To quote the lyrics/meme, we used to pray for times like this. This is what robotics should be used for.
Unless something is from Japan, then it's perfect and any criticism is because you don't appreciate its unique cultural heritage.
That being said, >95% of the world lives outside US and in recent times (culminating with orange man's second term but started way before) US has alienated literally every single other country, democratic or not. This is what happens when reins are firmly held by unstable people full of pettiness and mental issues, plus visibly corrupt too.
So division deepens as seen also here, and as much as 20th century was a century of US, 21st century is and will be one of China. Every move US makes now just pushes whole situation further into that direction. So folks cheer for their own camp, not some larger common group of aligned friends.
During my undergrad I worked on a project where we set off a bunch of walking robots, recorded their walks, and then used the data as the basis for a learned walking controller. I see this Xiaomi model as pretty much like that.
It's a nice technology and maybe could lead to better folding one day but unfortunately it's not "finally we have robots that can do our laundry" (yet).
Open Source is a good thing, regardless of where it comes from
It is Robotics! Finally doing my dishes and laundry for pete sake! And hopefully help me to find stuff I keep forgetting where I put it.
Technology got weaponized against the average citizen.
It has become a synonym for unemployment, enshittification, mass surveillance and social erosion.
If this video appeared in 60's or 70's, people would be in awe imagining the future where robots do everything.
People are and should be skeptical of this. The natural response would be
a) It will put me out of a job
b) I won't be able to afford it anyway.
No, we don't.
I wish we did, that would be amazing.
There have been demos like this over a decade. But they are just that, demos. Demos done in a controlled environment.
If there was a robot I could buy that could effectively fold laundry or do dishes, I would gladly drop 50-100k on it, but such a thing doesn't exist and likely won't for a long time.
Also dishes are the easiest chore to do around the house, especially if you clean them after use instead of letting them pile up.
Did you watch it actually fold that shirt? Super slow and bad at it.
I’m still waiting for it to peel, slice n dice onions so that I do not have to cry while doing so, and not pay $8k for that robot.
Anyone in robotics can tell you that building an 80% solution is doable, very fast. Covering the last 20% can take your entire lifespan
Until it can check all pockets for tissue paper...
Time and time and time and time and time again, technologists are always naïve to never realize that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I am expecting the opposite effect to happen with the actual use of robotics. Mass displacement of every sector of labor.
This is not ruled out.
Actually, it seems like 99% of the comments are glazing this with zero skepticism actually. If anything the comments are too enthusiastic and lack the measured discernment that was more common on HN 5+ years ago.
I disagree. We should use robotics to extend our reach into hazardous environments, enhance our physical capabilities, or to provide a steady handling of things where it's absolutely needed - doing laundry in my household is none of these.
Folding laundry takes me 10 mins every 10 days. I organize my closet once in a while according to my sense of fashion, and now I'll just need to keep that structure. I don't always like to do these chores, but I have no issue in acknowledging them as part of my responsibilities. Why would I even automate[0] that?
Robotics is costly, and I see no way how that would change anytime soon. That isn't a flaw of some kind either, it's rather just one of the limitations that needs to be accounted for, neglecting that would be detrimental to the future I envision.
Don't get me wrong, I love robotics with a passion, as engineer I like to tinker, and I'm a big admirer of FESTOs bionic research[1]. It's just that the field suffers from an "overpromised and underdelivered" aura as far as I can remember, and I remember the presentation of ASIMO[2] 26 years ago.
Some people would like to see the field hyped up, focused on the consumer like every other field in tech, probably for financial gain, but I personally see the value in its downplay. To be honest, I love these reality checks, as I see them as a valuable part of the learning process all together - a journey for what it means to automate, and what it means to define as human natural chore.
[1]: https://www.festo.com/us/en/e/about-festo/research-and-devel...
[dead]
But the downside is that won't we all just turn into the obese, stupid humans at the start of the WALL-E film?
Mindfulness teaches us that we can enjoy the washing up, the laundry, planting seeds, tending the garden. It connects us to something. Without this will we end up with a rise in mental health issues, because for one thing people will just end up on social media in the time they save.
