When we look at Kobi, we abandon all doubts previously held toward the ethical implications of humans marrying robots. We never truly understood what it meant to love until we met an adorable autonomous robot that mulches our garden, clears dead leaves, and blows snow into a wintery oblivion.
Consider this: the latest American Time Use Survey estimates that the average American tragically loses around 70 hours every year meant for drinking lemonade, hot chocolate, and beer. The culprit that quietly steals the equivalent of two whole work weeks? Lawn and garden care.
Just how do these everyday Americans spend those two weeks instead? Kicking Mother Earth in the vagina. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that refueling yard equipment dumps almost 17 million gallons of spilled fuel into the environment annually. That’s a higher yearly volume than the amount of oil the Exxon Valdez crapped into Prince William Sound. On top of that, air pollution produced each year by gas-powered lawn mowers accounts for roughly 5 percent of all pollutants spewed into the air across the U.S.
This is what we’ve chosen instead of trusting our yard work to a fully electric robot. In the name of ruining the planet and not drinking, we risk joining the hundreds of hapless idiots every year who lose toes, fingers, hands, and even lives in accidents while tending to their lawns.
Kobi, on the other hand, snacks on danger and dines on death. This brave little bot has three separate compartments tailored to mulching grass, collecting leaves, and clearing snow. It will even warn you to brace yourself in a timely fashion when its connected weather alerts inform it that winter is coming. When the flakes do finally fall, Kobi will remove it in small quantities even as it covers the ground.
As far as the lawn itself, Kobi learns and remembers fixed obstacles and avoids them accordingly while independently mulching a half an inch of grass at a time. It’s a proactive approach ensuring that neither of you has to do a lot at any one time. It collects leaves before they pile up. Best of all, Kobi acts only as autonomously as you choose to let it. If you would rather not let it tend to your property with complete freedom to pace its own schedule as it sees fit, you can always tell Kobi when to start and stop a task via the easy-to-use smartphone app. It even has PIN-protected accessibility and an anti-theft deterrent that alerts your app, lets loose a testicle-crunching shriek, and completely disables Kobi if any scoundrel should decide to make off with it.
