This hurts to read because it really nails it. This very thing has been on my mind quite a bit lately after watching my older kids now as young adults. We managed to keep them away from much of this simply because we never thought it necessary, but apparently not to the extent I wish we would have. Now with complete freedom of how they spend their time I’m not exactly pleased with the results. They still seem to be lacking the inner drive to create, but instead would rather consume.

My desire was for them to know how to be satisfied from within, developed from their own inner source, not coming from the outside, simply fueled by what they are consuming.

An anecdote: My dad was driven nuts by how much time I wasted as a kid and teen on gaming, and how it seemed that I had few productive interests,never built anything, and stopped projects as soon as I got bored.. He wanted me to be obsessed with something, but few teens are obsessed with anything but not being lonely, social interactions more generally, and just following a random walk exploration. Dad never won those fights to make me serious then. But you know what? As an adult, I am quite different. I am now a post doctoral fellow conducting cutting edge neuroscience, having completed numberous complex, long-term research programmes that have required obsession, grit, and a determination to perfect his craft.

If your kids can avoid the usual pitfalls (e.g. a serious drug addiction) Im sure all your efforts will come into fruition when they are ready to committ themselves.

Today I buy my son Rasberry Pie's, laptops with GameMaker installed, etc hoping he too will find an obsessio. But he too resists i.e. stops as soon as he is bored.

C'est la vie

This is true, yes!

But I am concerned about what this does to them as a person. Life will kick them down (and then in the head for good measure), and a time will come when they are truly standing alone. If they are lacking the inner self, will they have the fortitude and the wherewithal to navigate themselves back up, even without any immediate payoff? Or will this constant need to feed be so ingrained they won’t know how to push through a hard time with little hope and almost zero positive gain, and instead gravitate towards what feels good for the moment?

But, your anecdote offers hope anyway. Thanks for sharing.

I wonder if it's some innate drive for kids because it comes up in multiple generations; listening to music, watching tv, on facebook or youtube?

I still don't really have an obsession. Committing to a field feels so restrictive compared to reading about a variety of things. As a result, I haven't done very well professionally, but my dad, who was obsessed, didn't do well, either.

I don't remember wasting that much time as a teenager, since if I wanted something, I needed to get a job and work for it. If there was any chance of my bettering the type of situation I grew up on, I had to make sure my grades were amazing. I had to deal with someone else's serious drug addiction in the family, and try to make sense of it, while committing to myself. I don't know if you were ever physically abused as a child because of the lack of drive?

I'm just saying, you may have had the privilege to waste time on someone else's dime, and everything still worked out alright. Not everyone has that. Some of us, if we're not willing to fight from the get-go, we're going nowhere.

Anwyays, congratulations on your post doctoral fellowship.

I got through college with my family on student loans, stipends, and food stamps.And you know what, my kids will have opportunities I never even dreamed of. There is no better feeling.

You decide for yourself what my anecdote is worth.

On another hand your kids are more spoiled with the wealth they were born into and potentially may have lower drive than you have.

Hard to tell how they would turn out.

An afghan (?) proverb I barely remember went something like this: "The king's father grew up in a tent; he worked hard, built his house, and led the people well. The king lived in a house but remembered the tent he was born in; he worked hard, built his palace, and led the people well. The king's children were born in a palace; they have never seen a tent. They are lazy and will not lead the people at all."

"My grandfather rode a Pony, my father rode a Pony, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel,"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_bin_Saeed_Al_Maktoum

    Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.

Economists like to mention that just a few hundred years ago, an average worker's daily wages were only worth ten minutes of artificial light. Now they are worth more than 20,000 hours. This is progress. This is what we do.

Fuck the romanticization of poverty and hardship. That our children do not need to pour as much sweat as us into (literally) keeping the lights on is greatest joy of our success. That drive, grit, pain tolerance, and other survival-mode traits are no longer necessary or adaptive is the best thing that could be happening.

I suspect I will never be able to fully empathize with people who are sad about this. Different mindsets, I guess. Still, I think it's useful for us to be exposed to the opposing perspectives.

We aren't romanticizing poverty, I'm an engineer too and I'm directly involved in the 20k hours of light part, probably my contribution is a very tiny fraction of it but my children have grown up with not only no desire to work but no real desire to put their all into anything. It's not universal but it does seem more polarized than it was forty years ago when I was the age they are now (20-s).

