9 ms·

The (unspoken?) goal is to do my laundry - and all the other domestic tasks, because that’s where human satisfaction can be unleashed Give me a moment 1. All

The (unspoken?) goal is to do my laundry - and all the other domestic tasks, because that’s where human satisfaction can be unleashed Give me a moment 1. All economics / markers of value are about human happiness / satisfaction - we claim it’s money but it’s only given a value by humans who want it. 2. As soon as people get rich enough they outsource their domestic tasks - hire a maid or a cook, or buy ready meals. 3. In the western world companies over past fifty years got a free boost as women joined the labour force, and essentially companies were paying one guy the cost of a household now they pay two people the cost of household getting twice the workers for same price. 4. So most households have lost 35 hours a week, and also still have same amount of domestic duties to do 5. As we can’t give everyone a maid we might be able to give everyone a robot maid. 6. Most innovations / technologies find their way into homes - from bricks to heating to electricity we invent it and eventually find a way to make our lives more comfortable - see the point about economics is just humans liking stuff 7. I assumed that real robo maids would be a social shift - ie a different design of washing machine, people eating at other peoples houses every day, anti-dust surfaces. But this one looks … interesting 8. I know this is incredibly western middle class centric - but exactly what else are 6 billon people aiming for?

ktjag 2y ago
Where did the economies get a boost when women joined the labor force? In Germany the post-war economic miracle happened mostly without them. In the beginning of the 1970s, when women did join the labor force in greater numbers, admittedly the macroeconomic conditions were bad (oil crisis), so it is hard to filter that out. But still, mostly we have more workers, which lowers wages and leads to the creation of more bullshit jobs. To be clear, also men create and perform bullshit jobs! Now it takes two salaries to finance a house and a family. Great progress. At the supermarket, I boycott automated self-checkouts even if the lines are long so the nice cashiers keep their jobs.
- simgt 2y ago
  That's clearly the "why" no one pushing for innovative products is answering. A couple decades ago one salary could sustain a family in most developed countries, now it seems to be a struggle with two for many, we have mass unemployment, productivity soared but somehow society also can't afford enough cleaners to keep places decent. Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first?
  - seniorivn 2y ago
    efficiency and productivity is clearly more important for development of all industries than what you value. Political institutions are not very good at preparing for unfamiliar problems, dont count on them doing that. Just push for progress in natural way, and for politicians to adjust to an already happend changes. Thats the best that we can do.
    - _puk 2y ago
      "efficiency and productivity is clearly more important for development of all industries than what you value" And yet countries that value more than efficiency and productivity are repeatedly ranked as the happiest in the world [0]. "Just push for progress in natural way, and for politicians to adjust to an already happend changes" How much damage has unfettered tech done to society at large? Maybe we'll never know the full answer, but we can definitely agree it hasn't all been positive (advertising, social media etc..). We're now retrospectively regulating, but a lot of it feels too little, too late, for some elements of society (privacy being a notable example). 0: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/the-nordic-exceptionalism-what-explains-why-the-nordic-countries-are-constantly-among-the-happiest-in-the-world/ https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/the-nordic-exceptional...
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        Perhaps being happy is not the goal? What if the happiness isn't sustainable?
        consteval 2y ago
        Happiness is the only goal, because all other goals no longer matter if you're unhappy. Infinite money is worthless if you do not have the motivation and drive to enjoy it. Have 1 trillion dollars and spending none on something you care about is equivalent to having zero dollars.
  - vhiremath4 2y ago
    > Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first? I have more faith in our ability to solve world peace and AGI than I do in us getting to a more objective way to measure value that everyone can agree and adhere to.
- seniorivn 2y ago
  you should also try to avoid cars and electric lights, grooms and gas light maintainers need jobs too
  - ajkrgh 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - vasco 2y ago
      And then what, conclude that a useless action to delay progress is somehow good and allows you to feel better about yourself and superior to others using self-checkout while doing absolutely nothing? If that's the outcome of "classic education" I think you didn't do it right.
- Matumio 2y ago
