Will I Need to Learn Spanish to Speak to My Gardening Robot?
The person responsible for our yard is primarily what I call a “mow and blow” gardener. He comes once a week, mows and trims the lawn, then blows the clippings and other debris off the yard and patios. This is good because it is a job I have never wanted to do and, so far, have been able to avoid.
Fortunately, he knows considerably more than mowing and blowing. He works as a landscape engineer for one of the casinos in town and takes care of my yard and several others as a weekend side business. He agreed to take care of the rest of our yard, mostly with instructions from me but also by noticing things that need attention.
He plants some things and removes others. He repairs sprinklers and drip lines, does a limited amount of weed control, and fertilizes twice a year. In the spring, he aerates and dethatches the lawn. After the plants go dormant, he prunes the fruit trees and trims the roses. Some of these jobs cost extra, which is reasonable. Mowing a lawn is one thing. Knowing what to do with a fruit tree is something else.
The arrangement works because I can talk with the person who understands the yard and is responsible for the work.
The problems begin during the weeks when he does not come but sends colleagues in his place. They know how to mow and blow, but they do not speak English and apparently are not authorized to do anything else. If a sprinkler is leaking, a drip line has failed, or something needs immediate attention, it generally has to wait.
My Spanish is limited, so I cannot explain the problem very well. Even if pointing, gestures, and my extremely limited Spanish get the message across, they quickly explain that they do not speak English and do not understand. They finish the scheduled work and leave.
The lawn is mowed. The patio is clean. The sprinkler is still leaking.
This has caused me to wonder about the household robots we are told will soon perform all the tasks we do not want to do.
Will my gardening robot arrive understanding English? Will it respond in Spanish? Will it also understand Spanish so it can learn from my gardener? Will it translate between us?
Or will I have to learn Spanish to speak to my gardening robot?
What Does the Robot Know When It Arrives?
A new robot will presumably arrive with some basic training. It should know how to move around without falling into the pool, running over the roses, or attacking the patio furniture. It may recognize common plants, operate a lawn mower, carry objects, and follow simple instructions.
But knowing how to mow a lawn is not the same as knowing how to take care of my yard.
My yard has compacted clay, old aspen roots, temperamental drip lines, roses, fruit trees, an array of vegetables and herbs as well as plants that may or may not be where they belong. Some need to be moved as the seasons change. Some things that look like weeds are weeds. Others are volunteer plants. Still others are experiments I have not yet admitted have failed.
The robot will need to understand instructions such as:
“Pull all of those except that one.”
“Dig up the irises, divide them, and save them for replanting.”
“Cut this back, but not as far as you did last time.”
“The little shoots in the lawn are from the aspen we removed and will need to be treated.”
Most important, it must understand: “Leave that one alone. I’m experimenting.”
The manufacturer may claim that the robot is ready to work when it arrives. Ready to do what? There is a considerable distance between recognizing a rose and knowing the difference among hybrid teas, floribundas, and landscape roses—all of which are pruned differently.
Closing that distance will require training, repetition, correction, and probably a few unfortunate plants.
The Price of the Apprentice
My gardener costs about $50 to $60 a week, or roughly $250 to $300 a month after some of the extra work is included. Additional jobs generally cost between $40 and $60 an hour.
One of the first humanoid home robots is being advertised at about $20,000 to purchase or $499 a month by subscription. That already costs more than my gardener—and it has not yet repaired a sprinkler, pruned a fruit tree, or explained why the lawn is turning brown.
At $300 a month, it would take more than five years of gardening bills to equal the robot’s $20,000 purchase price. That calculation does not include repairs, software subscriptions, replacement parts, electricity, or the possibility that the robot will require another robot to help it stand up after falling into the flower bed.
The economics improve if one robot can do several jobs. Perhaps the same machine could work in the yard, clean the house, wash the windows, wash the cars, and help prepare for a dinner or lawn party.
That sounds promising, but can the same robot really work outside in the dirt, fertilizer, and sprinkler water in the morning and clean the kitchen that afternoon? Before entering the house, will it remember to clean itself—or will it track the freshly fertilized yard across the living-room carpet?
Perhaps we will need two robots: one for inside and one for outside. Then we may need a third robot to supervise the first two.
Cleaning the House for the Robot
The situation inside the house is similar. Our primary housekeeper is bilingual, but some of her assistants do not speak English. When she is present, special requests and questions can be handled. When the assistants arrive without her, communication becomes more difficult.
We also do what I like to call “cleaning the house for the housekeepers.” Fragile objects are put away. Papers are moved off tabletops. Personal items are picked up. Anything likely to be misplaced, damaged, or interpreted as trash is removed before the cleaning begins.
A household robot would probably remain around the house, so eventually it should learn what to avoid. It should arrive knowing how to clean a bathroom, vacuum an open area, dust exposed surfaces, and perform other basic jobs. The bedroom, office, and kitchen will require more education.
It must learn that papers on my desk are not automatically trash. A stack that appears disorganized may be part of a filing system understood only by me. “Put this somewhere safe” does not mean placing it where no human being will ever find it again.
The kitchen presents even greater opportunities. The robot may throw away the leftovers I intended to have for lunch because they no longer resemble anything in its food database. It may reorganize the cabinets alphabetically and place the peanut butter between the paprika and the pepper. It might put every object away perfectly and create the cleanest kitchen we have ever had—followed by a three-day search for the coffee.
The robot will be acting with the right intention. The results may still require another cleaning, several do-overs, and possibly a restaurant reservation.
As with the gardener, the robot will need to learn from the person who already knows the job. If our housekeeper helps train it—and explains some of the work in Spanish—the robot must understand her as well as us.
Ironically, the robot might solve the communication problem that helped justify buying it. It could translate my English instructions into Spanish for the assistants and translate their answers back to me.
Assuming, of course, that all three of us agree on what the robot thinks we said.
Getting Ready for a Party
A general-purpose robot could be especially valuable when preparing for a dinner or lawn party. It might clean the patio, arrange the chairs, set the table, carry food, empty wastebaskets, and handle dozens of small jobs that accumulate before guests arrive.
It could also create entirely new ones.
Told to prepare the lawn for guests, it might move all the chairs onto the patio because they interfere with its mowing pattern. Asked to keep the party area clean, it could begin collecting glasses whenever someone sets one down—even if the glass is still half full.
At the scheduled time, it might turn on the sprinklers because nobody told it that the lawn party had not ended. Then, while the guests scramble for the house, the robot could congratulate itself for completing every assignment on schedule.
The ultimate test will be whether a robot can recognize when an instruction should not be followed literally. Humans make those judgments without thinking. Machines will have to learn them, probably from the humans whose instructions were not as clear as they thought.
We Are a Long Way from Rosie
Rosie, the robot housekeeper on The Jetsons, could clean the house, manage the family, offer opinions, and apparently understand what everyone wanted without months of instruction. Nobody had to move the papers off the table before Rosie arrived.
We are still a long way from Rosie.
The first useful household robots will probably be apprentices rather than replacements. They will handle basic, repetitive jobs but need humans to teach them the exceptions. Over time, they may learn the property, the household, our preferences, and all the unwritten rules that make one home different from another.
Before my robot replaces the gardener, housekeeper, window washer, and car wash, I may need to hire all four of them to train it.
That training may turn out to be the most important part of making household robots useful. The machine must learn what we want, how we live, and when a correct instruction could produce a ridiculous result.
If my gardener and housekeeper are among its teachers, the robot had better understand Spanish.
Otherwise, I suppose I will have to learn.
In the meantime, I think my gardener’s job is safe.