Of course this is all anecdata but it is something that bothers such a large number of people that I feel there must be a kernel of truth in it.

I'm not sad they don't have to struggle to stay alive, warm, and well fed (not that I ever had to actually struggle either, merely plan ahead a little more) what saddens me is the lack of desire to create. Of course if we go far enough back you had to be creative just to live at all so perhaps we are seeing not a change but merely the revealing of what was always there.

When I first went off to college I failed. I did not know why I was there or how to do things. I dropped out and worked various jobs e.g. graveyard shifts at AMPM for two years, pizza delivery for a year, driver for a repoman repossessing cars..let me tell you that there were some pretty dark years then..

But I did succeed after failing

The point is not so much a libertarian fairy tale though. It was only after I met my wife and started a family did the focus of my life come together with a vengence. It was only because I received a lot of support from a supportive wife, a stable dad and mom, a good graduate advisor,and a minimally sufficient social services system. Without these I would not have succeeded coming from where I did..

Every time I come to Hackernews or Slashdot or Reddit, I really should be going to my editor and writing or picking a card off the wall and finishing that thing I want to do.

Obviously, right now, I'm failing. :-P

:-(

I think you have a good point about idle time being gadgeted away.

Also I think there is a tremendous potential in automation of physical labor (including remaining daily tasks). I wonder how much more free time we would have, if only 10% of workforce that currently does web/mobile/game apps (including myself) would apply their skills to automating their daily life with simple robots.

Also, imagine relatively cheap mass-produced robots that have embedded computer vision and motion planning accessible via DOM-like API (with javascript, of course), and what would millions of web developers do with that, with their current javascript/DOM skills directly applicable to manipulating the physical world. Does it sound too good to be true? I don't know.

Dishwashers help with the bulk, but you end up with more dishes in the household (not worth firing up the dishwasher til it's full). With the things they can't do, and the baked food they sometimes miss, the rinsing beforehand, the loading and unloading, the saving is marginal. But 20 mins a day with hands in soapy water isn't fun, so...

Cooking -- we make more interesting things with far more ingredients, as the fridge is the size of a 60s house, rather than just keeping milk and cheese fresh. Or order takeout.

So track record says whatever future inventions bring us to save time, work (and chores) will expand to fill time available, and we'll be even more fragmented, with even more stuff.

Well then, just don't buy the stuff! Exercise some self-control.

How's that working out for obesity?

> How's that working out for obesity?

Personally? I am in tip top shape fellow gentle person. Tip top. I found that things don't make me happy, but experiences do.

Multiple loads means a multi hour time commitment to being on stand by to transfer and continue the process.

The programmer in me actually has resorted to throwing everything in the car and driving to a laundry mat if I have a build up for some life reason. Then I can wash and dry 12 loads concurrently and be done with it all in about 2 hours. Laundry mats are "the cloud" of home chores.

Now if somebody ever manages to automate the process of transitioning from washer, to drier, to sorted and folded in the home then they will rightly make a fortune as the time savings would be off the charts.

I load my little wheelie-cart, my laptop for some work or a book if I have time, and do what I'd normally do somewhere else for a couple hours. The only real differences are minimal interactions with humans, a need for quarters, and having to wear pants.

Folding is tedious. I hang everything except T-shirts, and some way to skip folding things simply to hang them at home would be nice, but that would involve a vehicle, which is its own bundle of urban hassle and silly for two blocks.

I'm not sure of the tradeoffs. If you have the space, doing laundry while you're in the house for other reasons and transferring manually is the least of the effort.

For the single drum units, you lose the ability to wash 1 load while another is drying. The perk is that you can throw a load in when you leave for work and it will be done when you get back home. If you have more than one those, you're extending your total wash time from

wash * loads + (1 dry time)

to

(wash + dry time) * loads

i am considering replacing my (unused, broken) dishwasher with a small combo washer dryer and continue doing dishes and cleaning by hand. i think that would be the optimal setup in terms of time and effort and money spent.

The skills for building a robot are quite different from the skills for building "classical" software. For example for classical software one can do correctness proofs/analysis, while for robots one can only do empirical tests or correctness proofs relative to a strongly abstracted world model. So in other words: Applying their (existing) skills into that direction would not have much value. On the other hand: If these people were investing years to develop the skills necessary for robot development, this would probably help; but who of this group is really willing (and can afford) to do so?

