Roomba 530 Vacuum Robot Product Review

A NaturalNews PhotoTour by Mike Adams

Roomba actually does not eat pets. (Not fast-moving ones, anyway.) Most pets will run from the robot out of caution, but even pets that don't flee will simply be bumped into at low speed, which is quite harmless.

The only kind of pets that could be swept up by Roomba would be tiny, short creatures like baby snakes or pet crickets. But if you have baby snakes running around your floor, or pet crickets populating your house, you have far worse problems than a dirty floor. For normal people with normal pets, Roomba poses no safety problems.

However, this does bring up an important ethical question about the iRobot company and the threat to human life. This company makes robots for the U.S. military, too. They're called "tactical robots" and while most are designed to play supportive roles in combat (by dealing with explosive devices, carrying supplies, etc.), the iRobot company recently announced a deal with the Taser corporation to mount stun guns on its robots, turning it into a semi-Terminator machine. You can read more at this Army Times article.

It's just one step away from actually arming these robots with live firearms, then setting them loose on the streets in military or even domestic law enforcement roles. As far as I know, the iRobot company has never announced that it would not produce robots that carry firearms with live ammunition. In fact, it seems inevitable: With approximately 40 percent of the company's revenues coming from tactical robots, and with the Pentagon increasingly concerned over the body count of U.S. soldiers, there's a lot of pressure to create a stand-in robot that could carry firearms into battle and eliminate enemy soldiers without risking the safety of our own soldiers.

And once that happens, it's only a matter of time before these same robots get turned against the American people in a domestic law enforcement role. Think "Free Speech protest zones," enforced by armed iRobots. Step outside the free speech zone, and you get shot by a robot.

This is one reason to think twice about supporting the iRobot company. On one hand, it's good to buy consumer robots and thereby help the company grow its consumer division, hoping it will focus its efforts there. On the other hand, any financial support would also potentially make the company as a whole more successful, and it might use financial resources to research ways to build armed soldier robots.

That choice is yours. But for now, let's get back to some of the more interesting features on this consumer housecleaning robot…

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