The economic viability is a somewhat separate issue given that, right now, we don’t even have machines remotely capable of doing the work at any price. Certainly labor costs (or labor availability) impact what sorts of automation gets a priority in research and development. For example, Israel developing a bunch of new agricultural automation tech when the government put new movement restrictions on Palestinian farmworkers, Japan’s desperate attempts to automate aspects of elder care, etc., but they also were automating things that are a lot more amenable to automation.
True, but the people making those decisions really don’t seem to understand that, because they’re generally terrible managers. Although I also suspect it functions as a sort of hazing/loyalty test - it’s deliberate abuse where being efficient isn’t a consideration. As part of which I guess I could see demanding people also do cleaning would make sense… (It would not occur to them that cleaning is its own set of skills the workers don’t possess and everything would get increasingly dirty.)
Yeah, there’s a reason that I included /self cleaning toilets in my post. Just as we don’t have a bunch of mechanical horses pulling carriages, automation within restrooms is unlikely to resemble an animatronic robot that cleans existing toilets. We want a clean place to poo and using automation to enable that is unlikely to use the same toilets. There is zero chance that all janitorial services can be automated away, but as has been pointed out by others, partially automating the process can reduce the amount of human labor involved. People still do laundry, but it does not involve the massive amounts of drudgery that it did in the 19th century.
Which make me wonder… how long before an unhappy workforce and no janitorial services combine and they have a “mad shitter,” problem. It’s really only a matter of time before somebody trapped by H1B visa into working for this asshole retaliates by smearing shit all over the restroom nearest Elon’s office.
One better way to understand the impact of all this: Robots don’t replace people, they replace person-hours. You can argue all you want that robots can’t do 100%, but they can do X%, and X is forever increasing. All those on this thread who said “you don’t know what you’re talking about” etc, it all crashes up against this fact.
I have a Roomba and yeah, I have to clean and maintain it. Still, it has reduced my time spent cleaning floors by > 90% and I have much cleaner floors. One friend of mine has a Roomba and she said the same thing, it changed the energy of her house. Another friend has one and stopped using it because it didn’t work well for her. So, in my very informal non-scientific survey 2/3 of users found it > 90% great. That’s kinda how automation is going to be at this point.
That sort of staffing formula may seem obvious to us peons, but we’re not techno-utopian Libertarian management and engineering “geniuses” like Musk and his fanbois.
You’re missing the forest for the trees, especially that big one right in front of you that you’ve spent this whole thread wandering around, which you seem to think looks exactly like all the other trees.
Trees that can apparently reach heights past the tallest one ever, indefinitely and consistently. It’s surprising we can’t climb redwoods to reach Earth orbit by now
Certainly the basis for declaring how automation is going to be at this point … “Kinda”.
We got it at the beginning, at least. TFG appointed lots of people who worked on the basis of anecdote and a poor understanding of math. Then Dark Brandon had to show up and ruin it all.
I won’t argue with the basic premise of that statement but when it comes specifically to housecleaning I don’t think the technology is advancing especially quickly. Roombas were first available starting in 2002 and I dont think they’ve increased in efficiency or capability very much over the last 20 years. You still need to keep your furniture and stuff arranged in a way to accommodate them. They aren’t very good and getting under a dining room table with chairs all around it. And dishwashers have been around for far longer, with very few improvements in the last 60 or so years.
