Eric Schmidt: People want dish-washing robots more than any other kind | Hacker News Reader

Eric Schmidt: People want dish-washing robots more than any other kind

cnbc.com

62 pointszeep67 comments

Fun article and a good reminder that the desires of human beings may not have changed as much as we think.

The dishwasher, as we know it, was not invented by someone who was tired of doing dishes.

It was invented 130 years ago by a wealthy woman who didn't like the way her servants handled her good China. She tried washing the dishes herself but found it too much to bear. She wasn't even the one who was washing the dishes, she just knew that her servants weren't good enough at the task described: "Assess where things are, you have to identify everything, you have to remember where it goes, you have to move it in an appropriate way and you have to do all this in some manner of real time."

Personally I'd much rather have a robot to do the laundry (including sorting, folding, ironing, etc) Dishes aren't really that big of a deal for me even with a family of 5.

Currently I have my bathroom next to the laundry room. I can't do what I have in mind in this apartment, but one day I would like to.

1. Make three slots (whites, colors, baby clothes) in higher part of the wall between the bathroom and the laundry room.

2. Get three high plastic boxes. Set one below every slot. Make a big hole at lower part of every box. That's a washing queue for every kind of clothing.

3. Place a combo washer dryer below boxes to make loading efficient. Place also something like washing powder dispenser right above the detergent drawer of the machine.

4. Use the laundry room also as a walk-in closet. So you can hang clothes straight from the machine.

Sorting is done by slots. Instead of folding use cloth hangers. Ironing is mostly done by the dryer.

Given everything comes pre washed, stretched and colour fast, who still bothers separating clothes these days....I do towels and linen separate to clothes at best and not even consistently

Because you still want to bleach your whites. Sheets, towels, t-shirts from the gym... bleach goes all over that stuff, and it smells great! (And yeah, anyone who doesn't have white towels is doing it wrong. Eww, can you imagine all the filthy on a towel that hasn't been bleached?!)

Separate cloths by colour, and by type (glad you're doing half of that already!)... you wouldn't wash jeans with dress shirts... let the machine's auto-sense take care of the quantity / duration issues.

> Eww, can you imagine all the filthy on a towel that hasn't been bleached?!

I assume you also bleach your underwear and socks? T-shirts? Gloves? Pants? Dish towels? Sheets?

I separate synthetics because the dryer damages them and I don't want to do it when they're a wet mess.

I separate my clothes. I separate some because I’m going to hang them and it’s easier to separate while dry. I separate others because they have wildly different levels of durability and ruggedness. I don’t want my jeans abraiding my button ups.

There's no task I despise more than washing dishes. I'm a perfectionist and my hands are sufficiently big enough that it can take over an hour to clean 2-3 days of dishes, for one person dinners, to feel comfortable with their cleanliness.

Dishes are much easier to wash right after they're used. We got into this habit in my household and it's a real time saver. Also, I enjoy not having that feeling that there's something left to do.

Don’t leave dishes piling up for 3 days if you don’t want to spend a long time cleaning. The food dries on and of course the total number of dishes is 3x as high as if you cleaned daily.

I would assume that my method of dish cleaning is a linear time invariant system(because only the first few seconds are used to clean off food that I can visibly see; I spend much more time making sure I vigorously cleaned every spot of the dish) so whether I do it now or later, it's still going to cost the same amount of time.

I assume this behavior came from somewhere? I've lived with people that would leave bits of food on a plate when they wash it. But this tends to only be a problem when the dish sit there for a while, if you clean up immediately there is no need to be as anal about it.

Pro tip: Get a scrubber with soap in the handle like this, can't recommend them enough: https://www.amazon.com/Scotch-Dishwand-Non-Scratch-Friendly-...

> I assume this behavior came from somewhere

I have no idea to be honest.

> Pro tip: Get a scrubber with soap in the handle like this, can't recommend them enough: https://www.amazon.com/Scotch-Dishwand-Non-Scratch-Friendly-....

Thank you! I appreciate the recommendation!

This. If you live by yourself, also try going minimal on your dish set. One plate, one bowl, one fork, etc. Dishes can’t pile up if there is only one set.

Agreed. I don't mind washing the dishes at all. Another thing that is excruciating in a family: cleaning children's rooms. My god, where do they get all that crap. A robot that would tidy, clean, and purge the unnecessary crap that children accumulate would be incredible - and, I imagine, incredibly difficult to create.

