Comment by mxuribe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mxuribe | Hacker News Reader

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I'm with you all the way!

I hear people talk about optimizing one's day to be more productive and "get more done in your day" so often...but honestly, between work, family responsibilities, working out a little in the gym, getting involved in side projects (either "working on the car", or working on side dev project), maybe some civic community involvement, social visits (the occasional beer with a buddy), etc...it just feels like something has to give...and in my case, its the number of hours of sleep.

Perhaps i'm naive or too idealistic, but will the coming hordes of robots and associated automation help society by giving us all more time to ourselves - either for more/appropriate hours of sleep, or to spend on the activities i noted above? Or...maybe society - or should i say our capitalistic society - will "see" the unused bandwidth of our days made available by these robots, and insert more commitments to "fill our days"?

Sorry, i didn't get enough sleep last night, so am a little cranky. ;-)

Bear in mind that we segment our activity more in "modern" society. For example, in agrarian societies you didn't need to carve out time for exercise. Work was exercise. You also didn't need to carve out time for child care, because children worked alongside adults much of the time. And commuting wasn't really an issue when workplaces and residences were in the same community with minimal geographic separation.

It's our societal lifestyle that has demanded separate time for separate activities, resulting in a need for a greater than 24-hour day.

Once they got old enough, sure. Until then, women typically took care of them. Good luck working alongside an 18 month old.

Yeah, it's like trying to work in an open office, with people repeatedly stopping by with problems, and springing surprise meetings, and... well, maybe not quite that bad? :)

I'm not sure what's scarier: a coworker stopping by saying, "hey, the PROD-DB-1 server has been down for four hours" or your four year old stopping by and saying, "there's an oops in the kitchen."

If you train the four year old correctly you might even get "there's an oops on the PROD-DB-1 server". That would be more than I get from some of my adult co-workers.

A friend of mine runs a rural radio-based ISP, while raising... four? kids or so. It's entirely possible that some of his downtime was caused by someone accidentally spilling juice into something and letting the magic smoke out, but I've never asked.

Well, with 6 kids or more in each family taking care of small children was a full-time job of its own. Not to mention not having things such as a washing machine...

With 6 or more kids in each family older children frequently helped with chores and helped take care of the younger ones. Even a 5-year old is capable of helping with simple childcare tasks and a responsible 10-year old is capable of being a babysitter for periods of time.

Children would also be naturally spaced because breastfeeding around the clock typically continued until the child was at least 18 months old, meaning that they would normally be 15-30 months apart (the amount of time that breastfeeding acts a contraceptive varies widely from woman to woman but typically breastfeeding on demand will halt a woman's reproductive activity for at least 6 months).

I'm also struck by cities that commute heavily by bike (such as Amsterdam). Your commute is your exercise. That is not how most Americans live, however.

I would absolutely love to commute by bike. Distance is a factor but that is not the primary issue. I am in south-east Georgia and bike lanes are an absolute foreign concept. I mean even if we had them, people would use them as passing lanes and all that. I've seen plenty of 'sleep hack' articles recently; trying to do more with less where sleep is concerned. To me that is a complete non-starter. I truly just need more sleep.

I wonder how VR/AR will change this?

With your four display setup, now perched on your nose, moving between sitting desk, standing desk, and stretching on the floor, means moving a wireless keyboard. And for tasks where phone-like keyboards are good enough, no need for the desk, just wander.

Twitch a finger on a pad, twitch a hand and arm on mouse or controller or knee, or raise your arms and dance. You, not the task, determine your style.

Overlay work, while hanging with children. Or map remote kids, into your virtual world. Helicopter parents, meet drones.

Commuting? Well, I suppose some prefer the village well, to indoor plumbing - it's a chance to socialize, away from family oversight. And I suppose commuting will become more pleasant, as the roads clear out - have you seen video of 1950's highways? ;)

There's a meme, of people blithely living their lives, ignoring the future, not appreciating they will soon be stumbling through the smoking ruins of their city. Perhaps we need its complement. People blithely stumbling through smoking ruins, not appreciating they will soon be living in a city.