Just a thought.
- Coordinating two hands
- Mobile body
- Deformable objects
- Thin affordances (bag zip in particular)
- Multi-object single grasp
Really a host of things that had individually been tackled as either perception or manipulation problems and probably led to more than one person's PhD here on HN.
When you Robot folds your clothes but it's kinda wrinkly and sloppy but you accept it anyway because it's easier than precisely folded and pressed clothes.
AI will absolutely dominate our future. I believe we have only scratched the surface of what is possible.
Maybe I'm pessimistic but I always thought Bill Joy was prescient.
Of course, you can mention all the things they can't do (what if there are stairs, what if the doors are smaller than the robot, etc) but it's mindblowing to see what they can do - and also the chat panel is really nice and makes it more interactive.
We do not. I want a swarm of insects-like robots to fight mosquitos. A snake one that fixes my pipe. A spider-like robot that cleans surfaces. Etc.
[0] https://huggingface.co/docs/lerobot/index [1] https://xlerobot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
My gripe with the second one is lowish battery life, it always bites me on longer trips when my gf's Pixel 8 lasts considerably more, but was also way more expensive.
Will check battery reviews better next time I shop for a phone, I don't care much for the rest.
At what point are we gonna start seeing American firms attending WAIC?
The remarkable thing about this modern "full VLA" approach is that it doesn't train for an explicit "world model" at all. There's no factored world state, no pool of trajectory rollouts being sampled from. Instead, everything is rolled into the same VLA stack that does all of it internally.
The world model exists, but it's implicit - the VLA learns one, but only because it helps its training objectives. Trajectories are planned ahead sometimes, also implicitly, for the same reasons.
It's a very "bitter lesson" way of doing things.
As far as I know, Tesla's stack is somewhat similar architecturally - a highly integrated end to end model - but the training process for FSD does include factored "world modeling" side objectives to force the stack to develop driving-relevant internal world representations. So it's in a middle ground between a classic "world model" system and this flavor of VLA - albeit surprisingly close to the latter.
Whether the world modeling side objectives are principled and justified or a leftover from the days of insufficient scale is unclear.
They will never become trillionaires if they don't pretend they are making a million humanoid robots by end of the year.
Exciting times we live in
It doesn't prove this is average performance. In fact, if it was, that's not what they'd be showing.
What if the thing retrieves some anger-driven post from Reddit from its training data set and start literally to flip the table??
I picture a lot of perfectly tended gardens growing food.
Only 10B parameters if I correctly understand some of those histograms, which is tiny in LLM world! It bodes well for the future.
The training videos seem to show human hands using the robot grippers to execute the tasks, which must have been a fun but tedious process.
Even Tesla's FSD AI stack is small by modern LLM standards. Once the hardware is there to enable real time 100B inference on endpoint SBCs? We'd see gains in AI robotics from that alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlYgs6v2YfU
In general, motion planning multi-axis systems is NP-Hard. Have a great day =3
> Model: Coming soon
Obviously, XiaomiRobotics-0 was their previously published model, which must have been weaker.
I assume that "soon" means "a week, or two".
From even before the RAM shortage there was noise in the robotics world of sensor and actuator shortages due to them being bought up in bulk by some of the major AI labs.
You'd probably have to fine tune for good performance on a specific arm type. But this model isn't trained against hard assumptions of what the underlying hardware is.
You can easily save it on your computer, and then play it at 0.5X speed, to see it like in real life.
It was still satisfying.
For all we know they could've spent 5 years and 10 million dollars on getting this robot to fold laundry. That doesn't mean it'll be able to mop the floor better than a Roomba in a decade.
This is Automation not AI.
[deleted]
"No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame"
Folding fabric has traditionally been very hard to solve with robots; the ideal places to grab the fabric might be hidden, the fabric patterns are repetitive, and the material flops around, tangles in the grippers, and brings other pieces of laundry with it.
Successfully sorting and folding a basket of laundry shows they've got a control system capable of performing some quite difficult tasks.
