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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, giving disabled people some activity that helps them be independent and care for themselves sounds great!

On the other hand, the idea that this could become a weapon against disabled people (why are you staying on benefits? go out and get a job for yourself, you lazy paraplegic!) is... scary.

Especially given that it sounds mostly like a marketing gimmick, and that the very thing allowing them to interact with the world is not their own, but property of the store owners - i.e. they can't take the robot and move to a different caffe, they are tied to the benevolence of their boss.

Overall, this is much more distopic than utopic, and should be discouraged in this form; but the technology is interesting and could be an asset in the lives of many people.

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>On the other hand, the idea that this could become a weapon against disabled people (why are you staying on benefits? go out and get a job for yourself, you lazy paraplegic!) is... scary.

This one restaurant can't employ more than a tiny fraction of paraplegics, so I doubt that will happen. Sure, irrational people could use that argument, but irrational people can already use a lot of irrational arguments. If remote operation of drones by paraplegics suddenly becomes a major part of society, so that operations like this restaurant would be a significant part of the policy debate, paraplegics would be better off and potentially not need benefits. Wouldn't that be an ideal goal?

It depends on the nature of the work as to whether it is an ideal goal or not. If it is dehumanizing work, or perhaps even the fate of a paraplegic child to have their only career option being a "robot waiter" in a cafe, maybe there's a problem with that. Being "better off" is not only measured in terms of having wealth or a stable place to live (indeed with the same argument one could argue that slavery is justified because the slaves are "better off" living under a master rather than dying on the streets), it is also measured in life choice freedom and happiness.

What of paraplegics as restaurant managers, for instance? A related point from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on Affirmative Action[0]:

>Many factories and businesses prior to 1964, especially in the South, had in place overtly discriminatory policies and rules. For example, a company’s policy might have openly relegated African-Americans to the maintenance department and channeled whites into operations, sales, and management departments, where the pay and opportunities for advancement were far better. If, after passage of the Civil Rights Act, the company willingly abandoned its openly segregative policy, it could still carry forward the effects of its past segregation through other already-existing facially neutral rules. For example, a company policy that required workers to give up their seniority in one department if they transferred to another would have locked in place older African-American maintenance workers as effectively as the company’s own prior segregative rule that made them ineligible to transfer at all. Consequently, courts began striking down facially neutral rules that carried through the effects of an employer’s past discrimination, regardless of the original intent or provenance of the rules.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/affirmative-action/

>If it is dehumanizing work [...] maybe there's a problem with that

You're comparing a reality I am welcoming (disabled people being able to do something) with a possible future reality that I would welcome even more (the elimination of disability), along with a little bit of an even better future that might be even further away (the elimination of menial labor and the intellectual liberation of humanity). Sure, let's intellectually liberate humanity, but you aren't going to accomplish that by telling disabled people that they can't remote-operate commercial robots because you would rather them be intellectually liberated instead.

That's a very peculiar reading of the GP's position, to the point of distorting it.

I never proposed that such work should be disallowed, I offered a critique of promoting such schemes while ignoring the qualitative aspects of life which are very important, even to the disabled. So there are two possibilities to be weighed up here: firstly, the current situation in that there are fewer jobs for the disabled, who need to be supported through state assistance, but such an arrangement may offer more time to pursue intellectual liberation, and secondly a possible future in which the disabled must adopt some jobs like being robot waiters or live in poverty. If the question is related to social programs then I argue this is not at all a false dichotomy.

It's curious I'm being downvoted in my original comment for arguing for a more human approach to jobs and labour in society.

On HN, one is not supposed to comment on being downvoted: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Past attempts to exclude political discussion from HN reflect a belief that, somehow, what Silicon Valley does can be fully understood without recourse to political thought.

The reality is that the HN community harbours readers with a wide range of political views, and those readers can downvote people with whom they disagree with total impunity. It's not good for the quality of debate, to say the least.

As someone who has experienced it, I believe that the neoliberal concept of "workfare" and the related idea that just any job is good for the disabled is something we need to be really careful about. This isn't just a "late capitalism" thing, it's a historical problem where, for example, the mentally ill have been expected to work as gardeners at the institution which houses them, whether or not this is a fulfilling job for them. It goes back to the idea of the workhouse and beyond.

One crucial issue is that the person who is being asked to do the work needs to feel that they can say no.

Finding ways to extract labour from people who would otherwise be a "pure burden" on society is obviously fraught with risks of exploitation.

>One crucial issue is that the person who is being asked to do the work needs to feel that they can say no.

If more than one tele-operated cafe is founded, then their employees will have exactly the same choice as most people who work in the service industry today. If only one tele-operated cafe company is ever started, then it will not be a very big social change. That's really all I'm saying.

Of course, we could imagine that one company would become gigantic and also the world's only employer of disabled people, but that concern applies equally to every commercial enterprise and people group. Any company could become a labor monopsony in the right (wrong?) environment.

> i.e. they can't take the robot and move to a different caffe, they are tied to the benevolence of their boss

The same can be said about a lot of jobs. If your quit your job in a metal working shop you can't take your lathe with you, it belongs to your employer. A bus driver usually can't take the bus with him. A crane operator usually doesn't own the crane. The only thing different in this situation is that there is only one such cafe equipped with remote controled servers. But that just means we should encourage such cafes so that more spring up and workers can move to another employer with similar equipment.

> On the other hand, the idea that this could become a weapon against disabled people (why are you staying on benefits? go out and get a job for yourself, you lazy paraplegic!)

If there were enough job opportunities for disabled people, this "attack" would be entirely valid reasoning. After all they get benefits mostly because they can't participate in the job market in the same way other people can. In the reality we live in those job opportunities don't exist in sufficient quantity, so any such attacks are empty rhetoric.

