Servants of Spiders

No, not people who are servants of spiders but robotic servants made up of spiders. That’s what we need.

I was thinking about the kind of robot servants that might be coming our way in the not-too-distant future. For many uses around the house, the best shape and size would be pretty much humanoid. After all, our houses are designed for humans of average size. However, for some purposes, such as cleaning nooks and crannies and finding small objects that manage to roll under the refrigerator, as they are wont to do, small spiders would be far more efficient. Swarms of spiders would be efficient for so many other tasks, too: finding and eliminating pests, checking for damage in hidden places and repairing it, etc.

So we could have two main types of servants: humanoid and spideroid. (Is that a word? It should be.) But with technology only somewhat advanced beyond what we now have, we could combine the two for convenience. We could have swarms of robot spiders that would assemble themselves into human shapes, to the human eye indistinguishable from actual humans. For example, you could have a perfect butler serving you dinner, and if you dropped a pea and it escaped and rolled under the fridge, the butler would calmly dissolve one hand into a swarm of spiders that would retrieve the pea. Meanwhile, one of his ears would become a swarm of spiders, scurry into the kitchen, and assemble into some convenient shape to check on something on the stove.

Unfortunately, all of this is too much like scenes from various horror movies to have much appeal to consumers.