The Last Word On Nothing

“It’s so cute,” said Pete, watching our new robot vacuum cleaner gently ram the kitchen table. After gradually inching past the obstacle, the robot moved haphazardly around the room, missing the most obvious specks of dirt. Pete swept some of the dirt into a neat line in front of the robot, cooing encouragement.

I could see how the robot, a generous gift from Pete’s parents, was an improvement on our traditional vacuum cleaner. I hate vacuum cleaners — they’re icky to clean out and smell of burnt lint. I almost never use one since we don’t have carpet, just hardwood floors. But I couldn’t see how the robot vacuum was an improvement on that most elegant of household cleaning tools, the broom.

With their polished wooden handles and witchy straw bristles, brooms embody not only sexy design but my favorite form of procrastination. Along with baking, listening to audiobooks, and putting things in an online shopping cart and not buying them, I find that sweeping is an excellent way to avoid writing. 

I felt supplanted. Like Cinderella’s evil stepsister, I resented the robot’s cheery jingle. I even watched with perverse satisfaction as the robot bumped over a cardboard box and got trapped inside. Like Lucifer the cat in Disney’s Cinderella, I deliberately walked the floor in muddy running shoes, giving the robot more work to do. 

Since the 1990s, when the first robot vacuum cleaners hit the market, companies have tried to make other successful domestic robots. There are some companion and entertainment robots, including this creepy-adorable seal, as well as robots that can change the cat litter, mow the lawn and clean the pool. But the vacuum cleaning robot is the only one that’s really stuck, or become popular.

This has inspired researchers to study how people interact with robot vacuums, including a 2013 study titled “Living with a Vacuum Cleaning Robot,” published in the International Journal of Social Robotics.  Researchers gave nine Swiss households a Roomba, then studied them over the next six months, attempting to build on a field they call Domestic Robot Ecology. They visited the households five times to observe their reactions to the Roomba, and asked them to keep a “cleaning diary.” They also classified participants into four basic types of cleaners: Spartan (“barely notice dirt and do very little about it”), Minimalistic (“do what is necessary but not more”) Caring (“really care to have a clean and nice looking home to show visitors”) and Manic (“very picky, notice every little piece of dirt”.)

The Roomba did not induce Spartan or Minimalist cleaners to clean any more than they had before, or Manic cleaners to clean any less. One thought was that the Roomba might somehow encourage men to do a more equal share of the housework, but this did not pan out: in most households, women still did 75 % of vacuuming. When the researchers asked one woman why she was the Roomba’s main user, she explained: “Roomba is a vacuum cleaner, and since my husband never vacuums, it’s only me using it.” 

Children found the Roomba fascinating, at least at first. Like Pete, they collected crumbs and put them right in front of the robot, or made the robot part of their games, casting it as a spaceship with lasers. The cats and dogs were mostly afraid of the Roomba, the researchers found. Some people, especially men, liked to show off their “fancy new robot” to friends, but others found it disturbing, the study found. One woman, a painter, said she found it impossible to use “something as artificial as a robot” in her studio. 

Sadly, excitement over Roomba diminished over the course of the 6-months. Eventually, participants no longer perceived it as a ‘fancy new robot’ but ‘just another cleaning tool’.

In our house, the novelty hasn’t yet worn off. Every morning and evening, Pete deploys the robot with irrepressible glee. An engineer who teaches robotics to high school students, he’s delighted by its ability to sense its surroundings, moderate its speed, and find its way back to its docking station. I’m grudgingly starting to appreciate the robot too. It has two small paddles that extend out ahead of it, sweeping dirt into the vacuum like busy little hands, and they are kind of cute. Besides, now there’s less stuff sticking to my feet when I walk around the house barefoot.

The vacuum was just a scapegoat, I’m realizing. I have no problem with clean floors, I just hate being forced to interact with robots day in and day out. I’m all for robots doing dangerous or unpleasant work, like disarming roadside bombs. But when even a trip to a public bathroom is an assault — auto-flushers that spray toilet water all over you before you’ve had time to stand up! faulty hand dryers! soap dispensers that either ejaculate prematurely or don’t work! — the robots have gone too far.  

Last night Pete and I sat at our kitchen table with glasses of wine and watched the robot vacuum make its bumbling rounds, commenting on its progress while we cooked spaghetti for dinner in an InstantPot.  This is our Saturday night now, I thought: drinking wine and watching a robot vacuum. Then the InstantPot’s digital screen lit up with glowing blue letters: burn. 

“If you don’t get your shit together, I’ll put you in the scrap heap,”  Pete said to the machine, his affection for the InstantPot already supplanted by the new robot. He didn’t mean it — he’d spend days trying to fix the appliance first, I’m sure. But if he couldn’t fix it, he’d most certainly let his high school students dismantle it for parts. (You hear that, vacuum robot?)