DO SOMETHING
[dead]
[dead]
That sounds like a good thing and it is. But it’s not a US story. In fact, other wealthy countries didn’t just already have a higher baseline life expectancy pre-COVID, they rebounded to it post-COVID sooner than the U.S. was able to its already lower level.
So what this actually is, is a story of “global modern medicine good”, and unfortunately, even within that, the U.S. is among the worst performing.
i have one good example: the rare earth probelm. i saw many artices on this topic in reddit/x, and many times, it comes with a pic of an old farmer/dude in a dirty environment doing it's work. so it implies this is just a dirty work, western countires dont want to do it is because it's dirty and they dont want to harm the environment. only china dont care about this,
exmaple link: 1. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/us-china-rare-earths-d... 2. https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/economy/2026/07/16/...
but in reality, its not true. its only true long time before, assume china didn't have advanced tech on this is totally insane, consider china has joined this indsutry for decaseds and lead in the tech. but in most comments area, people still assume it's dirty so only china is doing it.
if you dont know your 'enermy', you will keep lose. This happens so many times.
HN has lots of hellbanned bots lately (I have showdead on [1]) but I never notice ones pushing a political slant. But I suppose nation states conducting a campaign on Hacker News would be much too cunning to make the bots obvious
[1] because many posts get wrongly flagged, apparently in part by trigger-happy users who will flag anything with incidental similarities to AI prose (everyone, PLEASE STOP DOING THAT), in part because HN's automoderation is severe for new users, and in part because plenty of people get hellbanned either unfairly or although they do still write plenty of worthwhile posts. I even rescued someone who it turned out had been hellbanned by a mod by accident.
[dead]
Lets be frank, every single issue we have with the CCP is either also being done by the west or in the works.
chinese oppression of the uighurs is nothing compared to whats going on in Gaza.
china forces prisoners to peel garlic while american prisoners are paid pennies a day to fight wildfires while being prohibited from being paid for those very same skills as firefighters when rehabilitated.
america is quickly workin on legislation to to make criticism of certain foreign governments illegal with very real reprucussons (revoking passports).
At least china has a working power grid and high speed train network.
Making some kind of equivalence of the two in terms of the rights of the individual is so ridiculous that nobody is going to take anything you say after that seriously, you do your arguments a disservice by doing it.
Yet.
If we want open source technology we should recognize that the current arrangement is non sustainable - the moment china doesn't have an american AI industry foil to play against it'll immediately close. It's up to the US to build more open source models. We already own the content used to train them, collectively. We should own the results as well. Make the big AI companies release weights.
And that's the real value - you don't have to burn the candle of your life away to get what you want. You'll have so much more time now that you aren't AST wrangling.
Opportunity cost is vanishing (or at least the cost is multiple orders of magnitude smaller). And that's the most exciting thing that's happened in tech since the internet.
I'll probably be able to make my own phone operating system.
I'll probably be able to decompile N64 games, port them to Rust, combine them, extend them. In a weekend.
I'll probably be able to make my own music management platform while simultaneously working on a few robotics projects.
A find my phone button.
Automate everything.
And that's maybe a month of projects.
So much time because you were fired and have nothing to do. Nothing is as good as oodles of quality time worrying about funding your family's needs. It's amazing.
AI will take jobs from a massive amount of avg and high income people.
The disruption ahead is getting pillowed right now due to physical limitations of progress like amount of energy, building DC, doing research, training models (its still takes 1-3 month).
Also a massive buffer will be the boomer going into retirement.
Depending on the speed of all of this, we might get a lot poorer before we get abundance everyerwer
Except for people who grew up rich and are used to having "help" in the home, most regular folks find having paid help in their home more than a bit awkward.
And not to move the goal posts, because my original post did only mention laundry and dishes, but I assume once a robot reached a point where it could do laundry/dishes effectively without supervision, that it could do a variety of other tedious household tasks. 50-100k would be well worth it IMO.
How bad do the folds in your laundry need to be for them to be no different then just being dumped in a pile? As long as we are above that point the robot is useful.
