When I was a boy I had a book, a story that played in a modernistic villa where robots did the work. One of these servant robots ran on rails from the kitchen to the salon. On command, the rails would come to life like the baggage conveyor at the airport and the robot would slowly but inexorably appear balancing a tray with mugs of piping hot chocolate. Whenever I came to this point in the story my mouth would water because I liked hot chocolate. It never occurred to me that the robot could stumble and spill his load. Robots don’t stumble. They can’t, they are just fiction.
But that was then. Now robots are real, running on little rubber wheels all over the house. Ours is extremely clever, cleans the entire floor, and when the battery runs low, finds his own way to the charging station. Our real robot is also harmless, just as my fictional hot chocolate carrier.
At least I thought so until this morning when we found out that he is a deadly weapon. Not to me, but to a fuzzy-haired dog with a long feathery tail. Yes, he is a machine, a machine that has a rotating brush to sweep up dust. He will stop for no one, certainly not for any feathery tails. If such things come too close they get rolled up very rapidly. And when all of the tail is rolled up, that which is attached to this appendage is next in line. At this point the owner of the dog loses his or her composure because he or she cannot find the button that stops the infernal machine and the dog surprises professional sound specialists who did not even know there was such a high C.
In our case the dog was too big for the robot to swallow her. The mechanism stopped by itself. After unraveling the tail from the roller brush the dog was found unharmed. But my faith in robots has been shattered. You cannot get me, for example, into a self-driving Uber car, ever. I will walk to the airport, if need be.