this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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We automated plumbing. It's called plumbing.
Same deal for laundry, dishes, farming-- there's so much stuff where human labor has been almost entirely eliminated, and people still bitch about the tiny remaining fraction. Ugh, you have to put the dishes in the box that effortlessly cleans them, and then take them out? That's bullshit. Where's my robot maid!
“Be kind to people, be ruthless to systems.” Systems includes the robots as far as I am concerned.
Systems include plumbing!
The first casualty of a good meal.
I never heard that quote, where is it from?
Looks like it's from the late great Michael Brooks
You betcha.
The dishwasher (robot) is insufficiently subservient. That's why you have to put LLMs in all the things. So it can say "That's such a good idea! You are so clever for thinking of that" when you start it.
Ryedaft, founder of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Always reminds me of this bit on the Conan O'Brien show.
Gotta love the perennial "our kids are spoiled idiots" bit. That one never gets old. I bet at least one of Aritophanes' plays will have made fun of the damn kids.
The "kids these days" part doesn't do much for me but the central point of "everything is amazing and nobody is happy" absolutely does.
It resonates with me because I find more wonder in the everyday stuff we take for granted than I ever did getting getting dragged into church as a kid. My first flight was 35 years ago and I still sit by the window and look at the world from that "chair in the sky" perspective the whole time.
And just to be clear, yes of course the world is full of bad shit. Our amazing technology helps is be hyper aware of that.
Finding the silver linings, the rays of light, the diamonds in the mud is a skill to learn, and I think learning it is worthwhile. That doesn't mean I close my eyes to the bad stuff, but spotting the good stuff definitely makes it all more bearable.
Very well put!
So many people would agree that the idea behind "stop and smell the roses" is a good and healthy one. And so few people would actually do it in real life.
I would even expand what you said to include things like living intentionally and experiencing the moment are part of that general skill of finding fulfillment in a world that will never be unbroken.
This is accurate. People are conflating plumbing, with the act of installing, and maintaining plumbing. It doesn't help that the act of maintaining the plumbing (noun) is called plumbing (verb).
But people don't want to have to hire a plumber to fix the plumbing when it is not doing what it is supposed to.
They want "AI" to do it. Except that such a thing would require advanced robotics more than "AI". With advanced (and affordable) robotics, the plumber wouldn't need to actually go to your house, they could just remotely control the plumber bot from the comfort of their home, or from a central office or something. The person that shows up with the bot can be little more than a minimum wage delivery driver. Deliver the bot, make sure it powers on, make sure nobody steals or destroys it, then pack it up and move on when it's done. The highly paid plumbers never have to go anywhere, and can basically hop from one bot to the next. While they're working on one job, a bot is already en route to their next job, and ready to go when they finish with the current job.
We've adapted art and communication to the Internet. We have not done the same for plumbing (the verb). So expecting something that you can't even currently do with a computer, to now basically be done by AI, which is confined to the restrictions of a digital-only environment, is foolish at best.
Since we adapted communication and art to digital media already, it's almost trivial to have that generated by "AI".
We need to build a robot capable of the work before we can do anything more here.
This comic is clearly about the plumber occupation and about jobs as a whole and not simply a dishwasher.
I find that any box folds clothes. If you mean folded such that they don't wrinkle, I think you're looking for a closet.