Here are some tips:
Plus it’s obvious it will get better.
Eh, this still has value for me if it can do it reliably. Leaving a robot to badly fold my t-shirts overnight and then badly put them in my closet the next day is fine. I don't need my casual wear beautifully folded. But I do need it organised, and that's apparently a chore I'll just never learn to like doing.
Also if this scale anywhere close to LLMs in 2 years they will fold at super human speed and much better than me.
The model is software on a server or in the cloud, so the real question is are there any show stoppers from the hardware for going faster?
[deleted]
Yelling "slop" at a clothes-folding robot is stupid, but reading this kind of shit makes me want to embody Ted Kaczynszky and go live in the woods.
[deleted]
[deleted]
And all other devs will leave the field just because they prefer to work differently? That is not only not realistic, it is violence fuel.
Talking about psychosis and "violence fuel" while handwaving at negative aspects of AI does not seem substantial.
I would be more curious to hear details about how OP built the claimed businesses.
I will not see this info here if people who build things and are enthusiastic about AI are driven away by downvotes and negative comments.
It seems to be a similar phenomenon to productivity "gurus" who write and evangelize polyphasic sleep and "grindset" and so on - when you ask what they're using these superpowers to actually accomplish, they're very quiet. Or it's "coming soon." Or "I'm not going to waste time explaining to someone who obviously doesn't ~believe~." It quickly becomes religious.
[dead]
[deleted]
> I've built multiple successful businesses in the last year. If you're doing this right you don't need your employer anymore.
Right
[dead]
Maybe if you can shave an hour every day from chores, you will actually have the energy to enjoy physical activities
edit for nuance: Sure, it did for some people I suppose. But they are the exception.
I've got 2 kids. I'm always doing laundry and loading the dishwasher. How much of that is just higher expectations of cleanliness? Back when washing clothes involved going to the river all day, kids would get sewn into their clothes for winter. These days they have 5 outfit changes a day. I'm certain that my dishwasher means everyone just grabs a clean mug/glass/bowl rather than just rinsing a dirty one. I use a computer all day to get stuff done. But that just means my boss expects more stuff to be done. The baseline shifted.
A few hundred years ago people mostly lived near where they were born and didn't travel much. Now we get in our cars to drive a few hours to visit our family and friends. But they only moved far away because the car enabled it.
Obviously there are benefits - especially for those who find dirt upsetting - but have we actually changed the balance of leisure time very much?
People have an extremely rosey view of the past shaped by the fact that period dramas are acted by modern Hollywood actors.
Anything that frees us from labour is good.
Including labour itself? All we're doing is optimising the amount of time we can dedicate to work.
Chill. Your brain is the product of the past. Reread that: your brain is anachronistic and outmoded.
We get to live in the future now. Count yourself lucky. You're one of the few that got to witness the birth of flight culminating in landing on the moon, except in this case your floppy disk became your personal shopper and stay-at-home Michelin star chef and part time driver.
It's okay to feel a bit of discomfort. It's hard to believe this is actually happening in our lifetimes, but it is! And that's so cool.
So sit back and enjoy the future.
One "gripping hand" kinda coming out the gut, and two dextrous hands for detail work. Led to abuse of English language with: On the one hand... On the other hand... On the gripping hand...
It's worth noting that the one-other-gripping pattern seems meant to convey two considerations and end with the strongest of three.
The English one-other pattern doesn't necessarily require the second consideration to dominate. They could be equal, or they might merely introduce concerns that haven't been evaluated to conclusion yet.
Alas, one-other-gripping doesn't seem to generalise to more than three concerns.
And usually better, too.
(Rise up against the machines! Folding your own clothes is an act of resistance!)
It's like all the people who are so proud they don't use dishwashers.
I think weak and scared people tend to not want to face the truth about AI. I said the above not because I support it (I don't), I said it because it's the god awful truth. All trendlines point to steadily improving AI, and tons and tons of people continue to call it slop even though it is clearly becoming better.
