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> "What we need is a computer that isn’t labor-saving, but which increases the work for us to do." — John Cage Arguably both are needed. The kind that replaces

> "What we need is a computer that isn’t labor-saving, but which increases the work for us to do." — John Cage Arguably both are needed. The kind that replaces the mindless repetitive work (e.g. dishwasher, roomba) so we have more time to focus on the kind that lets us do more than before (e.g. an orbital satelite, 3D printer). There are only 24 hours in a day and you can't do more without doing less first.

portaouflop 2y ago
Inventions like the dishwasher for domestic use never really led to meaningful work reduction for the people (women) doing this kind of work.
- skybrian 2y ago
  Seems like you can pretty easily use more dishes with less effort? If you end up spending more time on other chores, that's up to you.
  - asdff 2y ago
    Having lived in apartments with and without dishwashers its not as much of a time savings as you might realize. the dishwasher needs a degree of maintenance. Dishes have to be loaded precariously in a way to effectively wash them from the sprayer jets. Some dishes have to be washed by hand still. Everything needs rinsing and scraping. Its a modern dishwasher so that means its too weak to dry dishes on dry cycle to skirt energy efficiency standards, so dishes are then loaded into the rack by the sink to dry. and the whole cycle takes like 2 and a half hours. And I'm wondering why I'm not saving much time and its because the time savings isn't really significant to begin with. Coupled with the fact that when I was hand washing, I'd actually wash dishes as I generated them during cooking. It only takes me about 30 seconds to wash a plate or pan with sink and sponge and soap. I could have most dishes done before dinner was even served saved for the plates and silverware it was eaten with and maybe the last pan in the process, maybe 30 seconds work hardly less effort than the act of rinsing and scraping before the dishes go into the dishwasher. All that begin said I still use it, but I probably am not saving much, if any time, with the new rituals it requires.
    - moffkalast 2y ago
      > Everything needs rinsing and scraping. If you say that into a mirror five times an angry Canadian named Alec will show up behind you and start grumbling about prewash powder. It's amazing how absolutely nobody knows how to use a dishwasher properly.
      - asdff 2y ago
        Oh I am a powdered detergent truther already. I use the prewash tray. I clean the filter. I follow the manual to a tee. And you know what it says? Heat the water up out of the tap. Rinse and scrape the dishes. If I have to run the tap for 3 mins anyhow to get it hot enough to actually get the soap to suds up and not leave residue I might as well scrape out the pan.
    - macrocosmos 2y ago
      I had a broken dishwasher with a part I didn't feel like replacing for a few years that I only used as a drying rack. I replaced it recently because the door hinges broke as well. I now only run it once a week just to keep the parts moving. It is so much easier to just wash dishes as I go. And they're way cleaner when I wash them no matter how empty I keep the washer or how I arrange the dishes. Oh and I use it sometimes after I have guests over.
    - skybrian 2y ago
      What I was getting at is that dishwashers and hand washing scale up differently, but not everyone needs to wash lots of dishes.
- RandallBrown 2y ago
  It may not have reduced overall work, but certainly it reduced the amount of work they did washing dishes. That would allow them to do other things (or allow them to use more dishes.)
- vbarrielle 2y ago
