AI fail that will make you gag with disgust……

One of the first consumer robots were vacuum cleaners that bumped around your floors sucking up dirt and dust. The first models simply sensed when they hit something, a wall or piece of furniture, turned the wheels and headed off in a different direction.

The latest vacuum robots actually map out your room and mathematically calculate the optimum route to evenly vacuum the floor. They have a memory, build a mathematical model of the room, with laser mapping, 360 degree cameras, can detect objects in real time and have clever corner cleaning capability.  They move room to room, can be operated from a mobile app - scheduling and so on. They will even automatically recharge when their batteries get low and resume from the point they left. Very impressive.

That’s not to say they’re perfect. Take this example, that happened to a friend of mine. He has a pert dog and sure enough, the vacuum cleaner would bump into the dog on the carpet, turn and move on. The dog was initially puzzled, sniffed it a bit, but learned to ignore this new pet, as something beneath his contempt as top-dog. Cats even like to sit on them and take rides around the house.

Then, one day, the owner came back, opened his front door and was hit by a horrific wall of smell.  The dog had taken a dump and the robot cleaner had smeared the shit evenly across the entire carpet, even into the corners, room by room, with a mathematical exactitude that was superior to that of any human cleaner. The smell was overwhelming and the clean up a Herculean task on hands and knees, accompanied by regular gagging.

The lesson here is that AI is smart, can replace humans in all sorts of tasks but doesn’t have the checks and balances of normal human intelligence. In fact the attribution of the word intelligence, I'd argue (and have here), is an anthropomorphic category error, taking one category and applying it in a separate and compeltely different domain. It’s good at one thing, or a few things, such as moving, mapping and sucking, but it doesn’t know when the shit hits the fan.