Last week I cleaned my house. And tomorrow I shall clean it again. As I do every Friday morning.

When my wife goes to the pool, that is, so neither of us will get in the other’s way. I start by sweeping the steps in front of the house (a townhouse, incidentally) taking care not to touch the flower bed. Next I go upstairs, vacuum the carpets, shake them a few times, and leave them hanging out of the window. Having moved aside various objects—chairs, coat racks, dustbins, etc—I vacuum the floor and wipe it with a wet rag. To make sure the rag is clean, I periodically put it in a pail full of water, take it out, and squeeze it until it stops dripping. That done, I take up paper towels and dust the furniture with two different liquids. One for wood, the other for glass. Then I go downstairs and repeat the procedure, more or less.

I have tried out some of the floor-sweeping robots available for sale today. None can do what I really need, which is to clean my rugs. Rugs that have tassels, mind you. Even if they could, I still would have to take the rugs out to the balcony so as to allow me to reach the stone tiles of the floor.

To be sure, I could vacuum the rugs first and take them out, leaving the robot to do the rest. Since the robot is rather slow, though, the entire operation would take considerably longer than it does today. I would find myself spending hours alternately getting up and sitting down to move rugs now here, now there. Furthermore, the robot could not wipe stains off the floor, as I do. Nor, that accomplished, could it take the rugs and put them back in their place.           

So what is the problem, someone would say? Throw away your rugs and install wall to wall carpeting. However, in a hot climate such as ours here in Israel carpets are hardly the ideal solution. Not to mention the fact that, compared with a carpeted room, a tiled one can be really cleaned.

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There are plenty of other things around the house robots cannot do either. Such as cleaning bathrooms with their taps and showers. Or making a bed. Or laying a table. Or taking away the plates and the cutlery after the meal. Or putting them into their place after the dishwasher has finished cleaning them. Or disposing of leftovers by moving them into smaller containers (the refrigerator only has limited capacity, doesn’t it?). Let alone cook one percent as well as my wife does.

With the exception of the last, all these are simple tasks anyone could do, they say. Tasks that do not require thought, they say. That is true enough; actually the fact that they do not require thought is one reason why I like doing them as much as I do. Once you get used to the work it is done almost automatically, allowing thought to roam where it will. A bit like runners’ high for old professors, I suppose.

Work that proceeds almost automatically without requiring thought? If so, why can’t robots do it? Hardly a day passes without us being told, not once but a thousand times over, that super-intelligent robots are coming. They are going to take over from us, making us superfluous. Should we try to stand in their way, they may even gird their loins—imagine a robot doing that—make war on us, destroy our species, and inherit the earth. Yet the same robots cannot do what my eleven year old grandson does easily enough—lay a table the way it should be laid?

As the example of the dishwasher shows, the problem is not to build machines capable of taking the place of humans in this or that capacity. That has been done for thousands of years past; at least, say, since the first water- or wind driven mill took the place of the hand-operated grindstones of old. Nor do I doubt that machines will take over additional tasks in the future. The problem, rather, is to have machines sufficiently versatile to take on a number of different tasks; one, for example, which will lay the table, sweep the carpet, and clean the bathroom as well. And which will continue to do so even when I move house.

Robots in their present state of development cannot even do what my eleven years old grandson—a highly intelligent little guy, let me add, with a good sense of humor and excellent social skills a—does not only easily but gracefully. Rebus sic stantibus, such being the situation, will anyone please explain why I, and you, should fear the coming singularity?