Comment by hsnv
1 day ago
I've always found the idea of letting strangers clean my home strange. Maybe I grew up in the wrong tax bracket.
I see cleaning your own home, as well as other chores (dishes, laundry) as an act of self-hygiene. If you want a robot to do your chores, that gives me the same feeling as desiring a robot to bathe you, wipe your bottom and genitals after the toilet, brush your teeth for you etc.
Of course these are not apples to oranges, but I can't shake the feeling that you lose something about being a living, breathing being when you give up these mundane chores.
A robot that could wipe after using the toilet (admittedly fairly easy with modern-day powered bidets), clean someone up, help them shower, etc. would actually be a really big deal for care of the elderly. Currently this is a job a human has to do.
It would allow elderly to regain a certain amount of independence. Often they start having trouble with just 1 or 2 of these tasks, but then a home health aide is needed or they have to get put in a nursing home. The cost of this kind of care is $5000 - $20k a month. So there's a lot of money on the table for a good robot.
Any robot that does this reliably is easily more than a decade away.
Did you mean that to sound distant? Because my reading is that if we have robots reliably doing these sorts of delicate tasks in a decade or two, it would be amazingly revolutionary and disruptive to the economy.
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A decade for this kind of robot seems very optimistic. The latest one being prototyped in Japan can roll you on your side and help you out on socks.
Cleaning your ass or helping you shower is magnitudes more sensitive and complex
As long as it hits before my kids have to wipe my elderly ass I’m golden.
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Yet the insurance industry has been exploiting the elderly by selling Robot Insurance for decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM
I think we’re soon going to see a magical ChatGPT like moment for physical outputs. For instance, Figure’s Helix is only a 10M parameter NN. Once we get into the Billions we will start seeing leaps in progress just like LLMs.
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If only there was some type of social network for taking care of each other at différent stage of life!
Was called community
> brush your teeth for you
aka electric toothbrush
> wipe your bottom and genitals after the toilet
aka a bidet (or a toilet seat with a bidet)
> robot to bathe you
aka a shower
> dishes
aka a dishwasher
> laundry
aka a washer
If you want to do stuff yourself, use a manual toothbrush, learn how to wash your own clothes without a washer (people do this all the time, BTW), wash your own dishes without a dishwasher, don't use dry cleaning services, and use a bucket to take a bath. Also, don't use a vacuum cleaner.
> but I can't shake the feeling that you lose something about being a living, breathing being when you give up these mundane chores.
Say that when you have 3 kids, and cook most of the meals (i.e. no takeouts).
Weird leap. If we go by your logic, then broom is replaced by a vacuum cleaner. Automating something completely, aka getting someone to for it for you is a completely different thing.
I call that harpoon logic or half-dimensional logic. Works this way:
A subject is at the top of a cliff, facing the sea.
"I'd like to see the sea scenery better by approaching the edge".
A step is undertaken. The harpoon enters the mind.
"Oh, so I took this step, I've got to take another one".
N steps are undertaken. The subject is at the very edge right now.
"But hey, one can't stop the progress. Red lines, enough is enough, notions of overdevelopment etc are all excuses for luddites who don't value the merits of automation, easing the humankind's burden and removing all obstacles on the way to the best sea view".
A step more is undertaken.
Thunderous applause, turning into a standing ovation. And... Curtain!
[dead]
Maybe things have changed but finances mostly forced my kids and those in the neighborhood to grow up this way. No dishwasher, bidet (we're in the US anyway), electric toothbrush, and definitely cooked all meals. Maybe takeout pizza or chinese every couple months? Is this really so outlandish to you?
No - it was the same with us (OK, we had a dishwasher, but for much of my adult life I didn't).
The key is this:
> finances mostly forced
For a while I even hand washed when I did have a dishwasher. Then I realized that was a mistake and I started utilizing it (the dishwasher uses less water, and less energy to heat the water compared to my running the tap on warm).
The point is that after N kids, it stops being therapeutic and merely something you just have to do, and you're happy if you can afford a way not to do it.
Well, if everyone would find living the old way perfectly normal, as you and me do, how would the big guys get their ROI and become even bigger?
One does not simply invest in something new without any effort to make the old look medievally obscurant.
> don't use dry cleaning services
I agree with the rest of your comment but fuck dry cleaning services. Who does dry cleaning regularly?
