Neato Botvac 80 (Refurbished)

  • Keep your house spotless with this robotic indentured servant
  • Schedule cleanings for what you’re gone, or push a button and watch the little robot dance – dance, we say!
  • Eliminate dust, pet hair, and other floor dirt stuff
  • Includes charging base, charge cord, combo brush, high performance filter, side brush, battery (pre-installed, and also brand new), boundary marker, and something else … oh yeah, a robot vacuum
  • Give it any name you choose, including Gertrude, Tabatha, Francisco, Earl, and Mr. Roboto
  • Model: 945-0135 (There’s no better way to ensure your model number faces stiff search result competition than giving it the same format as a freaking phone number)
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Welcome to the age of robotics!

That’s what we would have said over 10 years ago when we first sold a robotic vacuum (under another monosyllabic nonsense name). At the time it seemed like home automation robots were on the verge of ubiquity. If robots could automatically vacuum our carpets, after all, what couldn’t they do?

Not much, it turns out. In the intervening decade we’ve experienced the rise of the smartphone, the advent of machine learning, and the development of the self-driving car. But if you’re buying a robot for your home, it’s probably still one that sweeps up crumbs.

After the moon landing, everybody thought we’d be visiting Mars in the near future, then colonizing it. Epcot Center stands as a weird/cute/sad testament to this belief. But we didn’t send a human to Mars in the following decades, nor do we have any (real) plan to anytime soon, unless you believe ol’ Musky. The “Space Age” was a dud.

Robotics are still advancing, for sure. Earlier this week Alibaba CEO and martian Jack Ma suggested we stop training workers for manufacturing jobs since robots would soon be taking that over. But we don’t hear much about new robots for the home anymore. Turns out that smartphone manufacturing is an easier process to automate than cleaning the bathroom.

Does that mean you shouldn’t buy a robotic vacuum? On the contrary! For one thing, these vacuums may be the only robots we get to own in our lifetime, so you should seize the opportunity to own a little electronic servant. For another thing, we’re selling one today so of course we think you should buy one.

And 10 years from now we’ll likely look back at 2017 as an adorably bright-eyed period of technological optimism:

“How cute — they thought VR was going to catch on!”

“Isn’t it quaint they thought self-driving cars would ever work?”

“How naive of them to think their robot vacuums wouldn’t rise up and enslave humanity!”

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