I'd object that on the contrary, arduino and http://www.espruino.com/ require mostly the same skills (plus some basic maker-tier hardware skills which are easy to gain). For example Espruino is programmed in javascript. I have bought ESP8266 boards for 3.5$ each and with espruino firmware that gives me a wifi-enabled computer for IoT or smart home tasks. I have done some simple smart home projects that provide a web interface (hosted on espruino!) to some functionality.

Of course there are robotics specifics - computer vision, motion planning (also forward, inverse kinematics), but these functions in principle could be hidden behind an opaque DOM-like APIs, while being implemented in a very advanced manner (e.g. trained deep learning models for vision, best SLAM algorithms, best planning algorithms). Just like the browser doesn't require you to draw webpages pixel-by-pixel on raw framebuffer and provides you with fonts, block model, events etc.

>For example for classical software one can do correctness proofs/analysis, while for robots one can only do empirical tests or correctness proofs relative to a strongly abstracted world model.

Objection #1: Almost nobody does correctness proofs in application and even in system software (e.g. the linux kernel), and yet these software projects work quite well, for example it is known that SpaceX uses Linux (with various patches) as a platform for its in Dragon and Falcon. In fact correctness proofs are mostly done by hardware companies, for some functional blocks, and maybe by the military. If you are interested in exploring this question further you can read "How did software get so reliable without proof?" by C.A.R. Hoare [1].

Objection #2: Proofs of correctness in logical or probabilistic sense are being done for various real systems by Cyber-Physical Systems community and by Machine Learning community.

>So in other words: Applying their (existing) skills into that direction would not have much value.

I still think that given good blackbox abstractions and familiar API much could be done. We can see beginning of it with maker community, arduinos and espruinos. More should be possible.

>but who of this group is really willing (and can afford) to do so?

Myself !

I think programmers, investors and customers should be less averse to hardware. We could live much more pleasantly if it were true. Underautomated status-quo is daunting.

1. https://www.gwern.net/docs/math/1996-hoare.pdf

I just remembered this post which I think helps better capture some of what I'm talking about: https://plusbryan.com/its-just-wood But I think there's something else besides avoiding things that are mysterious. I think it has something to do with the physicality of the thing. At least something else is needed to understand the weird reluctance with working with hardware that a lot of software-only people have, who differently from the general public (who can't even use their computers) are sharp enough to battle with mind blowing complexity and solving mysteries of bugs or how new languages or APIs work every day behind their screens.

Doing laundry is a lot more than loading and unloading. If you have small children then you have to check everywhere for stains and apply something like Spray 'n Wash first. And then folding takes a lot of time. (There is a folding machine launching soon but it's expensive and might not be reliable https://www.foldimate.com/ .)

I've tried a couple of different Roombas. They simply don't work very well. The rollers get tangled on rug fringes. They get stuck under furniture. The suction is weak. They require frequent cleaning. In the end it's less hassle just to use a regular vacuum.

If this is the case your dishwasher sucks. Other than knocking big chunks (bones, cobs, etc...) into the trash there's no need to pre-rinse dishes on a competent machine.

I do agree that dishwashers don't save as much time as you would hope, but they do help. Handwashing and drying is slow.

The laundry machine is absolutely faster than beating your clothes against the washboard, but yes, it doesn't check for stains and it is still a big time sink.

Roombas suck. No argument there. Vacuuming a room is actually pretty quick, it's picking up all of the stuff first that takes forever when you have kids.

It seems to me that western people have become too entrenched in their familiar lifestyle and it is too hard for current technology to adapt to it as is. And so we live in a status quo where a tiny rich minority can afford to hire human servants to do their chores while middle class can neither hire human servants nor buy robotic ones.

Your experience is much different from mine. I bought a Roomba, then bought another Roomba, because I realized I needed Roomba redundancy.

Could not imagine life without Roomba!

I don't have carpet and no rugs. On hard surfaces I find Roomba does a better job then manually sweeping. But maybe different with carpet.

I'm studying up on udacity about ML and CV. Reading papers and just exploring the domain.

I think the future is amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3KEoMzNz8eYnwBC34RaKCQ

I started dropping off our laundry at my local laundromat about 6 years ago, it immediately improved my quality of life. Now if only they would put it away for me.

Sounds like an opportunity for a startup!

</joke> ... or so I thought.