I can't tell if your VR-parenting suggestions are tongue-in-cheek or not. I'm terrified either way.

I think the lack of children working along side adults is a great shame. Not that I'm a fan of child labour but I think there is something that adds to a child's self esteem when they take on responsibilities along side adults. I know they complain and don't often like the labour, but I think it brings a sense of purpose and belonging that many young people seem to lack.

That lack of purpose is the point. If you can acculturate children to doing what they accurately perceive as pointless, joyless, regimented tasks and get them used to being told what to do, when to do it and how, to being ranked by an authority figure then school has done its job. An industrial society cannot function with people who won’t just put up and shut up.

Increased automation allows for more leisure time for those who own the robots.

And the unemployed...

"leisure time"

I'm in a constant state of leisure ;)

Automation never results in more leisure. It results in more specialized work and increased workloads. The sentiment expressed in the first line is why I intend to stay working remotely for as long as possible. I hated the fact I saw a drab grey cubicle farm more than my house and family.

Automation has been happening for the last century. And what has happened to work weeks/hours? Oh thats right, they went drastically down.

Too glib; they've been holding pretty steady at 8 hours, mainly due to regulation. Other work has increased hours, such as in many areas of health care, for example. Many folks also patch together multiple jobs in order to achieve a livable income and can work upwards of 12-16 hour days. I know several, personally.

Keynes predicted we'd be down to 3 or 4 hours a day by now, but that never happened due (partly) to the ever-increasing competitive ability/imposition that technology allows managers and shareholders to impose on labor in an effort to maximize economic potential and productivity.

How many hours do people work, really, though. If management became more lenient of people going home when the day's work is over, I imagine we would be a lot closer to 4hrs/day.

If my workplace announced that policy I'd just assume they wanted to know how productive I actually was. I would leave on time to signal that I had an appropriate workload.

And then people would ask why you can't handle more.

They went down thanks to major labor laws.

Even now, average working hours in developed nations are above the "legal norm".

Though the automation definitely helped to make it more feasible to work less, there is still a political fight to be had to push the hours down even more.

Children are not working, students are not working, the retired are not working, depending on the household stay at home parents aren’t working that much, the unemployed are not working.

Automation and increased productivity has resulted in a lot of leisure. It’s not evenly distributed but hours worked per capita is not on an upward trend.

Once you go remote it's hard to go back. I have been remote for 4 years now and I can't imagine doing the whole commute / office thing ever again. I don't even care if they pay more, nope. No way.

Amazingly enough, this is exactly how I feel. There's no chance for raises, although the company have a lot of opportunities to make more money, but I can't deal with the commute and office politics ever again.

I also used to feel this way. What worked for me is to not to do some of these things. For example, I got a robot vacuum cleaner and a robot mop. For any additional cleaning, I have a cleaning lady that comes every once in a while. This saves me a couple of hours of cleaning each month. If the car breaks, or something needs to be done around the house, I hire someone to do it. Groceries are delivered according to a schedule. Saves me a couple of hours of running around the supermakt.

I am not saying this works for everyone. It works for me. Labour cost are so low here, and salaries in IT are so high that it is totally worth paying someone to do some things.

As for commuting, I picked a job that is not too far away and is extremely flexible when it comes to when I am at the office. This allows me to only travel to the office at hours at which traffic is decent. At the worst hours, it can take 45min to get to my office. If I avoid those hours, I can be there in 15 min.

> Labour cost are so low here, and salaries in IT are so high

Where’s this magical place?

I would bet Eastern Europe, maybe Romania.

A good chunk of his advice is applicable even in moderately high-cost labour countries such as Germany or the Netherlands.

Central / Eastern Europe.

And I heard similar things about south and east of Asia

Cluj-Napoca, Romania. However, I am from the Netherlands where the same advice applied a couple of years back.

In my case, it's the exercise :-)

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