Technology has already removed a huge amount of inconveniences from our lives that we take for granted, such as not having to engage in backbreaking subsistence agriculture to survive. Why do you draw the line at a robot doing dishes but not a tractor plowing a field?

By your logic, why shouldn't I get rid of my dishwasher and laundry machine?

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abraxas 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Some things are necessary for survival and flourishing while others merely remove inconvenience from our lives.

Agricultural technology feeds the people we have around the globe (arguably we have too many people for the planet's capacity but that's a separate topic). Meanwhile some technologies just feed the hedonistic instinct.

Of course the line is blurry in places but cleaning up your messes is definitely the top end of the hedonism treadmill. I may be radical in my views here as I consider a personal automobile one such hedonistic luxury that the society would be better off without. Consider the Netherlands here. By just about any metric you care to measure it's one of the best flourishing societies in the world handily beating the US and Canada on an array of well being stats. Yet they are actively shunning cars and pushing their society towards the "inconvenience" of walking, cycling and public transport. Their society as a whole benefits in many ways.

Most of the world (with the USA leading the pack) is conveniencing itself into an early grave.

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backlava12 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks for taking the time to explain your point of view here.

I think what I'm struggling with is what criteria (or who) determines which inconveniences are acceptable to remove and which ones aren't. For example, why is a standard kitchen dishwasher acceptable but a robot that saves you 5-10 minutes a day of loading/unloading the dishwasher not? Is a regular Kenmore dishwasher acceptable, or does it push too far towards the top of the hedonism treadmill, and people should have to do dishes by hand?

> What will you do pray tell with that extra time? I doubt it will be spent on loftier pursuits. In fact I'm quite certain that for the vast majority it won't be.

I actually agree with you here. Judging by how most people spend their time, the majority will fill 10 minutes of toil saved with Youtube shorts and Instagram, but there are still a minority of people who will put that time normally spent on toil towards higher aims.

For the former category, if they were just doing mindless toil anyway, what does it really matter if they waste that time some other way?

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abraxas 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Because doing chores is not a complete waste of time. It's a mild physical activity and at the very least some rest for the brain and they eyes from the glowing screen.

As for who decides what is hedonism and what is a necessity? I think the society does - in a soft way. When people see others adopt more discipline and shun convenient doodads for slightly more physical work the society as a whole becomes a bit more badass.

I personally would rather bike and walk everywhere. Even if it takes longer and exerts more effort. If some day the majority sees it my way the society as a whole starts to soft push in that direction by altering the city infrastructure to be friendlier to bikes and pedestrians and less accommodating to cars. That's just one example.

Doing your dishes in the sink may feel like a terrible chore if you grew up with a dishwasher. I did not. I can live without one just fine. The benefit is that you get a bit of zen time away from the screen and there is no dishwasher to break and leak every few years.

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wao0uuno 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I totally agree with your point of view. There is a big difference between automating laundry that would otherwise take hours of hard manual labor every week and automating 15 minutes of light house chores. If you remove all chores and minor inconveniences from your life then what remains? Tik Tok scrolling? Reddit posting? Most of us don’t have creative passions that occupy their entire days. Those little tasks are the time for resting your eyes and brain, interacting with your family, reflecting on your life. I’d never want to have my entire life completely automated from me. AI chatbots for thinking my thoughts, maid robots for living my life.

	▲	ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If I save 15 minutes of household chores, then that is 15 minutes worth of reclaimed labor to rearrange my Windows desktop, review all security settings, tweak my router and switch's network settings and configuration, clean up & organize my cloud storage, organize several hundred credential records in my password managers, read some changelogs: you know, the usual kind of DevOps shit I shouldn't need to care about, as an end-user. In the age of LLMs and A.I., the real travesty is that computers must be manually controlled at all times, and we must invest manual labor into configuring them, as monkeys at the keyboard, and we must be denied any sort of orchestration or automation that would be available at the enterprise level.

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backlava12 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks for replying, I really appreciate your perspective here.

To offer some more of my own perspective, I find certain chores like dishes and laundry absolutely unbearable, and would love the choice to have those done automatically so I can spend my time on other things that I actually find enjoyment and satisfaction in. For example, doing dishes and cleaning up after cooking takes up a substantial amount of time, and I've love if I could spend that time doing more productive things in the kitchen instead. I would much more frequently make more elaborate and high-quality meals in my kitchen if I knew I wasn't on the hook for cleaning everything up afterwards. I have an endless amount of lawn and garden work too (much of which I enjoy doing it), so that's another thing that a robotic dishwasher could free me up to do. I'd love the choice to choose the toil that I find more satisfaction in.

I don't want to be held back just because some people will be using the time saved on Instagram. Scrollers going to scroll. It's inevitable that some people will get "filtered" by technology.

	▲	wao0uuno 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> For example, doing dishes and cleaning up after cooking takes up a substantial amount of time You’re supposed to clean as you cook. Every little spill or splat gets wiped immediately. There is no cleaning afterwards. Dirty dishes don’t go into the sink but directly into a dish washer. The only chore that remains is unloading clean dishes in preparation for the next dirty load. It’s all about organization and planning. It all fits together.

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pixl97 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Meanwhile some technologies just feed the hedonistic instinct.

Ah, Calvinism rears it's ugly head again. Life is suffering, God doesn't want it otherwise.