>Overall, this is much more distopic than utopic

Giving disabled people a more normal life, enabling them to participate more in society, is distopic? Even ignoring any financial aspects and the interaction during the work day, just working in itself is shown to have positive effects on mental health.

> the idea that this could become a weapon against disabled people

Possibly you're taking it a bit far there, but at least in England I could see that being the case. The lengths they go to to stop people getting benefits are ridiculous.

For example, Scotland now has devolved powers for benefits, and are being much more generous: Having a baby? Here's £300. Is it your first? Here's another £300. Twins? Another £300. Then they make sure you can apply for all this online.

In England they tried not to have an online presence because, "we don't want to make it too easy for people to apply."

> In England they tried not to have an online presence because, "we don't want to make it too easy for people to apply."

Source?

I'm afraid I can't say since I suspect it would break an NDA.

EDIT: Best Start Grant is public info though [0]

[0] https://www.gov.scot/policies/social-security/best-start-gra...

If it's important enough that people should be aware of it, it's important enough to break an NDA over, although that might require a technical workaround such as posting under a throwaway account. Since this comment is already attached to your name that's impractical here, but it might be worth keeping in mind for other forums.

Someone may object that contracts are sacred. I don't care about contracts that are designed to conceal or perpetuate abusive behavior.

There's undoubtedly a hostile environment for people claiming benefit in England.

Here's some discussion from judges: https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilydugan/most-dwp-benefits-cases-...

I'm well aware there's a hostile environment, but if we're going to spread quotes I'd like them to be backed up.

Fair point, but Japan has a pretty commendable culture of including and enabling people with physical disabilities. I once encountered a large group of Haneda airport employees participating in an exercise where each of them had adopted a different disability (one in a wheelchair, another blindfolded, another with crutches, etc) and the group was methodically navigating every centimeter of the airport with a separate team taking notes.

California has lawyers doing the same thing at businesses across the state, and suing accessibility-law violators. Sadly, it's more of an extortion racket using the letter of law as a weapon than a vehicle for improving access.

This does happen in California but it's important to observe that this is mostly private lawyers in California rather than lawyers acting on behalf of a state regulatory agency, ie disabled people have a private right of action against businesses that decline to accommodate their disabilities.

This is what 'leaving it to the market' looks like. Now, some would say that the market should only involve decisions about where to spend your money or not, but every libertarian and market theorist I've ever talked to says that if someone is being unfairly excluded from the market they should sue for inclusion, so here we are. Now, it's true that for some businesses the costs involved in serving some customers (eg installing a ramp for wheelchairs) is likely to exceed the benefit of doing business with those customers which can hurt profitability. But given that people decided systematic exclusion was a sufficient ill to pass a law about it, either businesses make themselves reasonably accessible or a public agency does it and recoups the cost via tax.

Of course, it's often not so much the cost of the accommodation as the confrontational manner in which the issue is litigated. The culture of diametric opposition and winner-take-all outcomes that pervades our legal and political systems may be the biggest part of the problem.

But like, if society can produce an abundance of jobs that disabled people can actually do safely and happily, why not push them to take those jobs?

Nothing scary about that, though if we get good enough at building interfaces for robots like this, the scary part could be how everyone ends up working "remotely" and we find ourselves in a WALL-E like chair all day...

Hard work is important in the japanese culture. The thought above, mostly western, if you pardon me, has no value there.

looking busy is important in Japanesd culture. Japanese salarymen sit all day at makework jobs that are essentially privatized welfare with lifetime commitment.

Gonna split the difference. What you describe is absolutely a thing, but there's a strong 'no work, no food' tradition in Zen Buddhism that is firmly rooted in the history of subsistence agriculture under moderately difficult weather conditions (only one growing season, tough winters).

This is what you read on the web. Just go to tokyo/japan, do you think all the country was built with privatized welfare jobs? :-)

> they are tied to the benevolence of their boss

If they get a contract, in most countries they'd just be remote workers with the same rights as any other worker. At many desk jobs, the employer can just lock your account and stop you from doing anything. Even a computer can do that these days. [0]

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me

While yes, this could go to a distopic place, it also creates opportunity for disabled people. Let's say you get a job as a robot waiter where before you couldn't get that job. You then start to learn the restaurant industry and start helping out with process or management. And then you are qualified to become a restaurant manager, owner, franchisee, etc. For any restaurant.

> they can't take the robot and move to a different caffe

taking on the risk of owning an expensive bit of capital equipment that moves, requires maintenance and is put into use at an employer's facility doesn't sound like a fiscally sound idea for someone who has difficulties leaving their home.

> weapon against disabled people (why are you staying on benefits? go out and get a job for yourself, you lazy paraplegic!)

As the sibling comment indicates about the UK, there's no reason why the benefits system or politics thereof has to have any connection with the reality of what disabled people can and cannot do.

The UK system has been restructured around "prove you cannot", with the interpretation of "can do occasionally with extreme effort" as "can do for a 40 hour workweek with no assistance". Many of these absurd judgements are overturned on appeal, but the goal is to discourage as many people as possible not save money or minimise bureaucracy.

Most disabled people on benefits want to work but for obvious reasons cannot or are not given opportunities too. If it were easy for them to work they would be lazy for not doing it.

I guess special regulation is required. After all, there isn't a huge market for paralyzed people out there, thus the cost of opportunity of changing jobs is small anyway. I see your point though but disagree with the dystopian tag: if there is any chance to free mentally healthy but physically paralyzed people it is through robotics and technology.

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