I understand that domestic employment for positions ranging from butler to valet to cook to gardener
is booming but some people aren't able to afford servants.
For them there are robots.*
From Popular Mechanics:
Unwilling to waste one more sunny Saturday mowing, PopMech Senior
Tech Editor Glenn Derene tests the new breed of grass-cutting robots.
For some people, mowing the lawn is a
meditative experience—a chance to tune out while getting a little
exercise walking behind the lawnmower, inhaling the scent of freshly cut
grass. It's good old-fashioned domestic man's work, like your father
did before you, his father before him, and so on. Well, not me. I hate
mowing the lawn. It's a numbingly repetitive, sweaty, noisy waste of
time. My
father hated it too. And I'm pretty sure his dad did before him.
Tell you what I do like, though: robots—love 'em! In fact, I would
gleefully surrender every thankless bit of home landscaping to an
automaton. So I decided to see if I could piece together a system
wherein my lawn essentially would take care of itself. Yes, I could have
hired a landscaping crew, but to me that was a dodge. I didn't want to
pass off my dirty work to someone else. That's the beauty of robots—one
day they may take over the world, but for now, they get the grunt work.
PM editor Glenn Derene with his son Owen and their
lawnmowing robot.
And, it's worth mentioning, I wanted a beautiful lawn—green, lush,
carpetlike—something my family and I could really roll around on during a
midsummer day. I just didn't want to sweat for it. The good news is
that, for mowing, there's already a robot solution—a couple of them, in
fact. Honda sells the Miimo; a company called LawnBott offers a variety
of, well, lawn bots; and Friendly Robotics has a bunch of really
friendly looking mowing robots. All of these systems seem pretty similar
and promise essentially the same thing: to tame your turf with a
minimum of human oversight.
I called up Husqvarna, a company with a long history in the grasscutting
biz. Husqvarna also has deep experience with robotic lawnmowers; it
introduced the first consumer model in 1995. Now it sells two: the
Automower 230 ACX ($2700) and the Automower 265 ACX ($3700). A few weeks
after my call, I got a big box with a 265 ACX and an appointment with
company representatives Quinn Derby and Gent Simmons. They arrived a few
days later, surveyed my postage-stamp-size lawn, looked at the box from
their company, and concluded that the 265 was complete overkill. But
the machine was there, so they decided to install it anyway....
MORE
* I couldn't resist the supercilious tone. Sorry.
Here's
The Guardian:
Who wants to serve a billionaire?
The rich are getting richer – and that means jobs on superyachts for
those who can meet their employer's every whim. But first trainees must
learn how to fold a towel ...
"...At the more arcane end of the spectrum are the people who staff
superyachts, who need to be equipped with discretion, servility and good
ironing skills..."
