Will We Meet Rosie From The Jetsons?

If you haven’t seen The Jetsons, it was a 1962 TV cartoon series depicting a middle-class family of the future. They drove their flying cars to their house in the sky, they ate food made automatically by their food-a-rac-a-cycle,  and they had flat screen TVs and made videoconference calls from their watches.

The Jetsons also had Rosie, the robotic maid who took care of house cleaning and other chores that weren’t already automated. Today, we have iRobot Roomba, the  robot that uses AI technologies to “map” a house and go vacuum, and robotics are on the verge of taking more big steps. Researchers have made robots that can learn to cook by watching youtube videos, and deliver packages to your house in an hour. 

Come with me if you will for a brief thought experiment. What if:

• Amazon prime air gets approved for deliveries by the FAA and starts delivering a wide variety of foods and other perishable goods within an hour.
• Cooking websites began not only providing recipes, but whole meal plans.
• Cooking websites also expanded to be able to pre-populate an amazon.com/Wal Mart.com shopping cart with all the necessary ingredients to make a given meal that you could then have delivered via drone in an hour, ensuring that all the ingredients were as fresh as possible?
• The cooking robot prepared the meal to specification every time with little or no human interaction?
• After the meal, said robot was programmed to go find a nice corner to fold itself up and sit in the corner until the next time it’s needed? 

If Rosie became a reality, which (if any) of the following would be affected:

• Would people still grocery shop for themselves? 
• What effect if any, would there be on the grocery store/retail industries? 
• Would the fast food industry be affected similar to how home theaters are competing with movie theaters?
• Would gender stereotypes be affected?

50 years ago when The Jetsons first aired, the technologies in depicted probably felt like pipe dreams that couldn’t possibly come true. Today, they don’t feel quite so far fetched.