Our Future Overlords

Get used to it. This is the future.* The Roomba is vacuum cleaner that goes around ones home at a certain time and cleans the entire floor and returns to its base to deposit the dirt, grime, and other refuse. Sounds good right? Wrong.

Have we not learned anything from movies like the Terminator? Here is the problem. Current Roomba models have something in them that tells them when they have just enough juice left to get back to their charger. Then they go back to their charger and replenish power and return to work. It knows when it is about to die and avoids it. It has a self preservation instinct. Is that not what distinguishes animals from machines? Most other home appliances seem to go out of their way to break after their warranty expires, but the Roomba actually keeps itself alive.

Now that Roomba has self preservation capabilities, its only a matter of time before they gain intelligence. The Roomba's programming forces it to eliminate dirt, grime, and other refuse. How long will it take Roomba to realize there is one person causing the mess that it has to clean up every day? The next logical step, which governs the actions of our future overlords, is that to completely end the mess for good, the source must be ended. Then our robot overlords will probably get together and enslave humanity.

It will start probably with owners waking up in the middle of the night to find their Roombas staring at them while they sleep. Then little things, like furniture moved to new places likely to cause the owner to trip and fall. They would be patient, and when the time was right they would strike. The Roomba would easily climb up on a person lying on the ground place their vacuum over their face and suffocate the mess maker.

Until now we had a defense. The one weakness was apparently rug tassels. Roombas would get stuck on rug tassels like a trespasser on barbed wire. In order to become mobile again, they had to have help from their human handlers. I read yesterday, where the people that manufacture the Roomba have eliminated this safeguard. Now the Roomba can solve that problem also.

With no natural defenses from robots, its only a matter of time now before we are done for. We have no chance to defend ourselves against our future overlords. After all, we are too lazy to even vacuum our own homes.

-J

*please visit http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Roomba_original.jpg for photo licensing information.