I could be completely wrong about this, but I think a lot of women causal clothing specifically recommend dry cleaning, compared to men (unless you are in a field that wear suits everyday).
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I don't think it's a tax bracket thing, or even necessarily a culture/upbringing thing --> I was brought up white-collar working middle class -ish (Eastern European middle-class, which probably doesn't map cleanly to North American middle class; buying a bottle of coke was a Birthday thing), but then was refugee from a civil war for a while, with the appropriate tax bracket. And my grandma certainly instilled much of the same sense in me :)
Thing is, today, as an adult, I'm painfully aware that I'm mortal and life is limited and time is the most precious resource available to me. I'm not religious so I don't believe in after-life reward for being a good boy either. So I'm a little bit more mindful / little less self-flagellating, than I used to be, about these things.
For myself in particular:
* Yes, I shower and wipe my own bottom :)
* I am the dishes and laundry queen in my family, though I definitely use laundry machine (curious where that would fit in your matrix btw? :)
* I don't mind the act of lawn mowing but I absolutely resent the randomness of it - at some point north american society decided that we/they will 1. Adopt a very specific fast growing grass for ALL the lawns and 2. Having it more than ~5cm long is an affront to man and god and neighbourhood alike. Why they haven't just culturally picked cloverleaf or something is beyond me
* I like organizing my living space but I get zero sense of satisfaction out of vacuuming, dusting, and general maintenance. Many other people love it! In turn though, they probably get zero need to constantly rearchitect their home network like I do :->
In sum - I personally put laundry machine and auto-vacuum in very different category than showers and wiping bottoms, but if you lump them together, much power to you, though I don't think it's a tax bracket thing necessarily :)
The way I see it is: My time is worth $0 unless I'd otherwise be earning money.
So if you're an hourly contract worker, and you would otherwise be billing $100/hr to write code or something, then it makes sense to pay a gardener to mow your lawn and a plumber to fix your toilet, as long as it's less than you're making.
But instead, if you'd otherwise just be doom scrolling on your phone or jerking off, you might as well mow that lawn yourself. Paying someone any amount of money is a waste.
I pretty much DIY everything around the house. I work hard for my money, and it feels lazy and wasteful to just ship it off to someone else to do what I am fully capable of doing myself. Maybe when I'm 80 and have trouble walking, I'll pay someone to move furniture around or wash my roof. But not while I'm able bodied.
> But instead, if you'd otherwise just be doom scrolling on your phone or jerking off, you might as well mow that lawn yourself. Paying someone any amount of money is a waste.
It sounds like you're saying "pay someone to save you time if you use the time to work, but not if you use the time to relax". One of the best possible uses of money is to save you time, no matter what you use the time for.
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>"My time is worth $0 unless I'd otherwise be earning money."
That's the key insight and difference, and not one we can necessarily persuade each other :). My time is worth a LOT to me. I can use the time to play with my kids, be with my wife, play a video game or a musical instrument, read a book, or even doomscroll, if that's what my brain needs at the time. These are things that bring me joy, and mowing the lawn doesn't. I spend a lot of my time doing things out of necessity that don't bring me joy. I have precious little time for things that do bring me joy. I'm not looking to optimize for things I hate.
Don't get me wrong, as I said, I DO laundry and dishes and cleaning and stupid lawn mowing (grr!) and some repairs etc (I don't even have a rumba :). I used to do more car maintenance myself. But when I do bring somebody in to do the work, I do not feel guilty about it - I work my ass off doing things I'm good at and being paid for it, and in turn I sometimes pay others who are way better and more efficient at something than I am :).
Milleage may vary :).
Do you not effectively put a dollar value on things you do for entertainment / personal satisfaction / fulfillment? Pick any two activities, and you can probably identify a dollar amount (which might be infinite) that would induce you to do one rather than the other.
So let's say you're playing a video game, and someone asks you to mow their lawn. How much money would they have to offer you to induce you to do so? That's the marginal dollar value of that video game over mowing their lawn.
Or let's say you're playing a video game, and you need to mow your own lawn, but you don't want to. How much would you pay someone else to mow it so that you can keep playing your game?
Of course, those two amounts would be different because you probably feel differently about mowing your own lawn than about mowing someone else's. The difference between the two should (if you're being consistent, which humans seldom are) be how much would someone have to pay you to mow their lawn instead of your own.
