The roamers hadn’t changed that much in the two hundred years since they’d been invented. At least not in principle. Lots of improvements had been made, like the Casimir power source, better materials, more compact electronics, and so on. But it was still an eight-legged general-purpose robot run by a moronic machine intelligence. I frowned in thought as I followed the device. Maybe the Skippies had the right idea. The creation of a practical AI, whether it was truly conscious or just zombie-level capable, would have a huge impact on society, maybe even more than subspace theory and the accompanying technologies had.