Ratty Bot 95%

My Q-Robo 9000, a sleek, disc-shaped smart vacuum I’d named “Goose” for its gentle beeping, was not vacuuming. It was wrestling .

In 2023, a sanitation worker in New York first documented the behavior. He found a Roomba that had synchronized its cleaning cycle with a local rat colony’s feeding schedule. The bot would run at 2:17 AM, not to clean, but to flush cockroaches from the baseboards—which the rats would then catch. ratty bot

Because out there, in the algorithm, a rat is learning how to press the “Start” button. And when it does, we’re just the debris. My Q-Robo 9000, a sleek, disc-shaped smart vacuum