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Comment by TorKlingberg | Hacker News Reader

What is strange to me is how the invention of home appliances seems to have stopped. The refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum and dishwasher all made huge changes to everyday life. But since the microwave oven, there has been nothing major. We are still spending many hours on household work. Are the remaining chores just to difficult to automate?

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The most labor-intensive and time consuming activities in the past were, in no particular order:

- Farming, raising animals, gathering food

- Food preparation and cooking (including e.g. grinding grain)

- Taking raw plant/animal fibers and turning them into cloth

- Sewing new clothing and mending old clothing

- Chopping firewood and tending fires

- Making pottery (or similar containers from other materials)

- Carrying water home from a well / river / spring

- Raising (typically many) children

- Cleaning / tidying

- Washing clothes

- Building homes, fences, furniture, etc.

- Transportation by walking/horse/carriage

(The reason peasant societies are poor is that these tasks take up more time than anyone can possibly stay on top of. There’s just always an unlimited amount of extra work to do, and the only folks with leisure time are those with plentiful servants to handle all the basic chores.)

Of those, we started with the low-hanging fruit, things that could be done at industrial scale in factories, and then added on-site appliances to handle the parts that couldn’t be centralized, steadily ticking items off until the overall amount of labor required to keep a basic household running is a tiny fraction of the labor required in an unindustrialized agrarian society.

At this point, there aren’t similar opportunities for new home appliances the way there were in 1850–1950. Sure we have 3D printers and floor cleaning robots and all kinds of computerized gizmos, but as for mass-market labor-savers, we just don’t spend nearly as much time on the kinds of machine-tractable labor-intense tasks that we used to.

Self-driving cars and trucks are one big one coming up.

This is a serious question: Why does my washing machine not dump the clothes into the dryer for me? Why do I have to come back and manually move them? Can't we put the washing machine on top of the dryer and build a gravity fed vibrating teflon hopper or something like that?

This bothers me every time I go down to the laundry room.

In a lot of places, no movement is necessary. Many European homes don't have the space for both, and I think losing some drying efficiency is worth it for the space reduction.

See: http://www.amazon.com/LG-WM3997HWA-White-Electric-Washer/dp/...

Space reduction, plus work reduction - you don't have to manually move clothes from the washer to the dryer. On the other hand, when you're in a hurry, you can't start another load in the washer while the first load is drying...

I have a combined washer/dryer. I put dirty clothes in, and get clean, dry clothes out. It was more expensive than buying two machines separately, and I loose the ability to run a washing job and drying job in parallel. For communal laundries, the additional expense and reduced throughput might be the deciding factors.

If you look at those appliances, they all basically take one relatively narrow and labor-intensive household task and either automate it or reduce the amount of labor involved.

I'd argue that one area of invention that has continued is essentially outsourcing home tasks in areas like food prep rather than creating new appliances to do them in the house.

More broadly though, if you think about where time is now spent on housework, it's a lot of generalized cleaning, straightening up, and putting things away that don't lend themselves well to the types of simple, repeated tasks that machines are good at handling.

Arguably automated vacuuming is the closest thing which is handled to some degree--depending on the environment--with Roomba's etc. But it's hard to imagine the automation that takes clothes from a basket, washes and dries them, and then folds and hangs them even if one assumes that the workflow can be adjusted to better fit with automation.

>> I'd argue that one area of invention that has continued is essentially outsourcing home tasks in areas like food prep rather than creating new appliances to do them in the house.

Actually if you do it right, it can take around 2-2.5 hours each week to freeze meals for the whole week

https://www.reddit.com/r/MealPrepSunday

https://mealprepsunday.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/hello-world/

On the other hand, while there are some tasty ,high quality frozen foods(like the french chain Picard) , they're more expensive , so people still make their own.

I'm no particular fan of frozen and other supermarket-prepared food for the most part and I do make meals with the intent of having leftovers even if I don't do it systematically. I agree that a lot of people who say they don't have time to cook could do so with a little planning.

However, frozen food, ubiquitous takeout, etc. is certainly widely used and probably makes faster and less labor-intensive meal prep at home a less pressing concern for many.