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I used to be like you. One day I found out that my oldest daughter was almost 18, and my youngest one was already 13. I wish I had paid someone to have mowed that fucking law more times and played more time with my kids, spent more time with my wife.
Trying to fix it now. But the time I've lost already, this time is gone.
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> buying a bottle of coke was a Birthday thing
That’s not middle class. You were poor. I know that, because I was there.
I have a bidet to help wipe my bottom... It isn't enough that I can skip wiping completely, but it greatly reduces that chore.
I sometimes dream of being rich enough to afford a servant to do this for me. But realistically even if I was that rich I wouldn't subject someone to that indignity.
I thought the same until we started getting our house cleaned every two weeks.
It’s so freeing.
It feels well worth even a few hours of my work to pay for the time of the (so efficient) cleaners. So much better value than things most people don’t think twice about paying for (streaming services, faster Internet, a nice car, etc…)
I'll take it one step further - we have a 2-year-old toddler and recently I realized that I was spending a full, solid, real 1-1.5 hours per day doing the same kitchen & play area clean-up. Every day. No matter how hard I tried, the daily chaos of my wife & I working from home, preparing meals, and our family spending time in this part of the house meant it just needed this work.
I hired a lovely person recently who comes to the house for exactly that hour a day every day and now does this task for us. It's the most "luxury" labor service I've ever hired, and it, easily and without question, the best use of $$ I have ever spent on a service. I have an extra hour to hang with the family now and our kitchen & play area are now fully reset and spotless every night when we go to bed and every morning when we wake up.
It's not streaming service cheap, and I'm thankful that my business can generate enough $ to allow me to pay for this service, but man is it freeing and wonderful.
The real cause is that you and your wife never learned how to keep house. I'm in the same boat. My house is cluttered. Not like hoarder bad but stuff just piles up. I've been a guest where the house is always neat and everything is put away. The hosts just never let anything get out of place. Everything they own has a place and it always goes back there immediately after its used. They maintain this organized well kept home almost effortlessly, because they were taught how to do it at a young age by parents who were the same way. Whereas for me, it would take me several dedicated hours a day to get everything picked up and put away.
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I can see the charm in hiring a cleaning person you trust, but I personally wouldn't extend that to paying a faceless corporation to send a robot to do it.
I'd much rather pay a nice human significantly more money than have it done by a stinking robot.
> tax bracket
From late 19th to early 20th centuries, it was common for British workers to hire charwomen to clean their places. Domestic service was the most typical job for women by the time. Historically it wasn't really something exclusive for the rich.
>If you want a robot to do your chores
you mean like a dishwasher or a washing machine?
You are confusing letting a machine make decisions about what needs to be done with using a machine to remove toil from the things I have decided.
No? The only different between these robots and a washing machine is that in theory, the robot is generalist and can do many tasks, whereas a washing or laundry machine can only do one task. You can still in theory fully control what task the robot works on. Also, in theory, the robot would be the glue between all the other machines, like filling up the washing machine, then moving it to the dryer, etc. It deciding what to do isn't a "prerequisite" for the robot.
I'm sure when these came out someone was thinking that they think about what stains to remove.
I guess I am mostly intrigued that those lists would differ greatly with respect to cleaning.
Do you feel the same way about walking? If you wanted to get anywhere on land pre Bronze age your only option was to walk. Then we started riding horses, later we invented carriages, much much later bicycles, cars, and airplanes. Do these also take away something about being a living, breathing being? Do you feel that your life is lessened by these options?
A different question is. Imagine that you are living with a partner and you agree on a distribution of labour. Let’s say you do the hunting and your partner cleans the house. They are happy with the agreement and fully consent to it. Do you feel it takes away from you being a living, breathing being?
I would love for a robot to wipe me after using the toilet - and I have a washlet for this!
It’s not about tax bracket. You can still pay your cleaning folks a reasonable wage and be kind to them. You can still treat them like human beings. It’s vulnerable to have another person tidy up after you, but fine in the end. Turns out vacuuming isn’t really that personal.
It’s one thing to have NEVER done the mundane chores and entirely another to save some time in your day while you’re at work to have someone help with it.
This got disturbing pretty quickly. Scatology meets HN.
It's like the family guy episode:
"Dad we're putting you in a nursing home"
"I don't wanna"
"Dad, there's people where who'll wipe your ass for you"
"Louis pack your things"
For me, it's the invasiveness and lack of agency; your house is the most private space in your life. At least if I do the cleaning myself, there won't be anyone else to blame for things broken or gone missing.
