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Comment by pkorzeniewski | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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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

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...

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