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Aye, Robot

I didn’t get to Friday’s question on Friday because, well, I’ll write about that in my next post. For now, I’ll turn to the question, which is one of my own:

Imagine that you had a robot custom-built for your home, but one of limited abilities. It is, after all, one of the first domestic bots ever built. Which five tasks, chores, or jobs would you have it configured for, if it were limited to five specific tasks?

I’m assuming I’m living in an apartment basically like my own, though maybe a little bigger and with a separate room for sleeping.

Thinking about my choices, it turns out that all of this is the kind of thing that people have, in the past, been willing and happy to pay for. I suppose if the economic situation were different I might even be willing to do so myself, though it would feel weird. My limited experience with household service (at Ritu’s place) was kind of a bewildered one, as I’d never been somewhere where washing my dishes (something I have in the past regarded as my job as a guest of more than one day) involves depriving someone else of his work. I suppose I might feel different knowing it was a robot washing my dishes, but I’m not completely sure I wouldn’t anthropomorphize it somewhat.

If I got a bonus task, I’d have the robot set up to check my hard drive and burn off the contents onto backup CDs periodically, deleting the contents of ephemeral files (like downloaded media) while it was at it. I’m terrible at keeping up with tasks like that, and having a machine do it for me automatically would be a real boon.

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