The Dumbest Intelligence

Newsletter 2026-02-02

Every few years, I attempt to outsource the worst tasks in my life to robots. Right on cue, those robots let me down. I’ve owned numerous automated vacuums. Every single one failed to clean my floor but succeeded at getting stuck under furniture in spots where I couldn’t see it. If their job was to play hide and seek, I would have no complaints. When not wedged under a couch, they sometimes died in the middle of the floor, overwhelmed by the amount of debris they were expected to haul away. It’s a machine, not a miracle worker. Even our mechanical overlords can’t be expected to keep up with the messes my kids produce. It’s been several years since I owned my last robot vacuum. Saturday, I visited my brother-in-law, Jerry, who always has the latest and greatest of everything. He has the newest model of domestic floor robot, which not only vacuums but also mops. It had laser range finders and video cameras to avoid getting stuck and the ability to self-empty when it became too full. Supposedly, technology had overcome every previous limitation that made my home too harsh of an environment for robots to survive. I was tempted to buy this new model. That proves once and for all the machines might be getting smarter, but I’m not.

Artificial intelligence is good for more than cleaning floors these days. It’s also great at making people lose their jobs. Given the state of technology today, if I were going to college as an incoming freshman, I don’t know what I would major in. It would be hard to be more wrong than I was back in 2003. I chose to double major in English creative writing for a career and history for fun. In place of the SAT, colleges should screen out applicants by their chosen field of study. If you choose English, you’re too dumb for higher education. I chose failure as a career path. My goal was to write for a newspaper, which I did for about a year after college. I quickly noticed that the internet would soon make all of us unemployed. I bailed before the mass layoffs, but not by much. If you ever read an article about reporters losing their jobs, you’ll see a bunch of gleeful commenters who say those journalists should “learn to code.” Ironically, coders are now also losing their jobs thanks to technology. For better or for worse (okay, definitely for worse), software companies are replacing human employees with AI. Neither the humanities nor STEM fields are safe career paths. Neither is skipping college to be a janitor now that robot vacuums are getting better. Not even McDonald’s is a safe bet now that the company is using AI chatbots to run the drive thru. Instead of picking a different major, I would need to pick an entirely different type of college. I bet McDonald’s still needs a human to play the clown.

The worst part is that the artificial intelligence taking these jobs isn’t actually intelligent. It’s a plagiarism machine that fills in the blanks to predict what word should come next in a string of text. I’d like to say I’ve never used it, but like almost everybody, I have a boss. Writing is my side gig. For a day job, I long ago pivoted away from the creative arts and into a string of standard office roles that paid a living wage. In that setting, I’ve been told to use AI to take something long and turn it into something short. That’s a situation where AI excels. It can plagiarize big things into small things faster than any human ever could. It’s usually for an email that I don’t want to write that’s being sent to someone who doesn’t want to read it. Chances are the person on the other end will use an AI reply. It’s just robots talking to robots. The mark of inefficiency in business used to be a meeting that could have been an email. Now it’s an email that should have been nothing. The true sign of intelligence is the words you don’t say. If I could just shut up, I’d be the smartest man in the world.

All artificial intelligence is fake intelligence, but some fake intelligence is more fake than others. The worst offenders are smart appliances, which are getting dumber by the day. I’m not talking about the aforementioned robot vacuums, which use technology to engage in complex problem solving. (Seriously, my dirty home might be the hardest problem in the world.) I’m referring, instead, to the devices that use “smart” as a euphemism for showing ads. There was a fridge that recently made headlines for displaying ads on the door unless you paid a subscription fee to make it stop. It’s a sad day when you have to pay not to be extorted by the metal box that keeps your food cold. I thought that scenario might have been an outlier, but it seems like all appliances are going that way. A few months ago, I helped my father-in-law remove his double oven, which had died. The new one has a completely unnecessary LED screen. Currently, it shows pretty landscape pictures. It’s only a matter of time until those are replaced with targeted ads based on what my in-laws cook. If they do it right, the ads should all be for heartburn and cholesterol medicine. If your food isn’t killing me yet, it needs more butter.

