If you watch Oprah or spend anytime online then I’m sure you must’ve heard of the Roomba made by a company called iRobot. The’yre fancy little floor cleaning robots that you can buy and when they where first launched a few years ago they sold like crazy. I remember seeing one a few times on Oprah (no I don’t watch the show.).

What on earth made me write about them now? Well I was doing my normal browsing around when I read something about a robot called Looj – Gutter Cleaning Robot by iRobot.

Obviously this required further investigation, not because I feel gutter cleaning is something that I desperately need to do, but rather because I was curious what a gutter cleaning robot would look like. It doesn’t look anything like I thought it would, and unfortunately its not anything like the robots of science fiction, but it does look like it will do what its designed to do. I then got side tracked by the rest of the iRobot website, I didn’t realise that they made so many robots or that they built so many cleaning ones.

I know alot of people go on about how the machines will take over the world one day (Terminator or The Matrix style) but I have to admit that we’re probably along way off, I don’t think a Roomba or a Looj or any of its siblings are going to be particularly threatning any time soon. I won’t disagree that technology, computer power in particular, is growing at an impressive rate but its along way off taking over the world. A lot of us think that the machines are out to get us, evertime we’re stuck in a lift, a bank bounces a cheque due to “computer error” or the electronic doors at the super market nearly slice you in two but watching clips of little plastic things clean floors or brush out gutters I don’t see it happening anytime soon.