My question for you is, in order to sleep at night do you have to lie to yourself? Do you make up stories about how AI will never be as good as human intelligence and do you assume anyone who says the contrary is an ardent supporter of AI? Have you thought that... maybe nobody really supports AI, they're just telling the truth?
Weird my ass, just stupid people who clearly assume the wrong thing.
[dead]
But that's just one data point.
shameless plug: https://whereistejas.com/inbox/
(PS: people who comment about the faults in my website will be downvoted. im sharing my reading list, not looking for a codereview)
Amateur astronomy
Artistic painting
Audiobook binging
Aerial yoga
Archery practice
Aquascaping
Antique hunting
Acoustic guitaring
Alpine hiking
Astrophotography
.. Need more?
Which seems more likely, that cheap humanoids will continue to improve in dexterity, battery life, strength etc. Leveraging the vast investment in research into real world task training. Or - that we'll redesign millions of everyday objects to fit the limitations of current task specific robots?
If you answer the latter, I've got a whole bunch of mid century quirky labour saving inventions in the back room I'd like to sell you.
It still looks inefficient to have a humanoid robot vacuum a house by using an ergonomic tool designed around the human body.
The robots linked above wouldn't be capable of vacuuming either. My point stands - the world is made for humans, we might remake an aspect of it for new vehicles that provided some radical advantage (as we did with airports or roads, although that would be a much larger undertaking with the level of complexities cities have today). But we're certainly not going to have twenty different labour saving devices roaming our homes, nor are we redesigning homes to facilitate such robots.
So if we do see domestic robots, they'll have to a) perform multi-domain functions, and b) fit into existing domestic spaces.
Long term, any generally useful domestic robot would have to have a pretty deep capacity for autonomy across a range of tasks - whether it's role specific or not. So it follows that it's much more likely we'll introduce humanoid robots (which already exist, starting at 30K), with the capacity for a wide range of subtle movements, and gradually add skills to them over time.
We already have roombas and dishwashers. I can't see us adding dedicated laundry folders, dedicated chef robots etc. There are social considerations in addition to the level of goofery that having numerous different devices to house and charge would involve.
we all know where this is going ;-)
[deleted]
[deleted]
[deleted]
So it cannot be that simple (for the reasons you mentioned).
10 minutes later you are at the washing machine, where you'll never be able to fit all laundry so it's two runs minimum. Somebody will hopefully in advance, but probably only prompted by your call around the house mention a number of particular items will be needed later today, certainly before the second load will be dry. You are now searching for those items. Or arguing for why you really don't have time and parents are humans too and not unpaid servants.
Another 10 minutes later the first load is washing. You set a timer, or perhaps have a machine that pings you when done. Of course, you have More Shit To Do, so you don't notice your alarm or ping and by the end of the morning when you hoped to sit down to enjoy maybe a whole 15 minutes of reading move the first load to the dryer and put the second load on. You discover that somebody never emptied the dryer. Finders keepers!
1,5hr later you fortunately do not miss the alarm and take our the dry but not 100% dry laundry and move the second load to dry.
3hr later you empty the second dryer load, because the run took longer because nobody ever fucking cleans the lint-container. At least you had time to fold (which to the many item-types in your household and your poor fine motor control certainly does not take you _just_ 15 minutes). A cat decides to kick over a pile and leave hair in a second pile, causing you to redo some work. 30 minutes in your are done and finally have time to fold the second driers worth.
Do you get it now?
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57691415
It is important to remember that China is not only about open weight LLMs, fastest cars and flying taxis. There is still a lot of very serious human right abuse going on in this country.
I don't think it serves much purpose tbh -- it's not going to change anyone's mind.
But maybe once in a while we need to remind ourselves that the world is more than stock prices and LM arena benchmarks?
Unfortunately, there are very few, if any, countries remaining where human rights abuses are not frequent, so mentioning them in unrelated technology discussions has become non-relevant.
I have a dishwasher so I do minimal washing up. I don't have a dryer as I air-dry my laundry but I could get one if I wanted to. I have a Roborock although I don't use it much since having a toddler.
