There's something darkly funny about people so embarrassed to have a cleaning person in their house, that they create a solution that would put most cleaning people out of a job.

The knowledge workers automate jobs away, leading pundits to say the future for low-skilled workers is to provide boutique services for the upper class. The end being that the upper class is too ashamed to actually consume those services if it means looking at a person...well, that's sort of a delicious irony, isn't it?

I have never hired a cleaner, but I imagine there are also people who are uncomfortable having strangers in their house and handling their things.

I have also heard about people getting cleaners who initially do a good job, but whose work quality degrades over time. You wouldn't have that problem with a robot.

Until it gets a million software updates to add “features” that are really just ploys to slow the device down and encourage you to upgrade ;)

The cleaning performance of my Roomba degraded over time.

Assuming that the robot is properly maintained and no parts break.

Not to brag, but my house has a a machine (and a room!) dedicated to cleaning a very embarrassing thing. I'll go even further and brag that I use this room and machine daily! Western society has normalized using the toilet, thankfully, and for a long time now, but it wasn't always the norm.

there's definitely some irony to it. I do think a significant motivation for automating stuff is to avoid firsthand confrontation with the reality of capitalism. some people don't necessarily feel uncomfortable with the power dynamic though; they're just embarrassed that another human sees how unclean their living space is. someone might also worry about theft, or they might not like having to be in their house at a certain time each week to let the workers in. it can also just feel like a general loss of privacy in your home.

It seems to me that the reality of capitalism is why wages are too high for the middle class to be able to afford servants.

And humans can't come over during a pandemic.

For high risk people, this might be a good alternative for normally-simple tasks they can't do by themselves.

Now I just picture someone passing away quietly only to be found weeks or even months later in a still immaculately clean house.

or in a more Black Mirror-esque reality, maybe after the human dies the robot no longer detects a heart rate or pulse and considers the corpse as trash and just disposes of it automatically.

At our house, we don't clean because of embarrassment. We clean because we want them to do the stuff that we don't want to do ourselves. I'd rather they spend time cleaning the oven than pick up toys.

At least a human cleaner wouldn't spy on you by default.

Given the proliferation of always-on microphones in people's homes (Google Nest, Amazon Alexa, etc), I'd say we're not avoiding the spying issues...

Well you can not have those if you don't like eavesdropping. A cleaning lady is atleast something you notice might hear you and she wont use the data to decide my credit rating.

A safe assumtion is that all IoT devices spy on you. I wonder how much longer there actually are robot vacuum cleaners that are safely offline for sale with full functionality.