  I generally agree with you, if you want someone else to do the checkout for you because you don't like doing it. But if you also buy clothes only made from hand-spun yarn, I mean, it was a problem for the yarn-spinsters back then, and by all means help them. But paying someone to do something that no longer needs doing is how you create bullshit jobs. No problem with spinning yarn for recreation, but if they have to do some complete nonsense to earn a roof and a meal... there are kinder ways to help.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > I generally agree with you, if you want someone else to do the checkout for you because you don't like doing it. Alternative take wrt. self-service checkouts: the store is making you do unpaid labor for it. And with how it's implemented in practice, it's not only offloading work of a specialist to you, it's also costing you time and frustration, since a cashier doing checkout 8h/day on a checkout desk optimized for throughput is doing a much faster job at it than you doing it ad-hoc, in constrained space, on a machine that throws an error if you look at it funny. I'm very much for automating bullshit jobs away, but store checkout ain't it yet, and the results are universally worse. More importantly, it's a common pattern that's been inflicted on people (and ourselves) by our industry particularly often: "automating away" specialist jobs with software. The workload doesn't actually go away - it gets redistributed to everyone. It only looks like a win, because specialist salaries are legible to the business, while generalized productivity loss isn't. Think of it next time when a two day coding problem takes you a week, because you also need to attend several useless meetings, make some powerpoint slides, update your calendar, timesheet, and fill in expense reports from a business trip.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Groceries are a highly competitive market so a large fraction of cost savings end up being returned to the customer in lower prices. From my perspective self checkout is a latency optimization. The person in front of you in line may have 3 items and still take an unreasonably long time finishing the transaction, but replace one line with 4 machines and the line keeps moving. Sure I’ll take a full cart to an actual cashier, but by removing people with only a few items from those lines they become more predictable.
- kristianp 2y ago
  > Now it takes two salaries to finance a house and a family Yes! I have been thinking this. So as an economic consequence of both parents being able to work, now the choice to stay home and care for the kids is an even harder one. The birth rate falls. Kids are raised by childcare workers, not their parents.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    But capital got their assets pumped and that's what matters! We need to stop asking 10+ workdays a week from each couple. Once we only demand 7 workdays a week, people are allowed to raise their own kids again!
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    That's the irony. Before, there was no choice but for women to stay at home. Now, most have no choice but to work. Turns out, for the market, having a choice is a form of wealth. It will make you pay to acquire it, it will treat you as that much more wealthy if you have it, and it will encourage you to sell it.
    - rwyinuse 2y ago
      Yeah, as far as labor market goes "women's liberation" never really happened. The social pressure to have a family didn't really disappear, and yet there's way more pressure to build a career to appease our corporate overlords. Is that really an improvement? Ultimately capitalism is built so that improved productivity, more working hours, higher salaries never benefit the worker long-term. If people start earning more, the owning class will simply raise prices to match this new level of income. The US is the wealthiest and strongest country in the world, and yet young people there struggle to buy houses just as much (or even more) than their peers in much poorer countries.
      - ants_everywhere 2y ago
        > The social pressure to have a family didn't really disappear All sexually reproducing organisms on the Earth have families without any social pressure and we evolved from primates who work like this. By far the stronger pressure is biological. I doubt social pressure even comes close to moving the needle.
- wslh 2y ago
  > Where did the economies get a boost when women joined the labor force? In Germany the post-war economic miracle happened mostly without them. I have a "hobbyist conjecture" that I'd love feedback on from people familiar with economics. Simply put, the idea is this: if you were to give every human around the world a million dollars (imagine this is easy and feasible), prices would inevitably rise. The poorest might experience some improvement in their standard of living, but not as much as one might expect. This effect seems to go beyond inflation alone. My intuition is that prices ultimately adjust based on social structures and expectations. Similarly, we see a unique economic advantage in many dual-income gay couples who, statistically, achieve higher standards of living. Often, this is partly because fewer have children, which shifts financial priorities and spending capacities.
  - program_whiz 2y ago
