A satirical response to Amazon's 2021 announcement of “Astro,” a household robot that reviewers described as still searching for a use case. The piece introduces a fictional competing product, the “Rumi-Ba,” from a fictional company (“WhimsiCo Robotics”) — a robot that wanders the home surprising its owner with random passages of Sufi poetry rather than surveillance footage. A tongue-in-cheek comparison table pits the Rumi-Ba against Astro and against David^8 (the android from Alien: Covenant), contrasting poetic delight, corporate data-harvesting, and android menace.
Beneath the humor, the piece pokes at real questions about what home robots are actually for, whose interests they serve (the owner's or the manufacturer's), and what it might look like to design technology aimed at human flourishing rather than data collection.
@misc{amer2022robotsoul,
author = {Amer, Ahmed},
title = {A Robot for Your Soul},
year = {2022},
month = jun,
day = {1},
howpublished = {Internet Ethics Blog, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University},
url = {https://www.scu.edu/ethics/internet-ethics-blog/a-robot-for-your-soul-/}
}