Artificial-stupidity powered robot vacuum

[oznl]

I have one of those Deebot “Omni X2” robot vacuums.

It claims to be AI powered.  It certainly does seem to be iterative.  The more it “learns”, the worse it gets.  It does explain what it's doing sometimes but I think it might make more sense in Mandarin.

Each week it finds some strange and novel way of disabling itself during the cleaning cycle.  This week I found it had flattened its’ battery infinitely trying to hump the first bar stool base it encountered on the way out of its' dock: unrequited love for robots.

It will studiously clean part of the kitchen floor three times but never the rest of it.

It takes 2.5 hours+ to not actually clean our house.  In elapsed time, it’s actually a lot longer than this because after the first 1.5 hours, it flattens its’ battery, goes and recharges for a couple of hours only to wakes again during the night to “finish” after we’ve forgotten about it frightening the daylights out of us.

If this is the state of Chinese AI then I’d be fascinated to see what those dog-robots featured on this week’s Chinese military parade actually do: presumably leap of the tanks carrying them and spend the next 2 hours blundering into irrelevant objects without accomplishing anything until their battery’s go flat.