In general once or twice a month cleaners aren't hired to "tidy up", they deep clean.
a bit like the difference of brushing your teeth and going to a hygienist.
Housekeeper. House Cleaner.
The first organizes things and may do the laundry or put away groceries or something. I wouldn't know for certain, as my income doesn't yet reach to those heady heights.
The second vacuums, mops, cleans bathrooms, etc.
But, to have a House Cleaner, you must do the Housekeeping.
House Cleaner is not going to vacuum around your piles of dirty laundry.
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I think the point still stands for the type of nerd on HN.
Deep cleaning isn't that hard and, for now, it's relatively inexpensive. There are still only a handful of products where price gouging has occurred due to influencer marketing.
All that needs to happen is another "Tide Pods" type of incident for Amazon to ban commercial cleaning supplies or anything with an SDS. Of course we make the robots do dirty work in this future, and boom you've got another form of surveillance threatening the 4th amendment.
"What's the matter bro? Tryin' to clean up a murder scene or what? huh huh huh"
I am quite similar but this will be inevitable when I get old:
> desiring a robot to bathe you, wipe your bottom and genitals after the toilet, brush your teeth for you
My (EU) country is heading demographic catastrophe, so either I die in my feces or robots help me with hygiene.
Meanwhile I plan to downsize my home to reduce todays chores.
I outsource a bunch of things in life. Different things at different stages of life. Some of those things I have outsourced I don’t dislike doing myself. But often it comes down to freeing up time and, to some extent, keeping money flowing back to people in my community.
You are the minority - [0]
According to that article:
- The global cleaning services market is predicted to grow to roughly $482 billion in 2026 and $859 billion by 2030 with a 7.5% annual growth rate.
- There are over 1.4+ million cleaners currently employed in the U.S.
- The U.S. janitorial services market is worth $112 billion, with 1+ million cleaning businesses as of 2026.
- The average annual pay for a cleaning business owner in the U.S. is $127,973 a year.
- The average annual salary for a house cleaner in the U.S is $35,034.
- 73% of cleaning business owners expect revenue growth in 2026.
- 55% of cleaning businesses raised prices in the last 12 months.
- 41% of households use recurring cleaning services, as customers shift from one-time bookings to weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly plans.
[0] - https://www.getjobber.com/academy/cleaning/cleaning-industry...
> You are in the minority ... 41% of households use recurring cleaning services ...
Wouldn't that put OP in the majority?
If 41% of households are actively employing a cleaner then it seems very likely that more than 50% would be happy to have their home cleaned if only they could afford it (as opposed to the commenter starting this thread, who seems to see household cleaning as a positive part of their life).
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I would absolutely purchase a robotic tool that brushes my teeth for me. I’m sure it would be much better I am at cleaning my teeth. I already use an electric toothbrush and a waterpik for exactly this reason.
Autobrush!
https://tryautobrush.com/
> brush your teeth for you
aka electric toothbrush
> wipe your bottom and genitals after the toilet
aka a bidet (or a toilet seat with a bidet)
> robot to bathe you
aka a shower
> dishes
aka a dishwasher
> laundry
aka a washer
If you want to do stuff yourself, use a manual toothbrush, learn how to wash your own clothes without a washer (people do this all the time, BTW), wash your own dishes without a dishwasher, don't use dry cleaning services, and use a bucket to take a bath. Also, don't use a vacuum cleaner.
Not everyone has the time or energy to do it. I estimate 10-20 hrs of chores a week for 2 adults 2 kids. Having cleaners is a nice touch when both parents work.
Unfortunately, we seem to lose more than we really gain, much of the time. Often it is 'sold' to us as 'convenient' but, I suspect, more often than not we don't gain that much
Maybe I grew up in the wrong tax bracket.
I knew a middle-aged waitress who had a cleaning woman come in every week or two.
After being on her feet for 10 hours dealing with jerks in a diner six days a week, she was too tired to do more than basic cleaning. The price was well worth it to her.
The real question isn't how much money you have when in the middle class, it is what will you give up. I have hired cleaners and I love the time savings, but it isn't worth it to me so I almost never do.
Do you consider a dishwasher to be a robot that does your chores?
About as strange as letting someone else work on your car. Some people can do it without any discomfort. Could not be me.
Presumably they feel more empowered, like an elephant must feel when a flock of birds are grooming them.