Swedish hackers have put together the GåågleBot: "a 'home crawler' consisting of a vacuum roomba with an on board webserver and camera. While the vacuum goes about its business, it extracts text from the images it takes. The text is later put in a database on the roomba and searchable through a web interface."
The idea is that you release this thing and it crawls your house and indexes everything that has text on it. Later, you can google your house, asking the index to find you books, groceries, CDs — anything with a label.
Lots of people have written to me to tell me that this reminds them of the roommateware I wrote about in my novel Makers, and I can see what they mean. But to my mind, the science fiction that this most strongly evokes is Paul Ford's Robot Exclusion Protocol, one of the funniest and most prescient bits of technospeculation I've ever read (go read it now, it's short and you'll thank me).
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