    Yes this is common knowledge in econ supply/demand and money supply. Other currencies 1M base notes is not a lot (e.g. 1M dinar). You can just add/remove zeros but prices have adjusted, those people can't live like "millionaires" with 1M dinar. There was a time goods like meat cost pennies, now it's $10 per pound. In those times $10,000 would be a life-altering amount of money, today most people have $10,000 in assets. The price of goods is related to money supply, they get more expensive if people have more money. Money has no intrinsic value, it is balanced by whatever goods and services can be bought by it. If you add money but no goods and services, money is worth less (see COVID policy, increase money and decrease goods and services).
    - wslh 2y ago
      Thank you! The COVID policy example feels especially relevant because it illustrates the kind of sudden economic shift I'm curious about, rather than just changes in nominal currency values. To clarify my thought experiment: imagine a stable economy where suddenly every person worldwide is gifted $1 million USD. I'm interested in exploring how this kind of immediate influx would impact prices and standards of living, beyond just inflation.
      - 2y ago
- imchillyb 2y ago
  Users of self check out are training cashier replacements. Doesn’t matter whether a person chooses self check out or cashier check out. What matters is the training. When self checkout becomes nearly as accurate as cashiers the cashiers lose their jobs. Which lane we choose has little to do with the replacement. Thousands of holdouts won’t affect the millions of shoppers training the replacements.
- nobodyandproud 2y ago
  Post-war Germany relied on cheap, foreign-worker labor instead: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter Note: The European guest worker model of the 1950s and 1960s doesn’t work for the United States, due to the birthright citizenship status.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  > At the supermarket, I boycott automated self-checkouts even if the lines are long so the nice cashiers keep their jobs. I’m not sure this is Owning the Bots the way you think it is.
- fjdjshsh 2y ago
  For this to be true, real wages would have had to collapse (at the very least ~50-70%) for a household of two workers to be less rich than the household of one worker x years ago. This is just not true. If people feel worse it's because they want more things from life, not because they are able to afford less things. (I'm talking about the last ~50 years. The last 20 years may be a different point, but it doesn't have to do with female participation in the marketplace)
- lifeisstillgood 2y ago
  I’m not saying the continues got a boost - but companies were able to absorb extra workers and maintain the total outgoings per household for decades Not sure how that shows up in the stats
vasco 2y ago
The underlying real goal is to have sex with the robots, just as the internet was going to be the gateway to all known information but instead is for porn.
- kelvinjps10 2y ago
  Is both
- ttul 2y ago
  [flagged]
- lifeisstillgood 2y ago
  Ok. Fairy Nuff.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
doctorpangloss 2y ago
These Physical Intelligence guys are very talented, but they will never raise enough money to achieve their goals. Their problem is saying it costs $30m to develop such a technology, when it will cost at least $1b, and probably closer to $5b.
- danbmil99 2y ago
  Not $30M, they raised $400M, and I'm sure if their stuff works and gets adoption they can raise more
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    $400m isn’t enough.
    - user90131313 2y ago
      With $400M they can make some buggy app or they can push really hard. It's enough amount that can be used a lot more efficiently. So entirely depends on team and the founders
    - jeffreyq 2y ago
      can you provide some napkin math as to why it's not enough?
fjdjshsh 2y ago
>3. In the western world companies over past fifty years got a free boost as women joined the labour force, and essentially companies were paying one guy the cost of a household now they pay two people the cost of household getting twice the workers for same price. If demand for work is fixed, then doubling the supply of work (male + female from the same household) would in principle decrease wages (not necessarily by half). However, the supply need not be fixed. This is what I like to call the "musical chairs theory of employment". Let's say there are 2x more working age people in 2024 than in 1954, does it mean each person earns less? When immigrants come to a country, does it mean that each immigrant causes a native to become unemployed? The evidence tells us that's not true and that there are other changes in the economy that also increase the demand for work. Check the literature of immigration effects (even major short term shocks) on unemployment and wages to see a pretty clear picture. I'm not aware of a study of what more female employment has done (my guess is that it's much more difficult to study, because it's a phenomenon that has slowly happened over decades. As an aside, this has happened in plenty of places around the world, no need to restrict yourself to the western world. Plenty of other places are relevant)
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Rent goes up.
- nick__m 2y ago
  The Canadian experiment have shown us that with enough unskilled immigrants GDP per person goes down. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-gdp-per-capita-rich-1.7318989 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-gdp-per-capita-rich-... https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-immigration-per-capita-gdp https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-immigration-per-...

