Robots Are Already in Our Rooms. Are They the Home Appliances We Always Imagined?
In fact, the future we imagined is still some way from reality
In fact, the future we imagined is still some way from reality
"Press the clean button on the Braava Jet and say goodbye to everyday mess at home."
That is the line iRobot used to advertise its new mopping robot, the Braava jet. In late August, iRobot put this low-priced mopping robot on sale in China for 1,999 yuan.
The robot vacuum is now the most common kind of robot in our lives. Its job is simple: move around a room sweeping and mopping, using onboard sensors to read its surroundings and steer around furniture.
A step up in capability are the service robots used in hotels. They carry guests' luggage, handle check-in, greet visitors, or take the place of staff in delivering things to rooms. Last July, a hotel staffed mainly by robots opened in Nagasaki, Japan — the Henn-na Hotel.
In fact, home robots already come in many varieties for everyday consumer use. Besides robot vacuums and hotel robots, there are social robots and toy robots, usually put in the home to keep people company or to offer something to interact with.
The best-selling social robot right now is Amazon's Echo. The feature people like most is not the speaker but the voice commands that fetch news, weather and other information.
"Smart home" has become the phrase we reach for most often when we talk about the machines we use at home. Put every device on the network and make life more convenient — that is how we think about home electronics today. Half a century ago, people pictured today's home quite differently.
60 years ago, what did people think the home of the future would look like?
The second industrial revolution brought electricity into daily life, and from the start of the 20th century it changed how people lived. Home appliances entered the house around this time.
Starting with Edison's electric light bulb in the late 19th century, appliances began moving into people's lives. The vacuum cleaner arrived in 1907, and over the next half-century new appliances kept coming. In 1913 the dishwasher went on sale, and the refrigerator was invented the same year, spreading gradually from 1930. In an American household of the 1950s and 60s you could already find most of the appliances we use now.
When home appliances appeared, 1950s to 1960s
- 1907: the first vacuum cleaner
- 1909: the commercial roaster
- 1913: the refrigerator is invented and spreads gradually from 1930; the first washing machine appears the same year
- 1925: the television
- Mid-1930s: the washing machine and the clothes dryer
- 1952: the automatic coffee maker
- 1962: mass production of the microwave oven begins
From the 1930s to the 1950s, what arrived in the home was not only machines that did the housework. There was also a great deal of fantasy about the future, and most of that fantasy took place in the kitchen.
The American appliance maker Whirlpool introduced its "Miracle Kitchen" in 1957. In this imagined kitchen a single central computer ran every appliance, and all a housewife had to do was press its buttons. In the promotional film, a housewife demonstrates and says: "In this kitchen you can bake a loaf of bread in three minutes, and the dishes and the floors clean themselves."
There were similar concepts: the "Kitchen of Tomorrow" that Frigidaire, then part of GM, showed in 1956, and the kitchen of the future in the short film 1999 A.D., made by Philco-Ford in 1967. Without consulting one another, they all picked the kitchen as the main setting where the appliances of the future would be used, and in that setting a single computer ran everything. "One button does it all" was the feature they shared.
These future kitchens were not idle daydreams on the part of the appliance companies.
In the early 20th century the kitchen became the center of the home, and most appliances — roasters, refrigerators, microwave ovens — belonged to it. The modern kitchen was seen then as a technological marvel, and the main consumer in it was the housewife.
As these appliance companies saw it:
"One button does it all" would let the machines in the kitchen finish all the work by themselves. That raised a woman's efficiency in the kitchen and freed her to do other things. At the time these companies believed such concept products might open new markets for them.
The Cold War was another reason these "kitchens of the future" caught on. The kitchen, a domestic space with no obvious connection to the Cold War, became an important stage on which the United States and the Soviet Union displayed their technical strength and the superiority of their ideologies.
At the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, Nixon and Khrushchev held a heated "Kitchen Debate" in front of a lemon-yellow GE model kitchen.
What they argued about, of course, was not the kitchen but the clash between capitalist and communist values. Nixon said in the debate that the kitchen showed the pleasure of American life, and that in a capitalist society people had more freedom to choose what they bought.
And yet the "kitchen of the future" still has not arrived
Technology did not develop the way the appliance companies had imagined. The central computer that would run every machine in the kitchen never became the point.
In the 1950s the government led the development of computing and was its main user and funder, so research in this period went mostly into national defense.
As the computer industry was commercialized, from the late 1960s into the 1970s, research was monopolized by large computer companies such as IBM. Breakthroughs in semiconductors followed, and the personal computer became the hottest industry of the 1980s.
In the 1980s, the makers of personal computers — Apple, IBM — took off. The computer was no longer defined as a calculating machine at the center of a room; it became a computing device that served one person.
Technical limits also meant the appliance companies never carried these concept products forward after the 1960s.
One telling example: when GM took its "Kitchen of Tomorrow" to an exhibition in the Netherlands in 1956, actors performed all the technological effects. The company did not actually have the technology.