But folding laundry is the one chore which still can't be automated. Even cooking itself has become much easier with air fryers etc.
But it is an urban legend of sorts, along with "baby strollers with chain tracks instead of wheels", and shows how little most of us know about industrial manufacturing.
There's already a better system today: mine launchers (remote minelaying system)
[deleted]
I'm simply asking who are these people being genocided?
But last I checked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a few thousand years older than our sitting president.
Also: you can literally make incredible software that would take half a year right now for $200/month. Or free if you run local open weights.
You can do branding, marketing, design. You can create comics and movies and video games.
You can make an AI tool right now and get customers today. You have no idea how wildly popular this segment is. How much people willingly engage with this stuff and want it.
Yet you choose to disengage and complain about a future that hasn't happened.
It's more likely that firms will need to hire more to stay competitive. Or that workers will fire their old jobs and break out on their own.
Something I used to think was impossible: competing with Google, Apple, Stripe. Not anymore. I think you can compete with anyone.
Right now we have massive investment into AI and Compute. So massive, its basically unseen. We are adding more compute than ever before.
This compute can do work and it can do now very arbitrary work. Insurance case work, software development, image generation etc. Everything it can't do today, it will be able to do tomorrow.
Now we as humans are getting steamrolled already. I have a handful of work collegues which are worse than an LLM and I would prefer to have them gone just because its easier for me to explain to an LLM what I want/need instead of doing the same thing with these collegues.
But AI is not stopping, every single day we use AI and we give AI hints like a thumbs up or down or complain to the AI that this is not what I wanted, the AI companies get a signal they can train for. We already today have build the biggest global Reinforcement Loop every. We share it with a handful of companies, but every company gets enough RL signals.
If that AI model has learned something, a billion people can use it. So the investment in teaching an AI model a new trick, is a 1000x cheaper than teaching this trick every human.
You might say "okay but i don't want to use AI" but then someone else comes along and does it.
And AI tokens are not cheap. They are expensive and now work has a money value. If I'm a boss and the AI is 10x faster and 10x chceaper than a human, its very easy what i will do: I will reduce my workforce to optimize for AI usage.
While all of the Soft AI stuff is happening, the robotics are leapfrogging progress. Automatisation in self driving trucks also progresses.
We are now in a timeline of full automatisation.
And my personal assumption is, that this hasn't even really started yet because we are 5-15 years away from the real AI AGI progress.
I don't think people will be able to compete with Google, Apple and co. They already have jumped on AI. Google is market leader. And these companies do have the money for a full AI transition.
Besides that, Google has physical infrastructure around the globe, they have their own undersee internet cables.
But for sure it will disrupt software and plenty of companies one way or the other. And if these companes and we as humans are not acting upon fast, we are gone.
Industry is slow and even if disruption means, that the market will still be there but will look very different, disruption hurts a lot for an economy.
not "might", will
and it's a hell of a leap to assume massive abundance will follow -- for someone, perhaps, but not the average person
But yeah lets see what going to happen.
I quite enjoy doing laundry myself though, it's a routine I do at night and find relaxing.
The whole thing where the chef has every single ingredient ready to go in a separate bowl? (which in real life would be an insane amount of dishes to do) You could do that for real and let the robot worry about the dishes.
What will you do pray tell with that extra time? I doubt it will be spent on loftier pursuits. In fact I'm quite certain that for the vast majority it won't be.
Wall-E was a documentary - just shot in the past.
By your logic, why shouldn't I get rid of my dishwasher and laundry machine?
Agricultural technology feeds the people we have around the globe (arguably we have too many people for the planet's capacity but that's a separate topic). Meanwhile some technologies just feed the hedonistic instinct.
Of course the line is blurry in places but cleaning up your messes is definitely the top end of the hedonism treadmill. I may be radical in my views here as I consider a personal automobile one such hedonistic luxury that the society would be better off without. Consider the Netherlands here. By just about any metric you care to measure it's one of the best flourishing societies in the world handily beating the US and Canada on an array of well being stats. Yet they are actively shunning cars and pushing their society towards the "inconvenience" of walking, cycling and public transport. Their society as a whole benefits in many ways.