ktjag 2y ago

Where did the economies get a boost when women joined the labor force? In Germany the post-war economic miracle happened mostly without them. In the beginning of the 1970s, when women did join the labor force in greater numbers, admittedly the macroeconomic conditions were bad (oil crisis), so it is hard to filter that out. But still, mostly we have more workers, which lowers wages and leads to the creation of more bullshit jobs. To be clear, also men create and perform bullshit jobs! Now it takes two salaries to finance a house and a family. Great progress. At the supermarket, I boycott automated self-checkouts even if the lines are long so the nice cashiers keep their jobs.

simgt 2y ago
That's clearly the "why" no one pushing for innovative products is answering. A couple decades ago one salary could sustain a family in most developed countries, now it seems to be a struggle with two for many, we have mass unemployment, productivity soared but somehow society also can't afford enough cleaners to keep places decent. Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first?
- seniorivn 2y ago
  efficiency and productivity is clearly more important for development of all industries than what you value. Political institutions are not very good at preparing for unfamiliar problems, dont count on them doing that. Just push for progress in natural way, and for politicians to adjust to an already happend changes. Thats the best that we can do.
  - _puk 2y ago
    "efficiency and productivity is clearly more important for development of all industries than what you value" And yet countries that value more than efficiency and productivity are repeatedly ranked as the happiest in the world [0]. "Just push for progress in natural way, and for politicians to adjust to an already happend changes" How much damage has unfettered tech done to society at large? Maybe we'll never know the full answer, but we can definitely agree it hasn't all been positive (advertising, social media etc..). We're now retrospectively regulating, but a lot of it feels too little, too late, for some elements of society (privacy being a notable example). 0: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/the-nordic-exceptionalism-what-explains-why-the-nordic-countries-are-constantly-among-the-happiest-in-the-world/ https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/the-nordic-exceptional...
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      Perhaps being happy is not the goal? What if the happiness isn't sustainable?
      - consteval 2y ago
        Happiness is the only goal, because all other goals no longer matter if you're unhappy. Infinite money is worthless if you do not have the motivation and drive to enjoy it. Have 1 trillion dollars and spending none on something you care about is equivalent to having zero dollars.
- vhiremath4 2y ago
  > Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first? I have more faith in our ability to solve world peace and AGI than I do in us getting to a more objective way to measure value that everyone can agree and adhere to.
seniorivn 2y ago
you should also try to avoid cars and electric lights, grooms and gas light maintainers need jobs too
- ajkrgh 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - vasco 2y ago
    And then what, conclude that a useless action to delay progress is somehow good and allows you to feel better about yourself and superior to others using self-checkout while doing absolutely nothing? If that's the outcome of "classic education" I think you didn't do it right.
Matumio 2y ago
I generally agree with you, if you want someone else to do the checkout for you because you don't like doing it. But if you also buy clothes only made from hand-spun yarn, I mean, it was a problem for the yarn-spinsters back then, and by all means help them. But paying someone to do something that no longer needs doing is how you create bullshit jobs. No problem with spinning yarn for recreation, but if they have to do some complete nonsense to earn a roof and a meal... there are kinder ways to help.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > I generally agree with you, if you want someone else to do the checkout for you because you don't like doing it. Alternative take wrt. self-service checkouts: the store is making you do unpaid labor for it. And with how it's implemented in practice, it's not only offloading work of a specialist to you, it's also costing you time and frustration, since a cashier doing checkout 8h/day on a checkout desk optimized for throughput is doing a much faster job at it than you doing it ad-hoc, in constrained space, on a machine that throws an error if you look at it funny. I'm very much for automating bullshit jobs away, but store checkout ain't it yet, and the results are universally worse. More importantly, it's a common pattern that's been inflicted on people (and ourselves) by our industry particularly often: "automating away" specialist jobs with software. The workload doesn't actually go away - it gets redistributed to everyone. It only looks like a win, because specialist salaries are legible to the business, while generalized productivity loss isn't. Think of it next time when a two day coding problem takes you a week, because you also need to attend several useless meetings, make some powerpoint slides, update your calendar, timesheet, and fill in expense reports from a business trip.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Groceries are a highly competitive market so a large fraction of cost savings end up being returned to the customer in lower prices. From my perspective self checkout is a latency optimization. The person in front of you in line may have 3 items and still take an unreasonably long time finishing the transaction, but replace one line with 4 machines and the line keeps moving. Sure I’ll take a full cart to an actual cashier, but by removing people with only a few items from those lines they become more predictable.
