🤖I dictated this article to an LLM as part of my Writing with Robots series.

At some point in the last thirty years, we all quietly began living with robots. Not the humanoid helpers that science fiction promised—no chrome butlers pouring tea or metallic nannies supervising the kids—but the kind of robots that sneak in from the clearance aisle in Best Buy. 

The first one?

Your printer. 

Crack open a home printer and you’ll find everything a robotics lab dreams about: precision servos, stepper motors, moving parts sliding in perfect coordination, sensors aligning things down to a couple microns. 

Give it an abstract command—this document, please—and the machine takes it from there. It autonomously translates instructions into real-world actions, manipulating ink, rollers, and paper until it produces a tangible object that occasionally resembles the desired file. 

We already have Star Trek replicators — they just only know how to make Word documents. But they’re undeniably robots. Stationary ones (har!). 

Then came the Roomba. The first consumer-grade robot that moved not just internally, but across the landscape of your home. It rolled, it sensed, it plotted its path, and it did physical work in the world. Like the printer, it was miraculous in theory, comical in practice.

Which is the real story of home robotics: great in theory, dreadful in execution.

Printers jam. They eat paper, smear ink, and emit incomprehensible blinking hieroglyphs when displeased. The world’s most dreaded tech interview question remains: Can you fix the printer?—a question that would have stumped the founders of Hewlett-Packard themselves. Decades later, despite billions invested in R&D, the problem remains unsolved, alongside the receding hairlines of a generation of IT departments. 

Roombas, too, with twenty years of iteration, still require military-grade navigation systems to avoid choking on socks and power cords. They’ve gone from mildly amusing novelty to serious investment—thousands of dollars for the top-line models, bristling with sensors and LIDAR—but the results are still fragile. The most advanced robot vacuum mop on earth is still handily outperformed by Gary, the janitor with a push broom. 

The Roomba has better sensors (Gary lost an eye while crossing the border) and probably a higher IQ. But no, Gary will never happily smear a nice fresh dog turd across your living room floor in a precise pattern (DO NOT GOOGLE THIS, I BEG OF YOU). 

This is the reality of robotics: the first 90% is easy, the last 10% takes forever. Home robots do work, but only sort of. They deliver enormous value but remain error-prone, high-maintenance, and hilariously brittle when confronted with the chaotic mess of the physical world.

And yet—we keep them. Printers have been infuriating us since the 1980s, but no one is giving theirs up. The companies selling these machines remain stubbornly profitable, because even a deeply annoying robot is still worth it if it saves you a trip to the copy shop. Robot vacuums, too, continue to multiply, trailing dog hair in their wake. They’re imperfect, but useful enough to be tolerated.

Which tells us something about the future of home robotics. We won’t wake up one day to Rosie the Robot ironing our shirts and preparing breakfast. Instead, our homes will slowly fill with machines like printers and Roombas: brilliant at 90%, hopeless at 10%, and forever just good enough that we begrudgingly keep them around.

The robot future is already here. It’s jammed in the printer tray.

Ready to see what it can do to your kitchen?