Dawned on me yesterday that the world has so far spent $180 billion on driverless car technology.

And this is discussed to death, so everyone has options of it.

But it seems like there would be a much greater quality of life gain a much less industrial effort to create automated domestic laundry, or even an automated kitchen.

Some of enjoy driving, cooking, etc. But I don’t know many people who love doing laundry?

Why can’t I dump all these clothes in a hopper and collect clean pressed clothes from another place? Don’t seem that hard? Unit could be quite big and cost >$10k and I would buy one in a flash.

Pretty sure AI can spot pairs of socks now?

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Its a very good point Stu, so much capital is wasted on unproductive nonsense whilst actual quality of life improvements could be made for a fraction of the cost.

Scientism in general needs to be completely rethought.

science is not a religion

progress is made where people with money to invest want it to be made. a lot more money can be made from selling driverless cars than automatic laundries

driverless cars will bring a huge quality-of-life improvement to cities that adopt them, way more than automatic laundries imo

>science is not a religion

Tell that to the branch covidians, the climate cultists and the Keynesians.

Science isn’t being driven by people with money, it’s being driven by the State. Fauci was overseeing $42 Billion at NIH and used it to torture beagles and fund gain of function research after it had been banned.

The private entities doing large scale R&D are essentially all government contractors too.

Scientism very much exists and has only gotten worse since Rothbard wrote this

religion is based on dogmas

science is based on provable and repeatable facts

using science as a means to manipulate tho, that is very valid, and unfortunately nowadays is common practice

but that lays on the misunderstanding that most people have regarding science, not on science itself

I don’t see like that at all really. A driverless car doesn’t even save you any time, you still have to make the journey. Now I get to spend even more of my day fiddling with a phone? 🤮 Like I don’t have that covered already?

Typical family of 4 generates what 60-80 outfits per week of washing, drying and ironing? 400-500 items? Plus towels? Plus bedding? Probably ~10^3 micro tasks per week?

What is that, 10+ hours per week of lost leisure time? Time parents could be playing with their kids? Time you can never get back?

I remember in 2011 the investor consensus was that autonomous cars would be widespread before 2020. It never happened.

Will they be widespread by 2025? Nope.

Lots of companies set out to do it and the vast majority cancelled their programs having never released a product. Many after spending >$1bil / year. Fast approaching $200bn invested and still no product on the market.

The effort would have been better spent automating household chores. It’s not even close.

Good example of this is the Roomba.

Sweeping and beating out rugs used to take a decent amount of time, that improved with vacuum cleaners which got more powerful over time reducing the effort and time needed and in recent years has largely been automated away with robot vacs which can do the entire task daily and return to base and empty itself, even do some crude mopping with an attachment.

I’m with you - automate household chores. The benefits that accrue to people will be far greater than driverless cars.

yes, but can it find the missing ones?

#priceless

I have a good friend who is building something along these lines. Not sure if they’re raising right now or anything, but you make a great point! Automate the stuff that nobody wants to do!

That’s cool, can you share?

I’ll have to ask him as I’m not sure how much is generally available info. Lmk if you’d like me to!

The short version is automating kitchen tasks for high volume settings

This is step 1 of 3.

How hard is it to…

1). Wash

2). Dry

3). Press

My wardrobe should be able to do all these things by now. Yet I’m still living in the 1950’s like an idiot.

Seems like a far less open problem than driving across a city.

💯