kristianp 2y ago
> Now it takes two salaries to finance a house and a family Yes! I have been thinking this. So as an economic consequence of both parents being able to work, now the choice to stay home and care for the kids is an even harder one. The birth rate falls. Kids are raised by childcare workers, not their parents.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  But capital got their assets pumped and that's what matters! We need to stop asking 10+ workdays a week from each couple. Once we only demand 7 workdays a week, people are allowed to raise their own kids again!
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  That's the irony. Before, there was no choice but for women to stay at home. Now, most have no choice but to work. Turns out, for the market, having a choice is a form of wealth. It will make you pay to acquire it, it will treat you as that much more wealthy if you have it, and it will encourage you to sell it.
  - rwyinuse 2y ago
    Yeah, as far as labor market goes "women's liberation" never really happened. The social pressure to have a family didn't really disappear, and yet there's way more pressure to build a career to appease our corporate overlords. Is that really an improvement? Ultimately capitalism is built so that improved productivity, more working hours, higher salaries never benefit the worker long-term. If people start earning more, the owning class will simply raise prices to match this new level of income. The US is the wealthiest and strongest country in the world, and yet young people there struggle to buy houses just as much (or even more) than their peers in much poorer countries.
    - ants_everywhere 2y ago
      > The social pressure to have a family didn't really disappear All sexually reproducing organisms on the Earth have families without any social pressure and we evolved from primates who work like this. By far the stronger pressure is biological. I doubt social pressure even comes close to moving the needle.
wslh 2y ago
> Where did the economies get a boost when women joined the labor force? In Germany the post-war economic miracle happened mostly without them. I have a "hobbyist conjecture" that I'd love feedback on from people familiar with economics. Simply put, the idea is this: if you were to give every human around the world a million dollars (imagine this is easy and feasible), prices would inevitably rise. The poorest might experience some improvement in their standard of living, but not as much as one might expect. This effect seems to go beyond inflation alone. My intuition is that prices ultimately adjust based on social structures and expectations. Similarly, we see a unique economic advantage in many dual-income gay couples who, statistically, achieve higher standards of living. Often, this is partly because fewer have children, which shifts financial priorities and spending capacities.
- program_whiz 2y ago
  Yes this is common knowledge in econ supply/demand and money supply. Other currencies 1M base notes is not a lot (e.g. 1M dinar). You can just add/remove zeros but prices have adjusted, those people can't live like "millionaires" with 1M dinar. There was a time goods like meat cost pennies, now it's $10 per pound. In those times $10,000 would be a life-altering amount of money, today most people have $10,000 in assets. The price of goods is related to money supply, they get more expensive if people have more money. Money has no intrinsic value, it is balanced by whatever goods and services can be bought by it. If you add money but no goods and services, money is worth less (see COVID policy, increase money and decrease goods and services).
  - wslh 2y ago
    Thank you! The COVID policy example feels especially relevant because it illustrates the kind of sudden economic shift I'm curious about, rather than just changes in nominal currency values. To clarify my thought experiment: imagine a stable economy where suddenly every person worldwide is gifted $1 million USD. I'm interested in exploring how this kind of immediate influx would impact prices and standards of living, beyond just inflation.
    - 2y ago
imchillyb 2y ago
Users of self check out are training cashier replacements. Doesn’t matter whether a person chooses self check out or cashier check out. What matters is the training. When self checkout becomes nearly as accurate as cashiers the cashiers lose their jobs. Which lane we choose has little to do with the replacement. Thousands of holdouts won’t affect the millions of shoppers training the replacements.
nobodyandproud 2y ago
Post-war Germany relied on cheap, foreign-worker labor instead: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter Note: The European guest worker model of the 1950s and 1960s doesn’t work for the United States, due to the birthright citizenship status.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
> At the supermarket, I boycott automated self-checkouts even if the lines are long so the nice cashiers keep their jobs. I’m not sure this is Owning the Bots the way you think it is.
fjdjshsh 2y ago
For this to be true, real wages would have had to collapse (at the very least ~50-70%) for a household of two workers to be less rich than the household of one worker x years ago. This is just not true. If people feel worse it's because they want more things from life, not because they are able to afford less things. (I'm talking about the last ~50 years. The last 20 years may be a different point, but it doesn't have to do with female participation in the marketplace)
lifeisstillgood 2y ago
I’m not saying the continues got a boost - but companies were able to absorb extra workers and maintain the total outgoings per household for decades Not sure how that shows up in the stats