Maybe a robot that teaches your kids to clean their own rooms would be more realistic, at least if we are to believe Eric Schmidt.

Ah. Like a cute robot puppy that detects clutter and then plays sad music while "crying". I like the way you think.

So we're just too lazy to be a parent now?

In the future, the robots will be better parents than us.

Incentivise it. The threat of no iPad all weekend is highly motivating to our kids. (Although sometimes they really can't be bothered and they spend the whole weekend outside instead; but I see that as a win too.)

Even just ironing would do it...

That's probably because you already have a robot that does 90% of your dish washing. A dishwasher.

But none of the loading and unloading yet, unfortunately.

Folding clothes is super hard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo

We already have a robot that does 90% of the laundry too. Washing laundry by hand is a lot harder than washing dishes.

I agree though that folding clothes is a hard job to automate, as simple as it seems. And that I would love to have a robot that could do it!

https://i.pinimg.com/474x/73/36/c6/7336c66c64b0410793a708521...

Just get a $5-10 folding board makes folding a lot easier and faster.

Even without the dishwasher I'd still take a laundry machine. Our dishwasher broke a few weeks ago and I did the dishes by hand for a while. It wasn't that bad.

Agreed. You can easily do meals such that there's very minimal hand washing and 95% goes through the dishwasher, and kids can do packing/unpacking from a fairly young age.

Yes, we've got the actual clothes washing (and sometimes drying) handled now, but sort/fold/iron takes SO much time, easily the biggest chore.

I didn't have a dishwasher for four years in the city until we moved to an apartment that had one. "Big deal, I don't need it, I like doing dishes."

Turns out, that doing dishes is fun and easy when you're cooking for two and not spending most of your free time taking care of a new baby.

I miss that dishwasher.

But you can already get this service without a robot, for example with Cleanly. For dishes this is far less cost effective.

I don't understand.

> (...) people want robots to be able to do more than to wash the dishes (...)

> (...) they would like a robot to do, (...), is clean up the dishes in the kitchen (...)

> (...) robot dishwasher (...)

So I understand that it is supposed to be more than a dishwasher, but what then?

I was lately thinking about replacing my wide dishwasher with two narrow ones. It would be a double buffering dishwasher. Then I would store most of my dishes in one and when they are dirty I would just place them in the other. When all (or almost all) dishes are in the other dishwasher I would run the washing.

I was also thinking about garbage drawers all around so cleaning would be easier. Something like from the ending of Johnny English [0].

It would be certainly cheaper then a robotic dishwasher. I would also buy used ones, as I am already using one.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V5-MQcTtCc

EDIT: also that's entirely different thing, but something to consider - fish cleaners: https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=THcKJpXwqVM ;)

> So I understand that it is supposed to be more than a dishwasher, but what then?

Load and unload the dishwasher. (Edit) Also remove the scraps of food that are too big. Maybe clear the table as well.

If you want two dishwashers, you could try a dish drawer [0]. My previous house had one, the current place is just a basic normal dishwasher - the dish drawer is something I really miss.

[0] https://www.fisherpaykel.com/us/kitchen/dish-washers/dishdra...

> So I understand that it is supposed to be more than a dishwasher, but what then?

I suppose what they mean is a robot which can scrub (like a human) all those cooking utensils which are not dishwasher-compatible.

We don't buy anything dishwasher-incompatible any more.

Dish-washers are just about the only household appliance that currently are more ecological than the human labour they replace.

Which makes me wonder: aside from liberating people from menial tasks (which is great! It leads to more equality[0]), could robots also be more sustainable than human labor?

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing...

Except these new efficient ones work very poorly. It's not terribly ecological to replace a large appliance every other year.

I guess that to some degree that would depend on the embodied energy, but if they really only last a few years I agree (do not own a dishwasher myself because rented apartment).

> Except these new efficient ones work very poorly.

I haven't noticed that at all. Nowadays in Europe most dishwashers and washing machines offer energy-saving cycles that do the same job, only 3 times slower. As far as I'm concerned this works as advertised.

We replaced a 20-year-old machine three years ago. And then replaced the replacement last year. And then we had about six repair calls on the new one. It's been good since about August, but don't say that too loud . . . it'll hear you and break!

