[athinggoingon]

How exactly is "automation and robotics" taking the burden from our shoulders? I live in a single family house. I still need to hire plumbers, electricians, handy men to paint my house, etc. I still need to hover over a porcelain bowl a few times a day and clog it up a few times a year. Toilet augers and plungers to the rescue.

[michaelt]

There was a time when if you wanted to know a phone number you had to manually consult a huge book, if you wanted to share a photo with family you had to manually carry the print to them, if you wanted to watch a movie at home you had to drive to blockbuster, and if you wanted to hurl abuse at a politician you had to wait for them to hold a rally in your city and queue for hours to get a front row seat.

Now I can find phone numbers, share photos with family, watch movies on demand and hurl abuse at politicians, all without leaving my chair.

[rightbyte]

Online phone books are not as complete. People lose their digital photos. Blockbuster had better stock of films than Netflix has now. Politicians don't read pleb Twitter accounts.

[falcor84]

You lost me at "Blockbuster had better stock of films than Netflix has now". While "better" is debatable, my watch list of films I want to watch on Netflix will most likely outlive me

[rightbyte]

Obviously the 90s movie rental place had no movies made after the 90s.

A movie rental place had more or less all blockbusters (pun intended) and a huge stack of old movies. Netflix today, not the old postal order Netflix, has nowhere near the assortment of a kinda crappy movie rental place of the late 90s.

[tommiegannert]

This really sounds like great progress. If a clogged up toilet is considered something of a big problem to highlight, we've come a long way.

Farming is highly automated both in terms of pre-made bulk chemicals and machines on the fields.

We mass-produce cars. Indeed, we have cars that we can leave months on end without maintenance. And they run both faster and further than a horse.

We have automated labs that can produce and test medicine in high pace.

We have seriously large industries (gaming, cruising, performing arts) that do nothing but give people something to do now that we don't have to worry about having enough food by end of winter.

[kazen44]

In historical context, this is all thanks to industrialisation and the specialisation of industry. The effects of the change of agriculture should not be understated. The industrialization of agriculte has made it possible for the majority of the population to do something else then farming. (be it substance or tenant farming).

Having an abundance of food and not relying on substance farming for the majority of your needs also has the knock-on effect of kids not being needed on a farm, but getting education instead. Which in term will eventually lead to more industrialisation etc.

[athinggoingon]

I didn't interpret the parent comment's reference to "automation and robotics" to include "industrialization and specialization". Sounds like a bunch of brogrammers coding up useless growth tech, funded by clueless VC funds. FTX and Upstart comes to mind.

...but what does Upstart do? https://youtu.be/WWxl4W_eVUA?t=110

[Apocryphon]

Industrialization and specialization has been the direction of society since agriculture, if not earlier. Automation and robotics is supposed to be the stage that came with industrialization, then digitalization. Those brogrammers coding up useless growth tech are just a big soap bubble in a much larger stream of the direction of society.

You are mistaking a (large, obnoxious, all-encompassing) trend of the economic moment (albeit a moment that has existed for 1.5 to 2 decades now) for the greater direction of civilization. A mistake in scale.

[JoeAltmaier]

Yeah service jobs haven't budged much. Except for automatic checkout, kiosks at the airport, that touch-panel at McD's, and so on.

But < 2% of Americans anyway work in agriculture. Down from 98% a century or two ago.

And US population grew by what, 50% in 30 years? But jobs by 25%. Manufacturing jobs dropped steadily as a pct of population. Because, automation?

It's often repeated that automation just allows people to get better jobs running the robots. Trouble is, 2 people run a robot that replaced 200.

Just ask Detroit how much automation benefitted jobs.

[bittercynic]

Porcelain bowl technology has improved greatly in the last couple of decades. Updating that might save you the effort with the auger and plunger, and make the regular use a little more pleasant as well.