vasco 2y ago

The underlying real goal is to have sex with the robots, just as the internet was going to be the gateway to all known information but instead is for porn.

kelvinjps10 2y ago
Is both
ttul 2y ago
[flagged]
lifeisstillgood 2y ago
Ok. Fairy Nuff.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

doctorpangloss 2y ago

These Physical Intelligence guys are very talented, but they will never raise enough money to achieve their goals. Their problem is saying it costs $30m to develop such a technology, when it will cost at least $1b, and probably closer to $5b.

danbmil99 2y ago
Not $30M, they raised $400M, and I'm sure if their stuff works and gets adoption they can raise more
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  $400m isn’t enough.
  - user90131313 2y ago
    With $400M they can make some buggy app or they can push really hard. It's enough amount that can be used a lot more efficiently. So entirely depends on team and the founders
  - jeffreyq 2y ago
    can you provide some napkin math as to why it's not enough?

fjdjshsh 2y ago

>3. In the western world companies over past fifty years got a free boost as women joined the labour force, and essentially companies were paying one guy the cost of a household now they pay two people the cost of household getting twice the workers for same price. If demand for work is fixed, then doubling the supply of work (male + female from the same household) would in principle decrease wages (not necessarily by half). However, the supply need not be fixed. This is what I like to call the "musical chairs theory of employment". Let's say there are 2x more working age people in 2024 than in 1954, does it mean each person earns less? When immigrants come to a country, does it mean that each immigrant causes a native to become unemployed? The evidence tells us that's not true and that there are other changes in the economy that also increase the demand for work. Check the literature of immigration effects (even major short term shocks) on unemployment and wages to see a pretty clear picture. I'm not aware of a study of what more female employment has done (my guess is that it's much more difficult to study, because it's a phenomenon that has slowly happened over decades. As an aside, this has happened in plenty of places around the world, no need to restrict yourself to the western world. Plenty of other places are relevant)

llamaimperative 2y ago
Rent goes up.
nick__m 2y ago
The Canadian experiment have shown us that with enough unskilled immigrants GDP per person goes down. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-gdp-per-capita-rich-1.7318989 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-gdp-per-capita-rich-... https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-immigration-per-capita-gdp https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-immigration-per-...