One of my favorite ways to troll roboticists is to claim, very loudly, that “a dishwasher is a robot”. It’s a great litmus test for how a given person will see the industry because it uncovers an uncomfortable taxonomic void that we haven’t yet resolved as a people.

Let me start by explaining how a dishwasher is, by many definitions, a robot. ISO 8373 tells us that a robot is generally a “programmed actuated mechanism with a degree of autonomy to perform locomotion, manipulation, or positioning”. Well, looking at my dishwasher at home, we’ve got:

• Programmed – I can select various modes that I’d like the dishwasher to run in. I have cats and a husband, so my dishwasher generally stays in “heavy / extra hot”. My dad’s has a cycle gentle enough to run Grandma Mae’s gilded china in.
• Actuated mechanism(s) – Water pumps, heating elements, fans, sprayers, there’s lots of actuated components here.
• Degree of autonomy – I can set it and forget it. My dishwasher can operate without me and make decisions to heat water, to what temperature, when to release soap, when the dishes are sufficiently rinsed, and so on.
• Performs manipulation – The systems out there these days are amazing. Complex multi-jet arms, spinning discs, adaptive sprayers, smart soap release mechanisms… it’s a whole thing.

Add on the subclass of a service robot, defined as performing useful tasks for humans or equipment in personal or professional use (eg, “cleaning”), and we’ve nailed it.

So why don’t we think of our dishwashers this way? Or our refrigerators, laundry machines, or an entire building?

Because they became so familiar that we only notice them when they’re missing. Dishwashers ceased being seen as robots the moment people stopped calling over their neighbors to marvel at the new technological doodad they purchased and started getting annoyed when their apartments didn’t include them. It’s the best destiny of any technology: to become invisible, reliable infrastructure. Robots become appliances the moment they achieve ubiquity.

And here’s how you know that a technology has achieved ubiquity: we build around it. Kitchen designs accommodate fridges, stoves, dishwashers, and now microwaves with dedicated spaces and utilities. Your home has heating and cooling infrastructure threaded throughout in the forms of sensors, ducts, compressors, humidifiers, and heaters. And we’ve flattened neighborhoods, carved tunnels, and created elaborate fueling networks for the automobile. By our own definition our homes, neighborhoods, and cities are robots we’ve never bothered to name.

Which extends the original definition into meaninglessness, if we were to rely solely on a technical definition. By pushing the assumed boundary to the extreme, we’ve uncovered the real divide that angers roboticists worldwide: conflating the technical work of the word “robot” with the cultural work it’s doing. Technically, a dishwasher is indeed a robot. But culturally, it’s an appliance.

A technical definition provides a model of what a thing could be classified as for the purposes of figuring out which rules ought to apply to it. Straightforward, simple, and entirely useless for the cultural work that a word needs to do. As human beings, we use the word robot colloquially as an othering term for new technologies. These othered technologies are new, strange, scary, and threatening, here to take your place in society and knock you down a few rungs economically and socially. Once the othered technologies become familiar, and we see that they’re net benefits and not the destroyers that we thought they were[1], they earn names of their own.

So take a look at what we still call robots: they’re strange new worlds of technology, early in their journeys within our societies. Roombas are mid-journey: familiar and approachable enough that they’ve begun to be anthropomorphized with names, attributed personalities, and even microfic[2]. Dishwashers have completed their journey to ubiquity as appliances.

All great robots eventually take their place as a named appliance. Dishwashers just got there first.

[1] – Of course, excluding when such “others” are used as socioeconomic weapons, but that’s a discussion for another time.
[2] – See the ever-growing body of work on “Captain Stabby”.