and leaping up to divert it from cables and rug edges, so whether or not it makes a difference. I’d rather it could hang out in the clothes and defrost the freezer, but I’ll draw the line when I ask to have it write my next book.
