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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
by 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 agoPerhaps 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 agoMy 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.
- moffkalast 2y agoYes indeed, it's the main source of nitrogen for fertilizer. Otherwise we'd be back to leaving a third of the fields empty to regenerate with clover or similar plants that deposit nitrogen, plus having lower yields in general.
- sunshinesnacks 2y agoI guess tractors/combines made a much bigger difference than fertilizer. > The base level of complete chore automation that we've apparently all forgotten about. This is easy to forget. I try to occasionally remind myself that a safe office job, nearly unlimited food, and electric machines (boring robots?) to do work for me at home are all pretty incredible. The majority of my physical exertion is for fun and health reasons.
- nonameiguess 2y agoYou say this with quite a bit of confidence, and I can see in a later comment you've got some personal experience. I do as well, but it totally contradicts what you're saying. I had to get rid of my dishwasher last year because it had been installed incorrectly and leaked without us realizing it until it had caused quite a bit of water damage. I had to wait to get that fixed before installing a new dishwasher, and that took about three months. I washed all dishes by hand during that time. Like you, I tend to wash all dishes as I generate them, but I don't live alone, and my wife does not, so that didn't make much of a difference, and washing dishes by hand did, in fact, take an hour or so every day. Now that I have a new dishwasher and don't need to do that any more, I'm not on TikTok, but actually do mostly just work more.