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Comment by im_down_w_otp | Hacker News Reader

> "As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do."

Ha! I've used the exact same characterization.

Anyway, this seems entirely predictable given a couple different considerations.

1) People are most apt to effectively solve problems for which they have some context.

2) People who are underserved or otherwise have "real problems" don't often have much overlap with people who have discretionary money to pay for solutions.

So you end up with a selection bias in the pool of problem solvers (and thus the scope of addressable problems) and a selection bias in the expectation for investment returns. Which results in the best minds of our generation crunching all manner of machine learning models to make it so we don't have to do something mundane like selecting an outfit to wear that's color and style coordinated.

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Is this a problem or a good thing?

Washing machines, kitchen appliances and similar technological advances, freed up our at home time so much that we can put a whole nother 50% of the population through college. A whole 50% of the population that can get jobs, have careers, and do cool shit, who was stuck wiping men's proverbial bottoms until the 1950's.

Making free time free is a good thing. There's no telling what will come of it.

Think of it this way: how much time saved on menial stuff will be freed up to go solve the so called more pressing problems? If anything, the problem is that we're thinking up wasteful ways of filling this time even faster than we're freeing the time itself up.

The calculus of the opportunity cost presented here isn't the tiny incremental improvement attached to my already amply comfortable lifestyle, but rather the aggregate full-time loss of many dozens or hundreds of engineers, data scientists, and investment $$$ diverted to trivial pursuits. Or put more simply. The lost problem-solving potential for 8-10 hours a day of a single PhD in Applied Mathematics massively dwarfs the 10 minutes that person saved having their car parked for them.

But what about the time cost/opportunity of a single full-time phd versus 10 minutes a day for the 253 million cars on US roads today? Globally?

Assuming parking only once a week for each vehicle, that's over 60,000 hours of saved time per day. That engineer's time investment is virtually free in comparison.

Of course these savings will only materialize after parking technology becomes commoditized. Commoditization is part of tech progress.

"Assuming parking only once a week for each vehicle, that's over 60,000 hours of saved time per day"

That complicated stuff with associated costs might benefit middle class and up. The few who buy it among them. Many will also want the pride of parking themselves, distrust the technology, and so on. You're not saving 60,000 hours a day so much as a tiny faction of it. If you succeed where others failed for a few decades worth of PhD hours on computer vision, pathfinding, robotics, etc.

Simplifications in this thread are way off. The real world involves interplay of the technical capabilities, whatever regulations will be, finances, and social factors.

I think you misunderstand how much time and focus is spent on trivial problems. Somebody already replied to this, but I will add more on the same note.

1 If some scientist finds a way to save a minute per instance of brushing your teeth, and if there is no difference in quality and cost, that is 600 million+ minutes saved every day in the US alone.

2 If some scientist finds a way for nocturnal people to contribute to society like other people, that is surely on the same magnitude as 1.

3 If some scientist finds some way to cut 10% of time on inspecting welds, it is surely a huge boost to the economy.

This is of course not meant to endorse situations where the quality drops. E.g. "If one cent is saved per unit of milk produced, I can buy a new yacht!"

Aggregations in this case aren't interesting unless the component part of the aggregation is by itself interesting.

A human, due to real constraints can't do a whole lot with an extra minute per day, and humans as a social body due to real constraints can't effectively collectively block-allocate 600 million diffuse minutes to some other cause. Each of them can only reallocate the minute they own/save.

The units and the distribution matter here... a lot. This seems obvious enough to illustrate using your own narrative.

What if I saved 6 Billion people 1ms per day? That's nearly 70 aggregated whole days saved per day. What are you going to spend your newly found 1ms on?

Reading hacker news. You never know which minute is the one with the good idea.

1min here, 10min there, 5min over there and before you know it, that's a whole extra hour of browsing the internet every week!

Is it possible that most of the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked?

Then build a platform to stand on so you can easily reach higher fruit.

No. Our definition of low-hanging fruit is ever evolving. There's always the next lowest fruit.

Having grown up around apple orchards, I feel it perhaps worth mentioning that this is not in fact true. The fruit that hangs low does so because its weight bends the branches. Once it's picked, the rest is considerably harder to reach. That's why the phrase means what it does.

(If you're interested, the word "windfall" is of similar origin. It refers to fruit shaken loose of the tree by a stiff wind, thus requiring no effort to collect beyond that involved in simply bending to pick it up.)

Thanks! I learned something today.

I'm sure all that technology helped, but I think the free time was more of a result of good union jobs, just a plethora of good private sector jobs, and reasonable housing. These good jobs allowed us to buy food, live where we wanted, take vacations, take on risk, have weekends off, etc.

The technology that really saved time was modern food procurement(the supermarket, or food that was ready to bring home with a short walk to a few stores.

And women, they wanted to work. I remember my mom had a lot of time on her hands, but it wasen't due to appliances.

When she got a career, she was happy at first, but then missed all the free time she had when she was a housewife.

A good part of the 'solutions' offered are in fact new time-wasters (and money-wasters, of course).

And honestly, that concerns almost everything around me, except a fridge, a stove and a washing machine.

It's a common sentiment: https://www.herecomestheairplane.co/

> 1) People are most apt to effectively solve problems for which they have some context.

Jeopardy style answer/question: "Why is diversity important?"

I think 2 is a common misconception. People who might not have much money to spend on luxury services as described in the article will most likely still pay for something that truly solves a problem. Actually solving a problem will always be worth more than scratching an itch. Taking the 'underserved' seriously as potential customers is worth a strategy meeting at a lot of startups I'd say.

At the bottom, where need is greatest, they may be underserved because they have so little money. I'd love to see the entrepreneurship engine better incented to search for solutions in such a space. I see universal basic income as a worthy pursuit for this reason (among others)--universally distributing an incentive to solve the problems of the bottom 20% would work wonders.

I've probably seen like 40 "boil water with sunlight" inventions over the last decade, each of which is claiming to revolutionize the lifestyle of poor Africans. ...Which is great, I guess, but nobody with money is buying them. And the fact that I've seen so many of these tells me more that people are really trying to sell something to me: the idea that I can feel good about myself by donating money to Joe Rando USA with a pot and some bubble wrap.

Woman in sibling company to where I work sell efficient wood stoves by the container:

http://www.primestoves.com/

They are very well received, saves fuel (and thereby CO2) and gives cleaner air indoors.

And, yes: people with money are buying them.

I came here to say exactly this, although I do not think that the doomsaying about the Wall•E-sque dystopia is really called for.

I just said the same thing about wash.io closing down.

Yeah... it seems to me like the world might be well served to give people with more pressing or interesting problems access to more tools and means to try to solve them.

I feel the same way about advertising.

It makes me sad that some of the smartest people in the world are at Google and FB getting people to click ads.

Help me out here, I really never got wash.io or rinse or any of those services. I'm assuming the target audience was millenials who have never stepped foot inside a dry cleaner and realized that many of them offer "pick up, wash & fold" services. No fancy app I'm sure but the core of the service existed. The comparisons made to "Uber" were not applicable in my opinion because there wasn't some type of laundry cartel controlling laundry medallions resulting in poor laundry services at high prices. Anyways, I'll go back to washing and folding my own laundry which provides some zen time in an otherwise hectic day.

I've dated millenials that have never done their own laundry.

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