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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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