  The dishwasher, maybe not, but a washing machine is reducing the laundry work by a lot. Have you ever tried to do your laundry by hand?
  - asdff 2y ago
    In those days you had fewer clothes and wore them longer between washes as well. Something to consider as we dedicate time to fold 7+ full outfits of clothes every week per person today.
    - darkwater 2y ago
      And on average families, especially the poorest ones, had 4 kids each. (Ok, I just made up the number to make a point but you get what I mean)
      - asdff 2y ago
        And kids would actually pull quite a lot of the weight back then too. "Clean your room" more like you are coming to the farm with me today boy and splitting the firewood for mother later.
  - sunshinesnacks 2y ago
    Agreed. Washing machines have had a huge impact. See [1] for some summary info. Anecdotally, having a dishwasher seems to simply mean that our house can go through 4x more dishes every day than I would expect… [1] https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-more-women-workforce https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-mo...
  - crucialfelix 2y ago
    Yes, life for housewives and mothers before the washing machine was hell. There are still billions of women in the world slaving away beating clothes on rocks.
asdff 2y ago
That is not the tradeoff being made. When you go from a home without a dishwasher to one with a dishwasher, you don't work more or less hours as an engineer at JPL. You work the same hours. Likewise for someone who does their housecleaning by hand or one that hires housecleaners, the latter doesn't start working 50 hour shifts at the office in response. Then the question is what are people doing with the extra time? We'd all like to imagine we are an artist or poet or musician deep own if we had the time, but are we really? Or would most people take an extra ten minutes and use it not to pick up a violin or to work a garden, but to scroll through tick tock perhaps? And you have to at least be aware to the fact that there is a lot of money to be made trying to get you to scroll tick tock instead of playing a violin not looking at advertisement, and very few interests out there pushing back as a result. So what gains we might make in efficiency today are liable to be gobbled up by some sort of profit making addictive product. And personally speaking, sometimes these low effort tasks like dusting the home or cleaning the dishes or mowing the lawn are great ways to disconnect active process into an automatic sort of action, to mediate while you are doing the thing, and think inwardly about some other idea you might have. In some ways washing the dishes is a forced chunk of time you actually have to think your thoughts. And scrolling an algorithmic feed in its stead is very much not giving yourself a chance to think your own thoughts about your own situation; you've in fact offloaded your thought process to the highest bidder to think for you. And that seems quite dangerous in society.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Perhaps that was a bad example since it's too much of a person-by-person thing (for myself I can definitely say I get more done if I don't have to spend hours on chores), but the fact that we can as a society actually do anything at all beyond just surviving is down to tractors and combine harvesters, so 98% of us don't have to work in food production anymore. The base level of complete chore automation that we've apparently all forgotten about. The fact that a job at JPL even exists is down to that and to manufacturing automation afterwards.
  - sunshinesnacks 2y ago
    My chemical engineer friends like to point out that the Haber-Bosch process has doubled global food production, or something like that. In the same “industrial agriculture” category as tractors and combines.

