That’s the starting point that ends with Libertarian techbros puffing up their chests and whinging “why should we pay a janitor minimum wage when we can get a scaled-up Roomba to do the same simple and repeatable task?” It’s an occasion to express contempt and disrespect for humans who do hard work that’s nowhere near as repetitive or simple as the “tech geniuses” think it is.
10 Likes
Ro-bots! Ro-bots! Ro-bots!
10 Likes
No pooping? I thought friendly doves took them away at the point of emergence.
7 Likes
“One of them told the BBC a member of Elon Musk’s team had said their jobs would be replaced by robots.”
Oh, the hubris of the tech bros and corporate enablers. I hope that they all catch something unpleasant from living in squalor. When the last toilet becomes blocked, and the last waste bin is filled with “waste”, they’ll be able to take a dump in Elon’s sink.
In other news, fuck Paedolon and his lampreys for sacking these people.
7 Likes
It’s employers like Musk that require us to pass laws like this. I mean who tells any employee they can’t use the bathroom?
12 Likes
In other words, Twitter will become something like the airplane lavatories on no-frills long-distance flights.
4 Likes
That’s assuming the water company doesn’t close the master valve for non-payment of bills.
7 Likes
Musk’s approach reminds me of the Golgafrinchans:
I wonder if the robots will clean his phones…?
9 Likes
When Musk flies all the telephone sanitizers to Mars, telephone-borne diseases will be certain.
edit: Okay, @Grazza, here you go.
10 Likes
Just the sight of something nasty enough in a pool can put you off forever. During my preteen years, we would frequent Brooklyn’s McCarren Park Pool – a massive sprawling construct thing that accommodated hundreds at a time. The last time I was there, we saw a human turd at the bottom of the shallow end. We looked on in horror as one kid quickly making his way to the pool edge unknowingly stepped on said turd, squishing it. That was it. We left.
3 Likes
I was done with water parks after a visit as an adolescent to the one attached to the Malibu Grand Prix in Northridge, CA in the early '80s. I took one look at the chocolate brown foamy water in the landing pool and noped right out forever.
3 Likes
19 Likes
A couple of life-long “Northridger” colleagues at Rocketdyne told us about MGP place way back when. Fortunately, SFV was lousy with apartments that had their own pools. 
2 Likes
I thought he was an oral extruder…
2 Likes
Agreed. And thankfully, I don’t live in their worldview. What I’m trying to say there, perhaps ineloquently, is that most tasks deemed simple for a human are still nearly beyond the realm of possibilities for a robot.
Assembly line robots, for instance, are only successful because the task they perform is exactly the same each and every time. Cleaning a floor well may seem simple in it’s human execution and it is easy to assume that translates to an easy to develop robot or intelligent automation…until you actually start mapping out the context, decisions, and actions. Then you see that the simplest of human activities are really quite complex.
8 Likes
There are self-cleaning public toilets that basically spray themselves down and then dry themselves off, but the whole room has to be designed for that, from the start. And yeah, it’s cheaper to just have someone clean it once a day for an office environment (where you have multiple stalls, too).
The Japanese smart toilets have a (sophisticated) bidet as part of it, but they also do other things, like dry you off after washing. Not so different from the self-cleaning toilet, really…
9 Likes
Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a society where robots upon taking over a menial task would allow a human whose task that was to actually have the time to do whatever instead of worrying about how to feed and shelter a family or how to get healthcare to survive.
I feel for the people who Musk just kicked to the curb, No robots are coming to save them.
10 Likes
Humans would still find a way to elevate some and make others miserable. It’s what we do
4 Likes
I tossed mine after a year of experimenting with furniture placement, wire tidying, and charger location in my home.
It would regularly get stuck under or behind furniture. It would snag wires and ‘hang’ itself. Its battery would die before it found it’s charging station. It would fall down stairs or get caught on edges. It would miss entire rooms but clean others 10x over. The last straw was when it decided to flip then ‘eat’ a plate of soft cat food which dried into concrete and ruined the machine all while it sat overnight stranded in a dark corner of my home.
9 Likes
10 Likes
