“I can’t do it,” my daughter declared, watching nervously as our brand-new robot vacuum cleaner poked around her feet. “I can’t anthropomorphise Marvin.”
Coming from her, this was a big statement. Hannah’s powers of humanising the non-human are profound. As a little girl, she made a pet of a snail she found in the backyard, named him/her Twig, and planned out a long and happy life together. (Soon after, Twig met their fate when Hannah dropped them and cracked their shell. As their life force leaked gruesomely out their back, she made tearful attempts to staunch the wound, and asked me to call an ambulance. Sixteen years later she still struggles to talk about it.)
Marvin the robot vacuum cleaner (left) heads back to base as Soda the cat keeps a respectful distance.Credit: Michael Bachelard
I have to agree, though, it’s hard to like Marvin. He’s a squarish block of black plastic and fancy lights who to my eye gives off an air of lurking hunchbackishness.
He also talks to himself. “Return to wash the mopping pads,” he’ll announce in a grating voice, then hustle back to his base station. I’m never sure if it’s a reminder to self or an explanation for the rest of us that, really, he’s still hard at work, not slacking off at home.
I named Marvin after the paranoid android in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The original Marvin had a brain the size of a planet, but his superintelligence only served to plunge him into deep and theatrical depression due to the mundanity of the tasks he was assigned.
This is not a risk, I suspect, that my Marvin confronts. His tasks are likewise mundane, but his brainpower seems stretched by even the basics. If this is artificial intelligence at work, I’m feeling fairly relaxed about the threat.
Marvin the paranoid android from the 2005 movie The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Marvin was bought (at enormous expense) after we recently renovated our apartment and acquired a smooth, concrete floor amenable to a robo-vac’s ministrations, and shiny enough to need regular cleaning. We also have carpet in the bedrooms, so we went straight to the top of the range. Marvin mops, he vacuums, he expels his own waste. All I have to do is tend to his base station.
Out of the box, Marvin’s first task was to map the area – two bedrooms, a bathroom, loo, laundry, and open-plan living. The map seemed reasonable – it looked just like our place, and I was delighted. Except the laundry was missing. No problem, I thought, I’ll get into the software and put the room in there. With some fiddling, I made it so.
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