Rosie the Robot: Ensuring Humans Do the Right Work

This article is an excerpt from Dr. Dave Mulder's Teach Like a Human, a book that examines teaching through a Christian lens in the age of AI. It has been republished with permission by Wipf and Stock Publishers.

When our family bought a new home several years ago, we received a gift from the bank when we closed on our mortgage: a Roomba. If you are not familiar, a Roomba is a robot vacuum cleaner that uses sensors to navigate and clean floors. It detects obstacles, dirt, and edges and then moves in patterns to cover the area to be cleaned. Brushes and suction collect debris into a bin, and then the robot returns to its charging station until the next time a vacuuming is needed.

I have to confess, I was pretty excited to bring this device home and get it set up in the new house. This was part of my imag­ination for living in “the future” that was promised by the Jetsons. The Jetsons are a cartoon family who live in a futuristic world of the 2060s (the cartoon originally debuted in the 1960s) and have all kinds of amazing technological innovations in their lives, from video phone calls, to voice-operated computers, to flying cars, to machines that brush your teeth for you. So, while they accurately predicted some things (video calls and voice-operated smart de­vices have become normal), they were off the mark—so far, at least—for some things. (Because I don’t think I want an automatic tooth-brushing machine!)

But from my watching Jetsons reruns in my childhood, there was one innovation I always wanted: Rosie the Robot, the Jetsons’ robotic maid. Rosie the Robot cooked meals, did the dishes, and vacuumed the house for the Jetsons. And I wanted a robot maid who would do my chores for me, too. So perhaps you can imagine my excitement in bringing the Roomba home: here was part of my vision for a robot maid who would take care of things for me!

But here’s the thing: the Roomba didn’t really work out the way I hoped. Our couch is just the wrong height, so the Roomba would sometimes get stuck under the edge of the couch and run and run until its battery was dead. Because of the layout of our kitchen and dining room, there were a few corners and crannies where the robot just couldn’t quite get all the dust and crumbs. One time, the door to the basement steps got left open, and we found the Roomba upside-down, halfway down the stairs.

My dreams of a robot maid did not translate into reality, and the Roomba has ended up back in the box, in the basement storage room.

Andy Crouch has a term for this sort of thing: “boring robots.” Crouch says, “Robots, it turns out, are amazing—but only before they arrive.”1 What he means is that the robots in our imagination are more wonderful than the reality once they are in our lives. This seems to be true for me when I think about generative AI as well. The first few times I use a new generative AI tool, I always feel a little wowed by the “magic” of the machine. But that magic is often short-lived, and I wind up feeling a little underwhelmed. That is not to say that the AI tools are not helpful in their way—they cer­tainly can be! But I wonder, along with Crouch, if the potential of generative AI might end up being more of a “boring robots” sort of thing?

I really want Rosie the Robot to clean my room. Instead, I have ChatGPT, which can’t clean my room and instead seems to be changing the way my students think about writing in ways that seem negative. Perhaps you can relate? I want to avoid some work, but I’m trying to avoid particular kinds of work—and I think my students are as well.

But here’s the thing: I believe that human beings are actually created to work. Work is not a bad thing, something to dodge or escape. In fact, God gave Adam work to do before the Fall! Genesis 2:15 states this plainly: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Work is not evil; work is a good part of how God created us to be as humans. Because of the effects of the Fall, we might want to avoid work, and there are certainly aspects of work that might be unpleasant.

Let’s stretch our imaginations here a bit: we can see ways in which work is impacted by the Fall, surely. But we can also see ways that we human beings—image-bearers of the Creator—can use our God-given creativity to innovate ingenious instruments that might make the work easier. This is also part of God’s good design for humans: we can use the creative potential in Creation to craft beautiful things, and this might be part of how we are work­ing towards the Restoration of all things.

The challenge, in our broken-but-beautiful, technology-rich world is discerning how to ensure humans are doing the right work!

Footnotes:

1. This quote comes from p. 91 of Crouch’s wonderful book, The Life We’re Looking For. This is part of a chapter that is all about this idea of “boring robots.” He explains how technology—including robots—often wind up let­ting us down because the promise is often hype and the reality doesn’t carry through. He even uses ChatGPT as an example of the reality of the “boring robot” phenomenon.