As people's idea of the kitchen changed, the kitchen of the future also mattered less at home. The early-20th-century belief that the kitchen was the "center of the home" shifted as society shifted. The kitchen was no longer only a place to cook; in American life it also took on a social role, pulling the family together. It began to merge with other rooms instead of standing at the center.
What people wanted from the kitchen did not move in the direction the appliance companies expected either. The imagined kitchen of the future would have made cooking far more efficient, but for an ordinary family the cost of owning such a machine was too high.
From 1960 on, people cooked at home less and less, and the rise of fast food made the kitchen's main function less important. Backed by industrial livestock farming and agriculture, the American fast-food business grew quickly through the 1950s and 60s. The American food magazine Food Review once called "not having to make food at home" the biggest change in American life over the previous 30 years. By 1999, 47.5% of what American households spent on food went to things outside the kitchen: restaurants, fast food, takeout, or half-prepared meals.
What have the traditional appliance makers brought to our lives?
Appliance development has not broken much new ground since the 1960s. Refrigerators, washing machines and microwave ovens still look much as they did, sitting in the house and being used. Since the 1960s, an old American brand like Whirlpool has produced only self-venting stoves, microwave ovens, and refrigerators that work somewhat better.
By the 1980s and 90s, mergers and a steady supply of new markets gave the industry every reason not to hurry into a genuinely new product.
In the 1980s the continued growth of American real estate pulled appliance sales along with it. Revenue in the appliance industry fell to $3.1 billion in 1990 in the downturn, but recovered to $3.3 billion in 1991, and grew about 4% a year over the two years after that.
Riding America's baby boom and its wave of replacement buying, and selling appliances that performed a little better, traditional appliance makers still held decent sales at the end of the 20th century.
By 2008 the industry was saturated, but global growth — China, India and Eastern Europe opening up as markets — also gave rise to new appliance makers such as Toshiba and Panasonic in Japan.
Through the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st, appliance makers released nothing revolutionary and still did fine, living on new markets and on products that were updated and refined.
The new appliances these traditional makers sell today have not moved on much in appearance either. Mostly they put the appliances on the network. "Smart home" has become their idea of what a household appliance is.
At CES over the past five years, most of the smart appliances shown by appliance makers have been things like Samsung's washing machine that can be monitored over built-in WiFi, its food-managing smart refrigerator, its smart television controlled by gesture and voice, and assorted smart hardware connected through WiFi or the internet of things — smart lighting, smart thermostats.
Technology companies are entering the home too, and their tool is the robot
Besides the smart appliances from the traditional makers, devices like the robot vacuum have been coming into homes since 2002. They look smarter than the smart refrigerators, but they are still a long way from the home robot we once imagined.
In science fiction, the home robot ought to be Rosie from The Jetsons: "she" is a machine with a personality, shaped roughly like a person, who handles the household for her owner.
In practice, the best-selling robots on the market are still functional machines like the robot vacuum.
The British research firm Juniper Research noted in a report on consumer robots last year that in this still-early market, task robots such as the robot vacuum ship in the largest numbers. iRobot's Roomba sells the most of all: more than 14 million units worldwide in 2015.
Besides the functional machines, Echo — the social robot that looks least like a robot — is also selling briskly. A study this year by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners put Echo sales at 3 million units since it went on sale in 2014.
On Amazon's Echo review page, one reviewer wrote that since he got Alexa he is no longer lonely — with it, he doesn't even need to get married.
None of these machines have a human shape, but they can do something concrete for people: clean the floor, answer a question.
The country most committed to building a humanoid robot like Rosie is probably Japan. Since it launched the Fifth Generation Computer project in the 1980s, Japan has poured effort into humanoid machines.
Because an aging population has left Japan short of workers, the government has spent heavily on companion robots in human form, hoping they can keep old people company or help them, and free up labor to ease the shortage that aging has caused.
Honda began working on humanoid robots in 1986, and nearly 30 years separate that start from its latest model, ASIMO; SoftBank has also worked with a French company to produce Pepper. These machines share features with us — a head, four limbs, a human way of walking, and some simple conversation.
But they are still far from the ordinary home, because they cost far too much. An ASIMO sells for $2.5 million, and Pepper, of which 10,000 have already been sold in Japan, costs $1,600.
When the Japanese humanoid-robot company Tmsuk failed to sell its robots in 2011 and dropped its expensive leasing plans for customers, its spokesman said that people would rather be cared for by other people than by machines. Beyond a price ordinary people cannot afford, the machines were nowhere near able to help anyone.
The artificial intelligence bound up with this kind of companion robot also still struggles with understanding natural language. The Japanese government has grown more cautious about funding it. Without large sums of money, humanoid robots have not come along as smoothly as people expected.
Like the "kitchen of the future," the robot housekeeper was something people imagined for home life back in the 1950s, and it has not arrived either. Our lives do contain a good many more robots now, but like the old appliances, each of them serves us through one narrow function.
Cover image: Kurzweilai
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.