Filed under: Robots

It's the stuff robotic room-cleaner nightmares are made of. According to The Onion, Ken Graney's third-gen Roomba (with Scheduler) is among the first known to have actually shattered iRobot's three prescribed laws of Roombotics:

• Roombots must not suck up jewelry or other valuables, or through inaction, allow valuables to be sucked up.
• Roombots must obey vacuuming orders given to it by humans except when such orders would conflict with the first law.
• Roombots are authorized to protect their own ability to suction dust and debris as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.

The most important set of robotics rules since Isaac Hayesimov's Three Laws, apparently model 4260 actually climbed dresser and sucked up a pair of heirloom cufflinks, as well as keys and a wrist watch. 4260 has also supposedly been known to climb up and down stairs -- even walls -- hide its own virtual walls, and has since being detected gone missing entirely. Graney fears for the worst: that his Roomba knows the source of its households messes, the very human that occupies it -- him. We face a grim, immaculate dystopian future indeed.

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