It is a marvel to me, after a lifetime of disavowing all gender differences but the most obvious, how much boys like robots. I've no interest in robots, unless they're on the telly, and they can do everything a human can, only 10 times better, and when they're Arnold Schwarzenegger painted silver. Even then, my engagement is fractional.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the men of the household fell upon these items like they were something you could eat. We had: a robot dog, even though there is a perfectly good regular dog; a tiny robot man, whose skills are implausibly limited; a robot vacuum cleaner, even though the business of vacuuming has never set light to even the tiniest flare of spirit; and a robot football duo, easily the least sophisticated of the robot brigade, really just two remote-controlled hillocks of plastic, each very slightly equipped to kick a very small plastic ball into a plastic net.
This was enjoyable, like playing table football without having to break into a tiny, tiny sweat. It is to table football, effort wise, what darts is to javelin throwing. Though when you watch darts, its players do, obscurely, seem to sweat quite a lot. You could play with the footie robots all night, unless you happen to be rubbish at it, and can't work out which way is forwards, in which case you'll tire fast, and the words "let's start a tournament" will fill you with derision. The little robots are fun to send across your floor, with the remote.
Let's be clear - they can't do anything at all, apart from backwards, forwards, sideways, the other sideways. The notion of a robot as a time-saving device is flagrantly ludicrous in the face of these nuggets, unless you already happen to waste a lot of time racing snails. They take direction better than snails.
The robot man, though technically more advanced, saved even less time. It can't actually do anything, apart from dance in an amusing way, though it ruined the amusement by saying, "I can't believe I did that!" at the end of the dance, which made it sound altogether too self-aware, like a precocious child doing an Irish jig. It will also flinch if you mime punching it in the face.
A slightly human feature is that, when you try and get it out of its box, it wriggles. Apparently, it burps - this is only hearsay, though. We never heard it burp. I guess you'd have to feed it something indigestible before you'd hear a proper burp. It can grab light items, such as a packet of fags and, at a pinch, a drink - hilarious! Look, I'm corrupting my robot! Next I'm going to put it in a funny position where it looks like it's having sex with a chair.
It reclines backwards until it's fallen over, whereupon it can get back up again. Phenomenal abs, you say, until you realise that it has no abs, it's just a robot. What can I say? This totally sucks. Some more boys, also with more passing interest in robots, said this is just a development stage - they're working on a robot that is a lot more like Arnold Schwarzenegger and in the meantime, they release products featuring small advances just to cover their costs.
Now, we need to talk about this dog. As the only robot with any real-life usefulness (unkind parents, fakely satiating the offspring demand for a pet with this non-pet), this is also the most expensive, coming in at two grand or thereabouts. There is something incredible about how dog-like this thing is - in the way it moves, the way it nuzzles into things that show it any affection, the way it wags its funny plastic tail, the jut of its doggy chin.
Even in its totally synthetic embodiment, featuring nothing of the soft and fluffy experience you'd associate with a dog, it is more dog-like even than a toy made of real dog skin. It totally messes with your understanding of sensory experience, and of visual recognition - what we think we know by "dog", I mean, is nothing like what we actually know. It's neither visual nor tactile; it's all in the gestures. And in turn, this screws with your understanding of wordless affection; you can scratch a dog on the chin, it will wag, or similar, and you get a sense of cross-species understanding, of oneness with the world, of the purity and sincerity of unmediated physicality. And then you scratch a bloody robot on the chin, and it wags its tail as well, and you get the same warm feeling, before you check yourself, and suddenly, everything is meaningless, and we're all just flotsam in a loveless world. No offence to the robot, but this feels like a shame.
Anyway, Aibo (for that is his given name) is a Japanese dog, with freakishly good English in an American accent. He has a memory of 128 megabites; this is way more than a regular dog, apparently.
Now, there are features of Aibo that are distinctly undoglike. He can speak, for a start. And he can also walk backwards. But so doglike is he otherwise, that when he does these things it flummoxes you, rather than making you think, "well, obviously, he's a robot". So, five minutes in, he says "you haven't named me yet!", and instead of thinking about it, and naming him something very droll like a swearword or a historical dictator, you panic, and think "what's a dog's name? What?" and then you call him Spot, which is coincidentally the same name as your existing dog, and this spawns an ongoing fight between the two dogs to do your bidding which, despite the real-life dog not knowing how to dance, or take pictures, or store music, continues until such time as the robot dog goes to sleep.
Then the real dog goes to sleep as well. He's exhausted; he's been trying to dance, when he doesn't know what it means. Spot the Second, in the end, is a bit too assertive. He says things like, "give me your hand", when any fool knows that correct protocol is for the human of the equation to say "give me your paw".
From a scissor-paper-stone point of view, the vacuum won hands down. It frightened the real dog; it obstructed the robot dog; it knocked over the robot man. And it sucked up components of the robot football, which discomforted me, partly because it would interfere with play, and partly lest I start some new variant of mad cow disease. You charge up the little mite, and send it on its way. There is a kind of force field you can set up, whereby it ignores areas you don't want vacuumed. Otherwise, it trundles about the floor, sweeping until it meets an obstruction, then scooching off in the opposite direction.
Where it falls down compared with human endeavour is that it can't tell which bits it's already done, so it's not unusual to see it disappearing under an oven, emerging with a chip on its head, and then disappearing back under, like the movement pattern of one of those rats that gets fed ecstasy to see how mental it goes. I'm sentimentalising the thing, I know. I feel very fond of it. My floor is extremely clean.
The conclusion, I think, is that, with robot technology being what it is, you'll get the most satisfaction from things with very narrow job remits. You want something to suck dust, you got it; you want something to mimic human company, you generally don't got it. The dog is something of an anomaly here, but given the choice, I'd still keep the real dog.
Mr Soccer robot football (two robots, football boots, football and goalposts), £34.95, from Firebox (0870 241 4289; firebox.com).
Robosapien V2 £199.95, from Firebox, as before.
Aibo ERS-7M3 £1,699, from Sony (0870 511 1999; sony.co.uk). Roomba vacuum cleaner £189.98, from Empire Direct (0870 120 1122; empiredirect.co.uk)