As long as planned obsolescence is not engineered into them

Is that really the case? I always imagined that was a meme the dish washer manufacturers promoted.

The easiest solution is to buy two dishwashers, one for clean stuff, one for dirty stuff, and then alternate between them.

I've always wanted this setup, if I ever design my own kitchen it will have this.

You don't need that - you buy two dishwashers. then move the dirty dishes into the dirtier dishwasher and once full run a cycle, then repeat the process

This is so you don't have to put dishes away? You treat the dishwasher of clean dishes as your cupboard? If so, I like the way you think!

I lived in a student house one year and we did this. It was amazing. Because of how it worked, you'd hear absurd things like, "does anyone need a salad bowl? I want to do another load and it's not empty!"

We became highly in tune with our dish needs and patterns.

Yeah, I used to live like this too. Now with kids we generally have an entire load of dirty dishes ready to go in by the time the last one is done cleaning. :P (Hence, this two-dishwashers idea sounding pretty good!)

I am wondering for years why Ikea does not offer dishwasherclosets as an option in their kitchens.

What do you do when all youre plates and bowls are dirty but the small plates and some utensils aren't dirty yet? (For example)

you wash them again

Sort of similar to Henry Ford's anecdote: "f I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses".

One part is that people really still don't what they can't have tried before, which is mass introduction of robotics in the household that are artificially intelligent.

I'd much rather have a robot to do laundry, put on bed sheet, clean bathroom, buy groceries, go pick up takeout food.

Dish washing is way down the list.

The first few are done by a housekeeper. They’re not that expensive; if you’re living in the Bay Area it’s probably only a small fraction of your rent for a significant increase in free-time to hire one. Groceries and food => prime fresh or farmstead (there are many) and doordash / uber eats / task rabbit / grubhub / eat24 etc.

These are exactly the sort of tasks we're aiming for in RoboCup@Home [0, 1].

With recent advances, this is getting closer and closer.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73enwaP0tJk [1] http://robocup.org/domains/3

Hmm, I’d much rather have a robot to feed my dogs, control their access to the backyard and scoop their poop.

Why do you have a dog? I ended up in the situation that I have two cats, but my wife's allergic. They are now restricted to one largish room and the garden. It's a bit of a a pain in the arse for me to take care of them this way, but if I were to automate this, that wouldn't help much. Every morning I awake to them crying for attention, and I have to go in and coddle them. Turn them upside down, rub their bellies. They even enjoy it when I clean their toilet, rubbing up against my legs and purring as I do it. Automating the task of taking care of them would save me exactly zero time, and only enable me to be a worse cat owner.

> Why do you have a dog?

I ask myself this question every day :) I rescued them from the shelter and love them dearly, but they are a handful!

Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat itself to your door. Automated cars? Automated factories? Automate the routine, the daily tasks of life, and people will throw money at you.

> "That turns out to be an extraordinarily difficult problem," says Schmidt.

So odd to hear this when everyone seems to be building self-driving cars...

At any rate, if there was one household chore I would happily hand over to a robot, it would be sweeping and mopping. I'm honestly surprised that this didn't make it into the article.

I would much rather have a robot cook for me, even if I had to wash it’s dishes.

All I want is combined washer+dryer for laundry to become more popular. Would make laundry as simple as throwing it in anytime and forgetting about it

Although appliances that don't beep continuously after finishing might still be my first request

We had one for a while. It just didn't work as well as the separated ones, in particular, the dryer part. That wasn't our only complaint, but that was the one that made us give up on it.

Combination washer/dryers tend to be smaller it’s also a pain in the arse to separate not only by color and programme but also by what can then go into the dryer and what can’t and at what temperature you can set the dryer too to avoid damaging the fabric and shrinkage.

Laundry is by far the most annoying thing luckily plenty of places around me offer 5 shirts for £5-7, so outside of T-shirt’s and underwear I don’t wash most of my daily clothes anything else is dry clean only.

Sports clothes I’ve started simply drying quickly and freezing them overnight in a bag my running clothes like it much better. I don’t need to buy new under armor leggings shirt and running jackets every 2 months now that I don’t run them through the washer and dryer cycle more than once every 8-10 days.

I just throw everything in together in one load. Haven't ever had any issues yet

I don't mind dishwashing. I mind having to remember to put dishes away.

I can confirm.

CTL-F on article and here on HN, searched for "sex" and found 0 article must not be accurate.

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