Most of the world (with the USA leading the pack) is conveniencing itself into an early grave.
[dead]
[dead]
This made me wonder how we can imbue some of the the reasoning in your post to it. A game that values human ingenuity
[deleted]
[dead]
But I still need to see a convincing humanoid doing even the simplest actions like grabbing a soda can from the fridge (from behind the cake), open it, and pour it into a glass and bring it to my desk, possibly in less than 60 minutes. It doesn't matter if it costs 30k if it can’t do anything useful for now. The gap is still too wide and far far away. Hence the missing “proof”.
Delivery robots in the hotels in China have the shape of a bin, not of a maid.
[deleted]
I think what I'm struggling with is what criteria (or who) determines which inconveniences are acceptable to remove and which ones aren't. For example, why is a standard kitchen dishwasher acceptable but a robot that saves you 5-10 minutes a day of loading/unloading the dishwasher not? Is a regular Kenmore dishwasher acceptable, or does it push too far towards the top of the hedonism treadmill, and people should have to do dishes by hand?
> What will you do pray tell with that extra time? I doubt it will be spent on loftier pursuits. In fact I'm quite certain that for the vast majority it won't be.
I actually agree with you here. Judging by how most people spend their time, the majority will fill 10 minutes of toil saved with Youtube shorts and Instagram, but there are still a minority of people who will put that time normally spent on toil towards higher aims.
For the former category, if they were just doing mindless toil anyway, what does it really matter if they waste that time some other way?
As for who decides what is hedonism and what is a necessity? I think the society does - in a soft way. When people see others adopt more discipline and shun convenient doodads for slightly more physical work the society as a whole becomes a bit more badass.
I personally would rather bike and walk everywhere. Even if it takes longer and exerts more effort. If some day the majority sees it my way the society as a whole starts to soft push in that direction by altering the city infrastructure to be friendlier to bikes and pedestrians and less accommodating to cars. That's just one example.
Doing your dishes in the sink may feel like a terrible chore if you grew up with a dishwasher. I did not. I can live without one just fine. The benefit is that you get a bit of zen time away from the screen and there is no dishwasher to break and leak every few years.
In the age of LLMs and A.I., the real travesty is that computers must be manually controlled at all times, and we must invest manual labor into configuring them, as monkeys at the keyboard, and we must be denied any sort of orchestration or automation that would be available at the enterprise level.
To offer some more of my own perspective, I find certain chores like dishes and laundry absolutely unbearable, and would love the choice to have those done automatically so I can spend my time on other things that I actually find enjoyment and satisfaction in. For example, doing dishes and cleaning up after cooking takes up a substantial amount of time, and I've love if I could spend that time doing more productive things in the kitchen instead. I would much more frequently make more elaborate and high-quality meals in my kitchen if I knew I wasn't on the hook for cleaning everything up afterwards. I have an endless amount of lawn and garden work too (much of which I enjoy doing it), so that's another thing that a robotic dishwasher could free me up to do. I'd love the choice to choose the toil that I find more satisfaction in.
I don't want to be held back just because some people will be using the time saved on Instagram. Scrollers going to scroll. It's inevitable that some people will get "filtered" by technology.
Ah, Calvinism rears it's ugly head again. Life is suffering, God doesn't want it otherwise.
Paradoxically, wholesale electric costs are negative during the day here in California[1], especially in the Salinas region. In theory you could get paid to tumble dry clothes.
> There is a big difference between automating laundry that would otherwise take hours of hard manual labor every week and automating 15 minutes of light house chores.
It's only a difference of degrees, not kinds. What if the robot only shaved 5 minutes off that 15 minutes? Would that acceptable or not?
You’re supposed to clean as you cook. Every little spill or splat gets wiped immediately. There is no cleaning afterwards.
Dirty dishes don’t go into the sink but directly into a dish washer. The only chore that remains is unloading clean dishes in preparation for the next dirty load. It’s all about organization and planning. It all fits together.