Because it's hard to justify the $$$ on a robot to automate a job that takes 30 seconds once a week.
Modern people don't realize it, but an awful lot of household drudgery has been automated. I'm old enough to remember life before the microwave. What a marvelous time saver that is! You can even buy one from the thrift store for $10. I remember them being $1000, and that was back when a dollar was worth something.
My first encounter with a microwave was at far Bob's in Pasadena. Finals had just ended at Cal Tech and I walked to far Bob's to decompress. I had no knowledge of microwave ovens.
I ordered a piece of cherry pie. Waitress decided to warm it without telling me, using their then-new microwave oven.
The plate was ice cold when she passed it to me. When I bit into a piece of the pie, I burned the bejesus out of my mouth. I yelped and the waitress came running.
She showed me this magic box, which made sense as I'd just finished E&M. She comped me the pie and since it was a slow night (around 2am), we spent an hour testing different foods in the microwave. Bacon layered in paper towels was the clear winner.
The fastest tech revolution I ever saw was in the fall of '75, when I was a frosh. At the beginning of the semester, the Caltech bookstore had slide rules for $125. By December, they were on closeout for $5. Never saw them again. The calculators had arrived!
(Showing my age again. Kids today don't ride bikes to school. All you gotta do is look at the lonely single bike rack at elementary schools. In my day there were lots of racks festooned with bikes. These days when I pass a school, there's a long line of moms in SUVs with the motor running talking on their phones.)
In the USA. But in plenty of other places they do. In fact, at the bike rack of my sons school there is too little place, so some of them overflow onto the school yard.
There are the mothers of kitchen automation:
1. refrigerator
2. garbage disposal
3. dishwasher
4. electric / gas stove and oven
These are really marvelous inventions. It seems I spent half my childhood washing dishes by hand. Ugh.
The latter does not exist in Europe so I haven't ever thought it would be an important step in reducing chores. We have bio waste bins for food leftovers which seems pretty efficient already.
In my opinion they provide basically zero value but lots of trouble. They encourage putting all kinds of nastiness down your pipes and in my experience tend to break and leak. But they are virtually ubiquitous here.
But perhaps not as much fun, particularly if you forget to put the lid on?
> It seems I spent half my childhood washing dishes by hand. Ugh.
Yes, I remember that when I left home to go to university, the very first thing my parents did was to buy a dishwasher.
Mind you, I don't have one today - kitchen too small, and I don't like bending down to fill/empty it.
I'm really wondering about the garbage disposal thing and I'll go Google about them.
Pneumatic waste collection is a thing, and has been for quite some time.
See
- https://www.wired.com/2010/08/trash-sucking-island/
- https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan...
- https://qz.com/1909600/the-future-of-garbage-collection-is-p...
What I think will happen is CEOs will be glorified actors that are tasked with delivering the decisions some ML system has made. It'll be like the "white guy in a suit" role that some Chinese companies have.
Whereas things humans have developed over millions of years and think are easy, like vision, dexterity, etc might be quite hard and the last things to be automated.
I feel like a lot of comments about what ML will do start with a misunderstanding of what ML actually is.
Saying ML will make a CEO’s decisions is like saying Excel will make CEO’s decisions. Neither is anything more than a system for keeping track of correlations.
I regularly consult management about technical decisions and the always chose something else than the best option. Based on feelings, opinions and kickback rates.
Well, right there's your problem.
Also, the vacuum now empties itself
Have you found those working? All my friends that have one just end up storing them somewhere never to be used again.
My apartment in Europe is suitable for it, as I do not have many rooms, so that it does a decent job on cleaning. I do not use the regular vacuum very often.
2) The CEO, and CEO pay, is already more of political action.
Have you ever seen a robot unclog a toiler? Get into a greasy kitchen vent to clean it? Clean out the molt between the tiles?
Of fuck that, there is no cleaning robot that can even recognise a stain a scrub it off with a brush.
Do you know there are different kinds of cleaning products and brushes for different surfaces?
Cleaning is a very complex process made up of hundreds of little actions, each fairly complex. They require loads of dexterity
I have seen a plunger-bot. I have never seen a commercial plunger-bot. I think I've also seen a mold scrubber bot. I'm not trying to minimize the skill involved. I'm trying to say that the labor it replaces (assuming the time value of money and minimum wage increases cancel out) is worth 362,500 over 25 years. That's a lot of money, but it's also not for a robot that can do all those things assuming it was as efficient as replacing a whole person. And less if the robot has to be replaced more frequently.
If the market supported a robot that cost a few orders of magnitude more than that, I can see a fleet of robots. Not 100% "let 'er rip" L-5 autonomy, but where one person managed a fleet of specialized robots. Mapping out the surfaces ahead of time, etc.
I will say, I was responding to a "janitor" in the office environment doing routine tasks emptying trash. Not a kitchen vent cleaner. There are a lot of deep cleaning actions that would be harder to automate, and given their rareness and extra difficulty are likely the last to go.
While everyone was predicting that the dirty jobs would get automated, instead its a lot of midlevel jobs are getting automated, but we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash.
I am willing to bet my house thay we can automate away the CEO but not the janitor, and it will be hilarious.
Management is just analysis of data, we can do that. But the physical works requires dexterity and robotics that still escapes us.