10 World-Changing Inventions People Thought Were Useless

7. Household Robotics

“...we will slide from housekeeping to being kept by our house.”Albert Borgmann, Real American Ethics, 2006

Okay, here we stray into that dangerous territory that we warned about earlier - predicting the future.

People are always wringing thier hands about the effects of new technology on the moral fibre of the population. Back in the 1950s, people were even worrying that the introduction of labour saving devices would render women obsolete.

Perhaps due to the now slightly naive predictions for the future made by Futurists in the mid-20th Century, people now view a lot of modern household technology as a little ridiculous and even lazy, forgetting that dishwashers and washing machines are already examples of robots doing chores for us about the house.

When the Roomba, the little robotic vacuum cleaner that bumbles around your home, was first released, people laughed and, despite being released back in 2002 and enjoying a certain amount of press attention, they're still often regarded as a bit of a novelty.

They are, however, a potential glimpse into the future of household robotics.

It turns out that creating a humanoid robot is much trickier than we thought it would be, and the possibility of anyone getting a ButlerBot 300 with arms and legs and a face any time soon is looking vanishingly slim. We are, however, seeing a trend for specialised droids, each with a different job in the home, as opposed to one big robot trying to do everything from folding the washing to making lasagne.

No one can really argue that washing machines have turned us all into amoral slobs, and no one would call them ridiculous, so why should it be any different for a robot that vacuums your carpets?