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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, once we have a more general-purpose robot that can fold your clothes, set your table, cook breakfast, and load/unload your dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer (or at least handle a reasonable subset of those tasks) we might finally start to see some progress in this area.

Those are enormously complicated tasks to solve in the general case though, so I don't anticipate anything like that being available for quite some time.

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> we might finally start to see some progress in this area.

You just ignored that the washing machine itself is a special purpose robot. Same with the dishwasher. Some progress already happened.

Go back a generation or two in the US, or live like the majority of people in the world, and you'd notice that laundry and dishes are very usefully semi-automated today.

They aren't robots because they aren't cybernetic at all. Sensory input and response loops are at the core of what a robot is, not automating things.

They have feedback loops. Temperature, time and speed control.

It's an automated, feedback controlled, electro-mechanical labour saving home appliance. It doesn't matter if you call it a robot or not: progress has been made.

Even one of those tasks would probably be enough for people to consider adopting robots. People started to have telephones back when you could only do voice calls with them. Then, the tasks that mobile phones could do expanded, first to PDAs then to the iPhone in the smartphone age.

What I would pay for a clothes-folding robot. That is my least-liked chore, folding the same clothes in the same way every week. Yes I wear the same clothes every week - I'm an engineer.

> fold your clothes, set your table, cook breakfast, and load/unload your dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer

But are these pain points for a sufficient number of people? I can understand robots that could do these tasks would be a godsend for disabled people and the very elderly, but those are small markets. The vast majority of able bodied people just fold their own clothes and do their own laundry. It’s easy and takes minutes. I don’t think I’d even pay $100 for a robot that could fold clothes.

Laundry is absolutely the biggest "housekeeping" item I have trouble with. I would pay a lot of money (thousands of dollars) for a robot that would take dirty laundry and wash, dry, and fold.

I’d pay a similar amount just for folding —- especially with a kid or two and two working parents, it’s our biggest household time-suck.

https://foldimate.com and https://helloeffie.com

Can't you pay a human to do that, if you're willing to pay thousands to have it done for you?

Yes, I suppose I could. I guess that I don't want another human coming into my house in my absence to do that, nor do I want to have to schedule it to happen when I'm home. Nor do I want to take my laundry someplace else and have to return later to pick it up.

I could probably live with leaving the laundry on the porch and having it returned there. I'll have to look into whether such a service is available in my area.

Traditionally, you would physically separate your living quarters from the areas where servants would work. In this scenario you could have a laundry room in the basement and a dumbwaiter connecting your basement to your closet, and have a separate door that only goes into the basement.

There are a bunch of laundry startups:

* https://www.rinse.com/

* https://cleanly.com/

* http://www.washclubnyc.com/

These startups employ people to do the laundry of their customers. If they get big enough, those startups might invest into automation.

Your dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, etc. is sitting around most of the day being idle, with its utilization being really low. Industrial laundry robots don't need to be mass produced in order to be profitable, they can be hand manufactured. This allows lower capital expenditures and allows for faster iteration. And you could pay some person to watch 5 robots and correct them when they do something wrong, something similar isn't possible outside of the industrial setting. So those services will greatly help with the invention of automatic laundry robots I think.

I feel like it was a disappointment that some of the brightest engineers of a generation went into ad tech, and next they're going into how to make the masses into part time servants with even fewer benefits than full time low-wage employees.

Most ad tech companies (Google, FB) likely devote well under 10% of their engineering might to work directly related to the advertising that forms their revenue stream.

Newspapers and magazines are ad-funded, too, but few would consider the work of journalists to be wasteful.

I would be curious to see an article, presentation, or quarterly report where that's written down because that's quite surprising. Maybe my gut is thinking ad-tech and all the support infrastructure, when the 10% is direct assigned engineering to ad-tech. And to be fair, the "support infrastructure" can and has other purposes.

People will pay for convenience. These might not be particularly difficult or time consuming tasks, but they're also rather menial, and inconvenient to have to deal with.

Just look at how much money people will pay to avoid the inconvenience of having to physically plug in their phones to charge them, for example: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=QI+Charger

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