Tuesday’s International Herald Tribune had an interesting article on intelligent robots written by John Markoff. One sentence caught my eye:
“At Stanford University, for instance, computer scientists are developing a robot that can use a hammer and a screwdriver to assemble an Ikea bookshelf (a project beyond the reach of many humans) as well as tidy up after a party, load a dishwasher or take out the trash.”
I for one am not holding my breath. Nor am I holding the 4 screws and the little squiggly metal thingy left over from the assemblage of my last rickety Ikea bookshelf either.
If you don’t know it, Ikea is the holy grail of household furnishing stores for vacation home owners in Italy. When you buy a medieval house here-a relatively easy proposition compared to, say depositing money into a bank account or buying a Vespa-you are told firmly to get yourself to the nearest Ikea and furnish the sucker. I think there’s a law, but like many Italian laws, it seems you can sometimes obey just the ones that are important to you.
In any case, if you balk at the Ikea idea and aren’t immediately tossed into the slammer, you are labeled a renegade, a fraud. You can’t deny that every piece of furniture in every vacation house you’ve considered buying has been disgorged from an Ikea loading dock. You’ve imagined people spending many hundreds of thousands of Euros rebuilding a pile of rocks that was once an old farm house into a new but old-looking farm house, then balk at shelling out more than the few Euros Ikea wants for an assemble-it-yourself modern-looking bookshelf which will probably never be used to hold proper books. Still, conformity being what it is, you are quite likely to rent an expensive van and use its expensive gas to get to the nearest Ikea, if only to look. Maybe you shrug off the fact that whatever monstrosity Ikea presents to you is guaranteed to clash with the classic Tuscan renovation in which your Romanian contractor was forced to mix 60 types of paint before arriving at the exact tonality of the whitewash people used on their walls in the ’30s when they lived a classic although penniless life you admired from across the Atlantic and wished you could join—with money of course, and without having to slaughter your own pigs.
I imagine that soon the last hurdle for the nut brigade will be scissored; there will be a man’s man robot in the robot room of every Italian vacation house that will assemble whatever Ikea furniture his owner thinks is necessary before strapping on an apron and loading the dishwasher with those scratchy plates Ikea sells (yes, I did buy the plates and I’m sorry for the momentary lapse. Let us say that plates should not be finished like sandpaper. It ruins the knives and makes my teeth hurt to hear meat being cut).
Ok, maybe it’s just sour apples, but I’d like to think that some day the Ikea-assembling robots will gather in the local bar after work, to snicker over the furniture that their English-speaking masters have asked them to screw together. Eventually they’d have it down to the model numbers. One would say, “09867523!” and the others would guffaw over the dissonant ugliness of the tacky birch bookcase wobbling on the worn paving stones next to the 16th century carved stone fireplace. Then a beer would be spilled and Electro-Jeeves-36 would come to the rescue, filling the stunned silence by jovially recounting, “763987309!”
Now that would be intelligent innovation. Especially if 36 cleaned up the beer.