It has actually been here for a while. You just never noticed.
Every time a book, a movie, or a TV show tries to envision the future, That future usually includes robots. In some stories, the robots are our servants; in others, they are our friends, and for some reason, in a lot of them, they are our enemies. But what most of us seem to overlook is that THAT future is already here (not the one where they try to kill us, thankfully). We are surrounded by intelligent machines that do almost everything for us; we just forgot to call them “Robots.”
Sure, many of us have a robotic vacuum cleaner that keeps our floors and carpets clean, and we refer to it as a robot, but what about all our other household appliances? The washing machine, for example, isn’t just a simple rotating drum that gets our clothes clean. If you bought a new washing machine in the past decade, it doesn’t just turn on when you push the button. Instead, it weighs the laundry inside, ensures the load is perfectly balanced, and then goes through an exact washing cycle designed to achieve the best results. Some models even send you a text when the washing is done. It’s not just a washing machine; it’s a laundry robot.
The same can be said about your coffee maker. What used to be just a simple machine for brewing coffee has become a small robot capable of grinding the exact amount of beans, frothing the milk, and preparing a wide variety of hot beverages with one push of a button. And with the advances in home automation, some coffee machines even turn themselves on automatically the second you wake up, so a freshly brewed coffee will be waiting for you without you even asking for it.
Many household appliances got so smart over the past few years that they can be considered robots. And some may say that smart homes have gotten so sophisticated lately, with the addition of home assistants like Alexa or Siri, that pretty soon we will all be living inside giant robots. And if that’s not an original futuristic notion, we don’t know what is.
