Happenings: AgTech Alchemy will be hosting an AgTech Alchemy: The Whole Hog event on July 22, 2025 around Tech Hub Live. We have 7-8 startups signed up and expect more than 50 people to show up.
Roombas and Rough Edges
In last week’s SFTW Plus edition, we looked at Amara’s law and how technology gets adopted. It is also important to compare any new technology to the existing best in class option available, whether it is a human or not, rather than expecting the new technology to be perfect. It is important to understand what is the benchmark to compare the new technology against.
This is especially true, when technology can be used as a substitute for some human capability like motor skills, or intelligence (with GenAI).
When the first Roombas came out, I was super excited that finally we would have a very clean house for little to no effort! We went out and bought one of the earlier versions of the Roomba.
We quickly realized for all the coolness of it bouncing around on the floor, there were many edge cases which it did not work really well with. For example, if you had a small object lying on the floor or had a room corner with some tight spaces, the Roomba would either get stuck or stop working because something got stuck in its cleaning mechanism.
So before starting the Roomba, one had to go around, adjust some furniture, close certain doors, and make sure there was nothing lying on the floor, which could disable the Roomba. Even before starting the Roomba, one had to make sure you had emptied out the trash holder on it from your previous run. The original Roomba’s very dumb. They would wildly bounce around like a drunk sailor. You hoped it covered 100% of your accessible floor area.
The newer Roombas (I use a brand called Shark) have solved some of the problems. Now you can let the Roomba map your house and you can instruct the Roomba to only clean the living room. You can schedule the Roomba to start at a certain time. The Roombas can now automatically go and empty the trash holder into another larger bin once it is filled. The battery life is better.
But you still have to prepare your room by picking up small objects and making sure the room is accessible which you want the Roomba to clean.
Any new technology has rough edges and we require humans to smooth out those rough edges to get the most out of the technology.
In fact, early on when the technology is still not mature and fully developed, you might actually end up spending more time and effort to make it work and give the technology developers an opportunity to improve it.
Rough edges with GenAI
One of the areas where GenAI seems to have the biggest impact is software engineer productivity. I have heard people say,
Do not study computer science, as your job will be eliminated. Everyone will be vibe-coding.