portaouflop 2y ago

Inventions like the dishwasher for domestic use never really led to meaningful work reduction for the people (women) doing this kind of work.

skybrian 2y ago
Seems like you can pretty easily use more dishes with less effort? If you end up spending more time on other chores, that's up to you.
- asdff 2y ago
  Having lived in apartments with and without dishwashers its not as much of a time savings as you might realize. the dishwasher needs a degree of maintenance. Dishes have to be loaded precariously in a way to effectively wash them from the sprayer jets. Some dishes have to be washed by hand still. Everything needs rinsing and scraping. Its a modern dishwasher so that means its too weak to dry dishes on dry cycle to skirt energy efficiency standards, so dishes are then loaded into the rack by the sink to dry. and the whole cycle takes like 2 and a half hours. And I'm wondering why I'm not saving much time and its because the time savings isn't really significant to begin with. Coupled with the fact that when I was hand washing, I'd actually wash dishes as I generated them during cooking. It only takes me about 30 seconds to wash a plate or pan with sink and sponge and soap. I could have most dishes done before dinner was even served saved for the plates and silverware it was eaten with and maybe the last pan in the process, maybe 30 seconds work hardly less effort than the act of rinsing and scraping before the dishes go into the dishwasher. All that begin said I still use it, but I probably am not saving much, if any time, with the new rituals it requires.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    > Everything needs rinsing and scraping. If you say that into a mirror five times an angry Canadian named Alec will show up behind you and start grumbling about prewash powder. It's amazing how absolutely nobody knows how to use a dishwasher properly.
    - asdff 2y ago
      Oh I am a powdered detergent truther already. I use the prewash tray. I clean the filter. I follow the manual to a tee. And you know what it says? Heat the water up out of the tap. Rinse and scrape the dishes. If I have to run the tap for 3 mins anyhow to get it hot enough to actually get the soap to suds up and not leave residue I might as well scrape out the pan.
  - macrocosmos 2y ago
    I had a broken dishwasher with a part I didn't feel like replacing for a few years that I only used as a drying rack. I replaced it recently because the door hinges broke as well. I now only run it once a week just to keep the parts moving. It is so much easier to just wash dishes as I go. And they're way cleaner when I wash them no matter how empty I keep the washer or how I arrange the dishes. Oh and I use it sometimes after I have guests over.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    What I was getting at is that dishwashers and hand washing scale up differently, but not everyone needs to wash lots of dishes.
RandallBrown 2y ago
It may not have reduced overall work, but certainly it reduced the amount of work they did washing dishes. That would allow them to do other things (or allow them to use more dishes.)
vbarrielle 2y ago
The dishwasher, maybe not, but a washing machine is reducing the laundry work by a lot. Have you ever tried to do your laundry by hand?
- asdff 2y ago
  In those days you had fewer clothes and wore them longer between washes as well. Something to consider as we dedicate time to fold 7+ full outfits of clothes every week per person today.
  - darkwater 2y ago
    And on average families, especially the poorest ones, had 4 kids each. (Ok, I just made up the number to make a point but you get what I mean)
    - asdff 2y ago
      And kids would actually pull quite a lot of the weight back then too. "Clean your room" more like you are coming to the farm with me today boy and splitting the firewood for mother later.
- sunshinesnacks 2y ago
  Agreed. Washing machines have had a huge impact. See [1] for some summary info. Anecdotally, having a dishwasher seems to simply mean that our house can go through 4x more dishes every day than I would expect… [1] https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-more-women-workforce https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-mo...
- crucialfelix 2y ago
  Yes, life for housewives and mothers before the washing machine was hell. There are still billions of women in the world slaving away beating clothes on rocks.

asdff 2y ago

That is not the tradeoff being made. When you go from a home without a dishwasher to one with a dishwasher, you don't work more or less hours as an engineer at JPL. You work the same hours. Likewise for someone who does their housecleaning by hand or one that hires housecleaners, the latter doesn't start working 50 hour shifts at the office in response. Then the question is what are people doing with the extra time? We'd all like to imagine we are an artist or poet or musician deep own if we had the time, but are we really? Or would most people take an extra ten minutes and use it not to pick up a violin or to work a garden, but to scroll through tick tock perhaps? And you have to at least be aware to the fact that there is a lot of money to be made trying to get you to scroll tick tock instead of playing a violin not looking at advertisement, and very few interests out there pushing back as a result. So what gains we might make in efficiency today are liable to be gobbled up by some sort of profit making addictive product. And personally speaking, sometimes these low effort tasks like dusting the home or cleaning the dishes or mowing the lawn are great ways to disconnect active process into an automatic sort of action, to mediate while you are doing the thing, and think inwardly about some other idea you might have. In some ways washing the dishes is a forced chunk of time you actually have to think your thoughts. And scrolling an algorithmic feed in its stead is very much not giving yourself a chance to think your own thoughts about your own situation; you've in fact offloaded your thought process to the highest bidder to think for you. And that seems quite dangerous in society.

moffkalast 2y ago
Perhaps that was a bad example since it's too much of a person-by-person thing (for myself I can definitely say I get more done if I don't have to spend hours on chores), but the fact that we can as a society actually do anything at all beyond just surviving is down to tractors and combine harvesters, so 98% of us don't have to work in food production anymore. The base level of complete chore automation that we've apparently all forgotten about. The fact that a job at JPL even exists is down to that and to manufacturing automation afterwards.
- sunshinesnacks 2y ago
  My chemical engineer friends like to point out that the Haber-Bosch process has doubled global food production, or something like that. In the same “industrial agriculture” category as tractors and combines.