Marge from down the block brought over a plastic tub of lemon bars this morning, still warm, with powdered sugar dusting her cardigan. She immediately started raving about the future. Specifically, a startup in California that just unveiled a $3,555 household robot called the Flourish 1.
According to Marge, this rolling cylinder with arms is going to liberate us from domestic misery.
I looked it up while scraping hardened strawberry jam off the laminate counter. The machine stands three and a half feet tall, putters around on wheels, and wears an actual knit beanie. No, really. But here is the kicker: to get it to do a single chore, you have to train it yourself. You hold your smartphone and physically mime the task for thirty minutes. You slide your phone across the tabletop like a sponge to teach it how to wipe crumbs. You guide it like a bewildered toddler. Then the machine sits idle for an entire hour so its computer brain can 'process' what you just did.
An hour. To contemplate a dirty dishrag.
Then, once it digests the lesson, the company says it pulls off the chore with about an eighty-percent success rate. Eighty percent! If I only washed four out of every five dinner plates and shoved the greasy fifth one back into the cupboard, Arthur would have checked me into a sanatorium decades ago.
It also has a payload limit of 3.3 pounds—barely enough muscle to lift a carton of milk and a grapefruit. If someone drops a muddy work boot in the foyer, the machine just stares at it in existential ruin. Why on earth would anyone spend thirty-five hundred dollars to do a chore twice (first pretending with a smartphone, then sweeping up the mess when the robot fumbles) when you could just buy an extra-long reacher grabber tool for twelve dollars and save your back? The reacher tool does not require an hourly cloud subscription to recognize a slipper.
Call me stubborn, but my kitchen already has enough blinking appliances I quietly resent. We do not need motorized garbage cans with stage fright.
Would you ever pay thousands to spend half an hour teaching a machine how to pick up your laundry, or are we just inventing expensive ways to babysit plastic? Let me know in the comments.
P.S. If you click that grabber link and buy something, I might earn a few pennies to fund my coffee habit. Thanks for keeping Brenda afloat!
Originally published on Substack.
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