Yeah, let’s see them design a robot that can strip and wax floors or just mop a grocery store, department store, or a hospital.
We used to do Kmart floors, gyms, restaurants, and office floors, it ain’t easy and the stripping, waxing, and buffing part is not unskilled labor.
I had many, many part-time jobs while in high school and university. One involved janitoring a rather small, neighborhood clinic (two internists and one (rather larcenous) podiatrist). As @Brainspore pointed out, there are things that require lifting and relocation. Not everything that ended up on the floor deserved to be thrown out. Would an AI janitor been able to discern the importance of a couple of sheets of paper that apparently fell out of a binder that held diagnostic codes? (That’s when I first heard of latent lues.)
musk is really transcending mockery now
there is nowhere else to go
I have 3 Roombas; one for vacuuming and 2 for mopping. None of them do even as good a job as I can do myself. I use them only if I need a cleaning job done that I don’t have time to do myself, and can live with the substandard level of clean produced. They will not be replaced.
HEPA filters all the way, babay! - No robot vacuum is gonna fix my place; but the floor is all theirs.
Yeah, for us half the beauty of a robot vac is it forces the kids to tidy up. They care about the robot’s feelings.
Now I imagine Elon designing his own robotic solution to the “obsolete” cleaning staff, which his employees will assure him is testament to his innovative genius while the toilets overflow and take-out containers begin to form majestic dunes throughout the building.
SARAH CYNTHIA SYLVIA STOUT WOULD NOT TAKE THE GARBAGE OUT
Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout
Would not take the garbage out!
She’d scour the pots and scrape the pans, Candy the yams and spice the hams,
And though her daddy would scream and shout, She simply would not take the garbage out. And so it piled up to the ceilings:
Coffee grounds, potato peelings
Brown bananas, rotten peas, Chunks of sour cottage cheese.
It filled the can, it covered the floor,
It cracked the window and blocked the door With bacon rinds and chicken bones, Drippy ends of ice cream cones,
Prune pits, peach pits, orange peel, Gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal, Pizza crusts and withered greens, Soggy beans and tangerines,
Crusts of black burned buttered toast,
Gristly bits of beefy roasts. . .
The garbage rolled on down the hall, It raised the roof, it broke the wall. . . Greasy napkins, cookie crumbs, Globs of gooey bubble gum,
Cellophane from green baloney, Rubbery blubbery macaroni, Peanut butter, caked and dry, Curdled milk and crusts of pie, Moldy melons, dried-up mustard,
Eggshells mixed with lemon custard, Cold French fries and rancid meat, Yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat. At last the garbage reached so high That it finally touched the sky.
And all the neighbors moved away,
And none of her friends would come to play. And finally Sarah Cynthia Stout said,
“OK, I’ll take the garbage out!”
But then, of course, it was too late. . .
The garbage reached across the state, From New York to the Golden Gate. And there, in the garbage she did hate, Poor Sarah met an awful fate,
That I cannot now relate
Because the hour is much too late.
But children, remember Sarah Stout And always take the garbage out!
Do you really want your comparatively well paid programmers spending any of their time at work cleaning instead of coding? When that could be done by somebody that is making far less per hour? Plus the tech bros are going to be unhappy to have to clean up after themselves, so they’re going to be more interested in leaving. And even if we do someday have toilet cleaning robots, that’s not going to help scrub poo for the next several years. This is curve-bending stupid. How can anybody think Elon is some kind of genius at this point?
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Of course. If the people cleaning toilets were getting paid $300k/year we’d be well along the way towards toilet cleaning robots/self cleaning toilets. But the economics just don’t work.
Of course it does. Those guys are your ancestors.
Hmmm…“Your”…
I am not sure “World’s richest man and star entrepreneur was an idiot all along, his life’s work was a fluke and now he is reverting to the mean hard.” is the angle I would have chosen though.
Oh, if that is what they are doing, on purpose, it is still being done in the dumbest way possible
That would explain why we’re stuck out here in the equivalent of “the sticks” of the universe.
Kind of out of the way. I’m thankful they picked such a lovely planet for us. Gave us lots of leeway. I didn’t get to see the signed glaciers before they melted, though. 
FGD just pops in and out. Always has a towel. Waters a rose on some distant moon. I might be mixing my stories.
Making programmers work over ~40hrs a week also tanks their productivity and isn’t the best use of time or per hour costs. So it wouldn’t surprise me. He also thinks everyone below him is - well - below him, so if THEY are subjected to “menial” labor, it is ok. Probably make some witty comment about how schools in Japan have students do some of the cleaning.
Credit where credit is due, some have not read Shel Silverstein before.
I know, I know, hard to believe, but ol’ Uncle Shelby isn’t as well known outside of North America.
They say libertarian, but scratch the paint, and it’s usually Randroid or Corporatism underneath…
This is something I always thought the Star Wars universe got right. They’ve got all of these fancy shmancy robots everywhere, even on “backwater” planets, but for the most part, things are dirty, grimy, and dusty. Even most of the robots are a mess.
