And when person-hours are reduced, the Capitalists rejoice while the workers must find ways to live on less because Capitalists don’t want to subsidize people who “don’t work”. 
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While the whole futuristic discussion is interesting, it has nothing to do with how Twitter firing half their cleaning staff is going to affect working conditions right now.
Especially with workers sleeping in the offices.
Right now, robots can’t strip or make beds as efficiently as humans. They can’t even fold laundry as efficiently as humans.
They can’t detect bed bug infestations, which are a thing.
They can’t find and get rid of all the random food scraps people leave around, which lead to rodents and cockroaches.
It’s kind of crazy that it turns into a hypothetical discussion so quickly, when there are plenty of right now issues being ignored.
Not to mention building codes and fire hazards of having people sleep there. Fine if it’s taking a nap during the workday. Not cool to turn it into bunk rooms for staff (no, not even Musk himself) if the building isn’t zoned for that.
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It all comes back to this idea at the heart of capitalism: that people don’t really matter. Musk doesn’t care about the people he’s firing, and he also doesn’t care about the people who now have to work in unsanitary conditions either.
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Put your chair on your desk at the end of the day?
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Yes, yes, robots have potential. But unless you’re arguing that Twitter was absolutely correct in firing their cleaning staff NOW and you think that robotic alternatives to replace them are going to be available within DAYS, I’m not sure what your point is. There’s no scenario where firing the cleaning staff now because robots might potentially replace their jobs in decades or centuries makes any sense, or looks any less out-of-touch with reality.
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… when one buys Roomba for the woo value I’m sure it’s worth every penny 
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There is no “end of the day” at Musk’s Twitter, remember?
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This whole conversation began because the muskrat is quoted by one of the fired staff as saying “you will all be replaced by robots soon”.
The city of San Francisco is already investigating the zoning and health violations of this stunt.
I have no idea the real situation in Twitter, with respect to their janitorial staff or anything else. Maybe he just didn’t like that company, or the contract, or was having a bad day.
Which leads to the other brutal reality in all this is that in California, cleaning staff are infinitely easy to replace. Just at the same time many (but not all) of their tasks are becoming susceptible to automation.
I made plenty of references to my beloved Roomba but actually… commercial-grade cleaning robots look a lot more amazing and will obviously cut out huge amount of person-hours spent cleaning floors. These aren’t decades away; you can order them now and have it delivered before Christmas. There is actually an industry organization which has consultants who calculate cleaning times. This stuff is a science! But I couldn’t find any clear article that analyzes exactly how they spend hours and which of those tasks can be automated. I’m sure the info is out there but I didn’t find it.
The operative word here is “callously.”
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Maybe Musk is just a dick?
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I have a hunch that whoever he replaces them with is probably going to want to get paid too.
This mass firing isn’t the cold, calculated decision of a forward-looking business genius, it’s just the latest temper tantrum by a fascist manchild systematically destroying his own company.
As you say, that technology isn’t new. If those things were really going to replace a majority of the human beings working in janitorial services we would have seen it happen by now.
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He didn’t get rid of the people that mop floors or just cut back a few people because he saved a lot of hours by purchasing an automated floor scrubber, he laid off the entire staff.
That floor scrubber drives right past toilets, desks, ceiling vents, windows, door handles, break room counters, etc, etc, etc…
That floor scrubber ain’t scrubbing under anything, in corners, elevators, stairs, behind toilets, etc…
Does it eliminate the person that mops large square footage areas? Sure it does. Do the ride on scrubbers and vacuums save time, money, and injuries? Sure.
But, once again, he let the entire staff go not just the people that mop and vacuum.
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At this point one has to be either ignorant or deluded about how basic business management and operations work in if they keep insisting on the former scenario rather than the latter.
Some of it is signalling to his middle-class techie fanbois, temporarily embarrassed millionaires all of them. There are a bunch of cost-saving measures that could more significantly impact the distressed company’s bottom line, but he feels compelled to focus on nickel-and-diming the “undeserving” janitors.
This meme recently posted by @Purplecat comes to mind.
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Lol, a bad day, haha, he’s definitely a dick. If I had control of a billion dollars (not to mention much more than that) I wouldn’t have another bad day for the rest of my life. And if that turns out not to be true then go ahead and call me a dick too.
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And not just me. If I had that much wealth, I would make sure a lot of people around me had a lot less bad days. And I would also try to limit the amount of bad days I was creating for others.
EM seems to lack the ability to step back, recognize that he has won the capitalism lottery, and set a new course for his life that doesn’t involve making life worse for others.
It’s like he is stuck living his life to the same basic crap algorithm like a dog-shit smearing Roomba.
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That has a certain poetry. I’m stealing it.
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Not really. There’s the whole adoption curve thing. If I owned / managed an office building I would spend a few hundred thousand on cleaning robots. But I’m probably more of an early adopter than the average building manager.
I found some other pretty amazing robo-cleaning videos, this one from one year ago. It actually does clean a commercial bathroom reasonably well. Certainly a motivated human putting in effort could do better, and certainly the robot would need some human help now and then, but also plenty of real unmotivated humans would do worse.