Not all intelligent devices are merely delivery vehicles for ads. Some of them are gaining the ability to kill. A mad scientist had the great idea to give a Roomba a knife. Now, robot lawn mowers are commercially available products doing real work in the real world. I know two people who have them. I don’t need one because I have my own intelligent lawn mowers. My pet pigs are still smarter than any robot on the market—and more functional, too. They’re combination lawn mowers and garbage disposals. We never throw away food anymore. In this house, the three Rs are reduce, reuse, and return to the yard as poop. Lawn mowers might not leave gross droppings all over your lawn, but they have other drawbacks. My friend’s system got struck by lightning. It sent a surge of electricity through the dock and back into his house, where it caused thousands of dollars in damage. If my automatic lawn mowers got struck by lightning, I wouldn’t have property damage; I’d have bacon. Everyone should own a small herd of pigs.

Photo by Yarbo Global on Unsplash

The real chores I want robots and their AI brains to take over are still too complex for machines to handle. The holy grail for automation designers is folding laundry. It’s a simple but annoying task for a human being with fingers and a brain. For a robot, it’s nearly impossible. Every article of clothing is slightly different, making the process a nightmare to automate. Rather than figuring out the right form of origami for your favorite sweater, it would be simpler for the robots to wipe out the human race. That explains the machine uprising in Terminator 2. I haven’t given our mechanical brethren a chance to lodge that particular grievance against me. I kept machines out of a job by resorting to good old fashioned child labor. My kids can’t wipe out humanity—yet. We’re all in trouble if they ever stop being so small.

Most of the laundry process is already automated. No one is going to a river to beat their clothes on rocks anymore. If you do, it’s out of anger rather than utility. I have a few shirts that could use a beating. Outside of that, laundry is a set-it-and-forget-it process. At least it used to be. Now, my washing machine sends me texts when it’s done. It’s eager to shame me for leaving wet laundry in there too long. If it were ten percent more automated, it would take out the wet laundry itself and put it in the dryer. Until technology reaches that point, I’ll rely on my kids. If I’m away from home when I get the alert, I text my family’s group chat to tell whoever is there to move the laundry. It takes all of two minutes to do. My kids react like I told them to do the seven labors of Hercules. I get it. When I was a child, my mom washed and folded all of my clothes. All I had to do was take those folded clothes and put them away in my room. I still put off that task for days or weeks at a time. The table in the basement beside the washer and dryer became my default dresser. The first rule of parenting is that, no matter how little you ask your kids to do, it’s still too much. Perhaps kicking off the robot apocalypse really is the easier alternative.

I’m a meaner parent than my mom was. I expect my kids to fold their own laundry. I folded it all myself for a while, but it was a disaster. The sizes on the tags don’t necessarily dictate which article of clothing belongs to who. There’s a network of trades and negotiations concerning what has been passed down to who and what has been retained even though it’s now too small. Now, I make them claim and fold their own clothes. It stopped them from fighting with me but increased their fighting with each other. The conflicts don’t stop once the piles of unsorted laundry are separated. What should be four solo activities performed in separate rooms of the house somehow involves extensive verbal sparring and hand-to-hand combat. The real reason machines can’t take over folding laundry isn’t because they can’t fold, but because they’re not smart enough to fight correctly. Robots have mastered total passivity and total war but have failed to grasp the verbal bickering and somewhat harmful wrestling stages in between.

Ultimately, that same laundry issue will likely prevent me from trying out the latest and greatest robot vacuum. Jerry said that the robot with the world’s most advanced sensor package has trouble detecting objects that lie completely flat, like socks. That’s the number one obstacle in this house. Percentage wise, more of my floor is covered by socks than carpet. Before the robot could vacuum, I’d have to make my kids pick up. If I’m already in task master mode cruelly making them do a simple chore for the benefit of the family, I might as well make them vacuum as well. It’s like jumping into a cold pool. After the initial shock of making everyone unhappy, I get used to the unpleasantness. It’s easier to keep swimming than to get out. If there were a robot vacuum that could pick up socks, that would be a different story. It wouldn’t have to fold them. It could just shoot them at the nearest child. I would gladly pay extra for that feature.

My kids are growing up in a totally different world than I did, yet some things have changed so much that they’re coming full circle. When I was in college, only a few classes let us do our essay tests in the computer lab. Most required us to write by hand. Given my handwriting, it’s a miracle I did so well. Actually, maybe that explains my performance. Professors couldn’t read what I wrote, so they gave me the benefit of the doubt. I was the human version of “TLDR.” Now, due to the threat of AI cheating, some teachers are going back to hand written tests. My kids have better penmanship than me, so they should be fine as far as grades go. But once they ace school, I’m not sure what comes next. All the writing, coding, janitorial, and drive-thru jobs are gone. Maybe they could have a career in disabling unnecessary appliance screens that do nothing but show ads. My father-in-law could be their first client.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James