On meeting the first robot of Spring

When do we get signals of the future?

I got such a signal this week. I was travelling for business and, as I walked through the airport terminal, I met a robot. Well, perhaps met is too strong a word. I was looking for the check-in desk and it was cleaning the floor. We weren’t introduced and we didn’t talk to each other. But it was definitely a robot: it was about as high as my waist, it was moving around autonomously, and it had a complicated configuration of wheels and brushes at floor level. I know that vacuuming and cleaning robots have been around for some time, but those little hockey pucks somehow never quite felt worthy of the name robot: they didn’t have the heft and presence of the science fiction robots of my youth. This was a proper robot: big enough that it occupied the same space as humans. I hoped that its collision detection was working properly.