This is not the first time I have encountered a robot in the wild. Across the mighty Mississippi River, there is a sports bar I go to occasionally in Illinois as it is close to the golf course I go to most. If Señora is not around for dinner I may stop in there for a bite. For a while now, they have had a robot that brings the food from the kitchen in back to the waitress station in the middle. It always seems a little rickety to me, but I have never seen it spill anything. On the other hand, I am in this establishment less than a handful of times a year.
I was in a local grocery store, Schnucks, this afternoon. Señora had decided she wanted me to fix my infamous cabbage soup for dinner. Lacking a couple key ingredients, I made the sojourn out of my nicely air conditioned abode to the outside blast furnace that is currently St. Louis.
As I rounded the aisle corner towards the main aisle in the front of the store, I almost crashed into their inventory robot that had just done the same thing from the next aisle over. Mainly out of curiosity to see what it would do next, and, truthfully, a wee bit of spitefulness, I just stopped in the main aisle, my shopping cart in a face off with the robot.
Okay, okay, I know the meanness was useless as I seriously doubt this low level robot had an emotion chip onboard, especially at this nascent stage of robotics. Yeah, yeah, you are right; I am harking back to a Star Trek episode, or was it one of the movies, when Data obtained an emotion chip.
Back to my stalled robot, I just stood there, my hands on the shopping cart’s bar handle. The robot paused for more than a few heart beats. I began to wonder if perhaps it was a bit of a lecher and he/she/it was checking out the gams, alright wheels, on my creaky shopping buggy.
The robot finished his lecherous inspection of my in-store food accumulator, and it started forward towards my cart, stopped again, whistled (not true, you say?), turned to my left and went around the cart and me.
I felt a bit like George Jetson dodging robots. While we are on the subject of the Jetsons, one thing I have always wondered about was the relationship between George and the Model XB-500 robot, aka Rosie, the housekeeping robot. Was George receiving “fringe benefits” from this nominally female machine? And exactly what was going on in that shower machine that caused them to exit so cheerily.
In the future would my behavior be considered robotic harassment? Could such behavior in a corporate environment trigger a discussion in HR? Would an enforcer robot come around and discuss my behavior? As cute as these robotic critters are, and they are cute, for some reason the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, Terminator comes to mind… human vermin.
Oh, the detritus that floats around in my noggin.
And so it goes.
I wonder what a Taser would do to one!
Find out if the inventory robot has its own blog.