Just a quick note on my business plan to invent bathroom cleaning robots. As soon as I invent a truly effective and inexpensive bathroom cleaning robot, everybody in the world will buy one and I will be the richest person in the world.

The Philadelphia Inquirer had a recent article called Why household robot servants are a lot harder to build than robotic vacuums and automated warehouse workers. Granted, cleaning a bathroom is really hard on a human body, especially one that is getting older. But why would you assume a robot that looks or acts like a human would be the way to do this. I picture something more like a swarm of ants that can pick up individual pieces of yuck, drop them in a pile somewhere, and then go back to their charger pad. Or maybe spiders. Too creepy? Well, just make them look like little seashells or something not creepy. Why is this so hard?

You could also approach the problem from the other end – designing bathrooms and kitchens that are more appropriate and accessible for robots. Come to think of it, bathrooms and kitchens are not all that appropriate and accessible for humans as it is. This whole thing could use a rethink. All surfaces should be completely impermeable and able to be hosed down. Instead of moving dishes from dishwashers, to sinks, to cabinets, and back again five times a day, all these things should just be one thing. You put dirty dishes in a cabinet, shut the door, open the door next morning, and you have clean dry dishes. Every dish would go in the same spot every time, and robots could handle this. Robots could also reorder peanut butter when the jar is half full, and eggs when they are half gone. For that matter, packaging could be completed redesigned to make more sense for robots as well as humans. Packaging is a big part of our environmental and waste problems in our so-called modern world.

Paraphrasing a cartoon I saw making fun of Elon Musk (but can’t seem to find again), “I come up with the brilliant ideas, and all I ask you idiots to do is make them happen!”