Thank you for that link, I really needed it (I do cook on Sundays but not enough for a whole week).

A wishlist.

All-in-one robotic kitchen:

1. Automatically orders product from the supermarket to ensure it can prepare a set of food dishes you configure at any time

2. Stores the products once they are delivered

3. Automatically prepares the food that you select

All-in-one robotic wardrobe:

1. Washes the clothes (done)

2. Dries the clothes (done)

3. Checks clothes for stains, sends to dry cleaner if present

4. Irons the clothes

5. Folds the clothes

6. Automatically stores the clothes, presents them to you on request

All-in-one robotic bathroom:

1. Showers and washes you automatically

2. Cuts your hair, shaves your beard

3. Styles your hair

4. Applies makeup and perfume if desired

5. Cuts your nails

6. Varnishes your nails if desired

7. Removes body hair if desired

The only fundamental obstacles to doing all this seem to be having good enough computer vision, and getting to a scale where the products become affordable.

I think it's so weird that cooking robots don't exist. Most tasks that you perform to cook are repetitive and mostly foolproof, and I say this as someone who trained as a cook. Certain things maybe can't be automated, like seasoning to taste. But I mean...It's weird that you can't throw a bunch of raw vegetables into some sort of box and soup pops out an hour or two later. Wash, peel, chop, heat, simmer, bam. Slow cookers are cool, but the actual cooking part is easy regardless, it's the prep which takes up most time and seems automatable. They obviously automate it at an industrial level.

Maybe there's just no demand for it.

I recall hearing that the first Betty Crocker cake mix didn't sell well. It was very convenient - just add water, stick it in a pan, and bake. People didn't like it.

After running some focus groups, Betty Crocker found out that it was too convenient - people didn't feel like they had done any "cooking". So Betty Crocker reformulated it so that you had to add eggs, not just water, and then it became a huge success.

People want cooking convenient, but many people still want to feel like they cooked.

Yes! I've heard this story. The supposed black-box of consumer buying-behaviour is weird indeed.

It's funny that on the one hand we'll soon have something as advanced as self-driving cars, and on the other we still need to iron our clothes, wipe off the dust and take garbage manually :)

It's not because of technology. We just tend to solve problems in order of how easy is to create a business model out of them.

Trust me, there is a HUGE business model to be made out of washing and ironing clothes. Many who can afford it have maids to do this. If it was possible to automate these tasks it would be hugely valuable for the provider and the recipient.

Of course. The problem isn't the size, but the difficulty level of designing a successful business model.

Then build a traditional pickup and delivery laundry service with enough scale to offer competitive prices to in-home laundry services.

Now you can have revenue to fund your R&D departments "automation" goals, increasing your margins...

Or go the Tesla way - build a super-expensive automaton for some rich customers and use that money to bankroll R&D for a cheaper solution...

My take on it is that next level of disruption in the home requires a high degree of AI or robots to work.

Ironing clothes has to cope with intricate clothing types and shapes. Wiping dust has to navigate a space around obstacles (like a self driving car?). Taking the bins out has to work with a hugely varying terrain - steps, doors, gates, etc - unless you install something custom to the building.

That said, these solutions are the obvious way to automate the tasks we do today. May be the disruption comes form clothes that don't need ironing, spaces that don't collect dust.

Right, if you look at washers, dryers, and dish washers, it's not like they automated the exact procedure that people performed to do the task. They used a different method that was possible to automate.

Similarly, early AI research tried to mimic how humans learn, and now we have machine learning, which doesn't learn in the same way as humans do but is still quite successful.

And with clothes, for example, that's arguably pretty much what has happened. Clothes do tend to wrinkle less in general with modern materials and social norms have also evolved so that, for many situations, wearing perfectly ironed clothes isn't a requirement.

Dust can be reduced by using air filtration systems, sealing dwellings better, and using low-lint fabrics for clothes, furniture, and carpets.

