My robot hoover, like all household appliances, ostensibly exists to save me time.
It was a Christmas gift from a friend, and a thoughtful one at that, given that heaving the conventional hoover out of the press and pushing it around the flat is one of my most loathed tasks. Robot hoover does the work for me.
It sits at a docking station in my livingroom and at my command it trundles around using its little sweeping arms to swish debris into the path of its own vacuum mouth.
The trouble is, it’s not time-saving at all because it turns out that watching robot hoover do its trundling and swishing is actually one of my favourite pastimes. I lose hours to it. She – and I might as well admit now that robot hoover is a she and her name is Helen – is fascinating.
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Helen isn’t a particularly sophisticated model. She doesn’t retain a map of the flat and I can’t limit her to a single area without the use of barriers. Rather she tootles hither and tither, making sure she covers all of her bases.
I love her.
You see headlines on the cover of trashy magazines about men who’ve fallen in love with their lawnmower or women who want to marry a streetlamp. That’s not the kind of relationship I have with Helen. I have, however, anthropomorphised her to the extent that I worry about her, and consider her to have personality quirks.
Helen has a timer but the idea of her operating while I’m not there fills me with anxiety. What if she gets stuck on a cable? What if I haven’t tucked away the tassels on the rug sufficiently and she tries to ingest one, leading to panicked beeping? What if she can’t make her way back to the docking station to recharge? Her sense of direction can become very muddled, particularly if she’s travelled out into the hall or the bedroom.
Instead, I track her every movement, lifting things out of her way and setting her on the correct path if she gets lost. Her favourite place is the kitchen and if I didn’t block the doorless entryway with a chair she’d spend all day in there if she could, sniffing out any stray nuggets of cat litter.
Of course, Helen doesn’t have a nose, or a sense of smell, but I know I’m not alone when it comes to treating my robot like it really does have sentience.
As early as 2007, a Georgia Tech study into owners of the Roomba brand of vacuum found that many were emotionally engaged with their appliances. They gave them names and dressed them in costumes and even liked them better when they exhibited operating flaws, because it’s human nature to become attached to something that is open about its issues.
Since then, of course, robots and smart devices have completely infiltrated many homes. My own usage is limited to Helen, an Alexa device and a smart plug for a lamp.
Things can get way more intricate than that. Samsung, for example, has “Family Hub” fridges with built in screens for watching TV, displaying photos, art and scheduling. Last week the company launched a pilot programme for customers in the US which showed ads on the fridges when the doors were idle. My fridge doesn’t do any of that and doesn’t even have a name, but if it wanted to show me ads, it would want to be making dinner at the same time.
Despite Helen’s shortcomings, I’ve never considered trading her in for a more sophisticated model. I know her foibles and she does her best. She would never show me an ad.
At my family home there’s a robot lawnmower that trundles around the front garden. Her name is Gladys and she too is several years old. Sure, she sometimes gets stuck under a hedge and yes, her range is limited but she is much loved.
We’ve had lengthy dinner conversations about her and we all agree that the grass has never looked better since she joined the household. Whenever I go home, I genuinely feel a warmth towards Gladys when I see her lumbering around, laboriously shaving a nanometre off the top of the lawn.
We are apparently close to a mass market robot hoover that can climb stairs, but for some reason that’s an innovation too far for me. I love Helen but I need to know that her relatives won’t someday be able to open my bedroom door and watch me sleep. I’ll probably have another robot for that.
