Robotic Cleaning Devices

Robotic Cleaning Devices

   Have you ever thought of looking into one of those new ‘Robotic’ carpet sweepers? They sound really interesting, and an  evaluation I read gave a good report on the abilities of these little helpers.

   What I found most interesting in the article (besides the technical abilities of the machine) was the anthropomorphizing so frequently used throughout the article. Several times the author referred to the robot as ‘he’. It is interesting how quickly we can give attributes to a machine, whether it be ‘she’ for a ship, or ‘he’ for a little machine.

   This thought brought back the old joke that centers around what gender a computer is. In many languages, the Latin and Germanic language groups for instance, you use a gender word to describe any object. In Spanish this is La for a ‘female’ item, i.e. ‘La Mesa‘ is ‘the table‘, and ‘El Diablo‘ is ‘The Devil‘.  Is a computer ‘El Computor‘, or is it ‘La Computor‘? German would be ‘Der Komputor‘, or ‘Die Komputor‘, depending on the gender decided by society.

   Here we have the reasons computers are male or female, depending on a person’s reference point:

Gender and Computers

Top nine reasons computers must be male:

1. They have a lot of data but are still clueless.

2. A better model is always just around the corner.

3. They look nice and shiny until you bring them home.

4. It is always necessary to have a backup.

5. They’ll do whatever you say if you push the right buttons.

6. The best part of having either one is the games you can play.

7. The lights are on but nobody’s home.

8. Big power surges knock them out for the night.

9. Size does matter

Top nine reasons computers must be female:

1. Picky, picky, picky.

2. They hear what you say, but not what you mean.

3. Beauty is only shell deep.

4. When you ask what’s wrong, they say “nothing”.

5. Can produce incorrect results with alarming speed.

6. Always turning simple statements into big productions.

7. Smalltalk is important.

8. You do the same thing for years, and suddenly it’s wrong.

9. They make you take the garbage out.

   I don’t know what the scholars ever decided. Perhaps the issue is still being debated.