I chose to discuss the Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner that avoids obstacles while cleaning floorspace without needing human direction. The Roomba is manufactured by iRobot. It ranges in price, depending on the model, from $129.99 to $549.99, and can be ordered from the iRobot website.
The Roomba unit is a disc shape, a little over a foot across, and comes in a grey or white plastic outer shell. It runs on nickel-metal hydride batteries that have to be recharged between uses. Depending on the model, it might come with "virtual wall" units that help trap the vacuum in a defined space. The unit is very robotic in appearance, and can be either obtrusive or nearly invisible while doing its work. The Roomba comes in several models, with many kinds of accessories, such as special cleaning brushes, remote controls, a programmable scheduler, the virtual walls, and a home base for it to return to. It contains a flash-programmed CPU so it can be updated with future innovations.
The Roomba is interesting to me, because it really fills the consumer culture fast-action NOW gratification. It takes care of the tedious work of running a normal vacuum cleaner over the carpet and contributes the job without needing human action. The downside is it takes a longer period of time to clean the same space than if an intelligence rather than a machine was directing the cleaning. However, since the human does not have to do the action, then it frees up that time to spend elsewhere.
The Roomba actually is something I would not buy. I suspect it is attractive to people who dislike cleaning chores, or who feel lazy about them (no offense to anyone who owns a Roomba). I like the satisfaction of a job well done, and to me the Roomba does not offer that satisfaction. It seems too easy to break, not to mention if I do the chore myself, then its done that much sooner, and then I can have my room space back. I don't like delegating chores to unintelligent machines that cannot make an informed decision, might break down, perhaps get stuck, and then I have to do it myself anyway.
alli-Elizabeth S. #3
14 years ago
I agree that the Roomba is part of our preoccupation with fast and easy shortcuts that end up being expensive, inefficient, and wasteful. I've read reviews about the Roomba that comment on how the unit gets stuck in corners or under furniture and never really cleans an entire room. I realize that the price may not seem high to everyone, but for several hundred dollars, I expect an applianc to be good at what it's designed to do.
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