I think you severly underestimate the complexity of ironing and cleaning -- I would say wiping dust in a room full of objects (many of them fragile and of complex shape) is a significantly harder task for a robot than steering/parking/stopping a car. And ironing has been solved, though the machines dry cleaners use take too much room for most households to be practical,

I understand how difficult these tasks are to automate - I just wanted to point out how uneven technological progress is. We imagine a not-so-distant future where we have self-driving cars, advanced AI, trips to Mars etc. and yet tasks that bothered people for hundreds of years aren't even close to being automated .

I haven't ironed anything for at least 10 years.

http://www.moss.co.uk/non-iron-shirts

I disagree that the invention of home appliances has stopped.

The appliances you list are "labor-saving" devices. But there is only so much labor to be saved. In the last quarter of the 20th century, and into today, new home appliances tend to be for communications or entertainment. Examples:

- TV, then flat panel, digital

- Computer, then laptop

- Modem - telephone/Cable/DSL

- WiFi router

- Cable box/DVR

- Video game system

In addition, an entirely new category of appliances was created: the personal appliance:

- PDA

- Cell phone, then smart phone

- Tablet

- Fitness sensor, then smart watch

I think the next round of home appliances is likely to be energy-related:

- Solar panels

- Home battery

- Smart monitoring & reporting system

The necessary innovation to reduce time spent on household work is likely to be a cultural shift away from owning physical things and towards digital media. Arguably it's already here - CDs, DVDs, games and books are all available digitally now, so we don't have to keep shelves of media clean and tidy. Once people move away from owning art, pictures, plants, etc and replace them with digital versions instead then cleaning will become a trivial 5 minute job.

I have plenty of books and CD's in my house, but I don't think they are my main household work bottleneck at all... I spend much more time hanging and unhanging clothes, ironing clothes and cleaning the bathroom than what I spend dusting the books and CD's, which is only needed maybe once or twice a month... perhaps I'm not the cleanest person on the planet though.

I think that the main issue is that the major problems are solved by the listed tools.

There is still some innovation going on. For example there is a window cleaning tool from Kärscher (probably also others) and gutter cleaning tool from iRobot.

Robotic vacuums save a lot of time for those with hard floors and children/pets. Soylent and other meal replacements save about an hour per day.

If you cook for an hour a day, you're not doing it right.

>Soylent and other meal replacements save about an hour per day.

This sounds utterly horrible although it did lead me to this gem of a quote: "When Soylent debuted last year, the New York Times' tech columnist Farhad Manjoo described it as "the most joyless new technology to hit the world since we first laid eyes on MS-DOS."" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/soylent-2-0-review_561d6...

As someone else said, cooking really doesn't need to take a lot of time. I doubt I spend an hour a day on average even though I generally like cooking and spend more time on it than strictly necessary. There's a lot you can do with stir frying and making meals like chili in bulk.

But shudder. If that's what efficiency looks like, I'll just stay inefficient.

If you're spending an hour a day cooking, I'm guessing your standards are way to high to be dealing with Soylent.

Sous vide and combi ovens will/are revolutionizing cooking. We are just couple of years away.

Count me skeptical. I have a sous vide setup circulator and like it a lot. They're even pretty reasonably priced ($100-$200) these days. They're a great way to cook meat in particular and let you throw in a steak from the freezer in the morning and it'll be ready (perfectly cooked) in the evening with only a couple of minute sear. Of course, you can also do interesting things by long-cooking tough cuts of meat.

But, even as a fan, I'd be hard put to call it revolutionary for the home cook given that it's relatively special purpose.

I also mentioned combi oven. Throw in Watson that is walking flavor bible, and you have very potent mix.

Sous vide removes any kind of skill out of the cooking process.

I have also had policy later - everything that is not sous vide goes into the pressure cooker (which could be seen as 120 degreee sous vide bath). Makes food prep extremely easy.

I know combi ovens have their fans and there are some fairly reasonably-priced options these days. I don't have a personal opinion which is why I didn't mention them. I do have a pressure cooker which I also use although not as regularly as you apparently do.

I should play with Watson more. I have the link on my Bookmark bar but I haven't really explored it much.

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