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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

> "What we need is a computer that isn’t labor-saving, but which increases the work for us to do." — John Cage

Arguably both are needed. The kind that replaces the mindless repetitive work (e.g. dishwasher, roomba) so we have more time to focus on the kind that lets us do more than before (e.g. an orbital satelite, 3D printer).

There are only 24 hours in a day and you can't do more without doing less first.

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Inventions like the dishwasher for domestic use never really led to meaningful work reduction for the people (women) doing this kind of work.

The dishwasher, maybe not, but a washing machine is reducing the laundry work by a lot. Have you ever tried to do your laundry by hand?

Agreed. Washing machines have had a huge impact. See [1] for some summary info.

Anecdotally, having a dishwasher seems to simply mean that our house can go through 4x more dishes every day than I would expect…

[1] https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/how-appliance-boom-moved-mo...

Yes, life for housewives and mothers before the washing machine was hell. There are still billions of women in the world slaving away beating clothes on rocks.

In those days you had fewer clothes and wore them longer between washes as well. Something to consider as we dedicate time to fold 7+ full outfits of clothes every week per person today.

And on average families, especially the poorest ones, had 4 kids each.

(Ok, I just made up the number to make a point but you get what I mean)

And kids would actually pull quite a lot of the weight back then too. "Clean your room" more like you are coming to the farm with me today boy and splitting the firewood for mother later.

Seems like you can pretty easily use more dishes with less effort? If you end up spending more time on other chores, that's up to you.

Having lived in apartments with and without dishwashers its not as much of a time savings as you might realize. the dishwasher needs a degree of maintenance. Dishes have to be loaded precariously in a way to effectively wash them from the sprayer jets. Some dishes have to be washed by hand still. Everything needs rinsing and scraping. Its a modern dishwasher so that means its too weak to dry dishes on dry cycle to skirt energy efficiency standards, so dishes are then loaded into the rack by the sink to dry. and the whole cycle takes like 2 and a half hours.

And I'm wondering why I'm not saving much time and its because the time savings isn't really significant to begin with. Coupled with the fact that when I was hand washing, I'd actually wash dishes as I generated them during cooking. It only takes me about 30 seconds to wash a plate or pan with sink and sponge and soap. I could have most dishes done before dinner was even served saved for the plates and silverware it was eaten with and maybe the last pan in the process, maybe 30 seconds work hardly less effort than the act of rinsing and scraping before the dishes go into the dishwasher.

All that begin said I still use it, but I probably am not saving much, if any time, with the new rituals it requires.

I had a broken dishwasher with a part I didn't feel like replacing for a few years that I only used as a drying rack.

I replaced it recently because the door hinges broke as well. I now only run it once a week just to keep the parts moving. It is so much easier to just wash dishes as I go. And they're way cleaner when I wash them no matter how empty I keep the washer or how I arrange the dishes. Oh and I use it sometimes after I have guests over.

> Everything needs rinsing and scraping.

If you say that into a mirror five times an angry Canadian named Alec will show up behind you and start grumbling about prewash powder. It's amazing how absolutely nobody knows how to use a dishwasher properly.

Oh I am a powdered detergent truther already. I use the prewash tray. I clean the filter. I follow the manual to a tee. And you know what it says? Heat the water up out of the tap. Rinse and scrape the dishes. If I have to run the tap for 3 mins anyhow to get it hot enough to actually get the soap to suds up and not leave residue I might as well scrape out the pan.

What I was getting at is that dishwashers and hand washing scale up differently, but not everyone needs to wash lots of dishes.

It may not have reduced overall work, but certainly it reduced the amount of work they did washing dishes. That would allow them to do other things (or allow them to use more dishes.)

That is not the tradeoff being made. When you go from a home without a dishwasher to one with a dishwasher, you don't work more or less hours as an engineer at JPL. You work the same hours. Likewise for someone who does their housecleaning by hand or one that hires housecleaners, the latter doesn't start working 50 hour shifts at the office in response.

Then the question is what are people doing with the extra time? We'd all like to imagine we are an artist or poet or musician deep own if we had the time, but are we really? Or would most people take an extra ten minutes and use it not to pick up a violin or to work a garden, but to scroll through tick tock perhaps?

And you have to at least be aware to the fact that there is a lot of money to be made trying to get you to scroll tick tock instead of playing a violin not looking at advertisement, and very few interests out there pushing back as a result. So what gains we might make in efficiency today are liable to be gobbled up by some sort of profit making addictive product. And personally speaking, sometimes these low effort tasks like dusting the home or cleaning the dishes or mowing the lawn are great ways to disconnect active process into an automatic sort of action, to mediate while you are doing the thing, and think inwardly about some other idea you might have. In some ways washing the dishes is a forced chunk of time you actually have to think your thoughts. And scrolling an algorithmic feed in its stead is very much not giving yourself a chance to think your own thoughts about your own situation; you've in fact offloaded your thought process to the highest bidder to think for you. And that seems quite dangerous in society.

You say this with quite a bit of confidence, and I can see in a later comment you've got some personal experience. I do as well, but it totally contradicts what you're saying. I had to get rid of my dishwasher last year because it had been installed incorrectly and leaked without us realizing it until it had caused quite a bit of water damage. I had to wait to get that fixed before installing a new dishwasher, and that took about three months. I washed all dishes by hand during that time. Like you, I tend to wash all dishes as I generate them, but I don't live alone, and my wife does not, so that didn't make much of a difference, and washing dishes by hand did, in fact, take an hour or so every day.

Now that I have a new dishwasher and don't need to do that any more, I'm not on TikTok, but actually do mostly just work more.

Perhaps that was a bad example since it's too much of a person-by-person thing (for myself I can definitely say I get more done if I don't have to spend hours on chores), but the fact that we can as a society actually do anything at all beyond just surviving is down to tractors and combine harvesters, so 98% of us don't have to work in food production anymore. The base level of complete chore automation that we've apparently all forgotten about. The fact that a job at JPL even exists is down to that and to manufacturing automation afterwards.

My chemical engineer friends like to point out that the Haber-Bosch process has doubled global food production, or something like that. In the same “industrial agriculture” category as tractors and combines.

Yes indeed, it's the main source of nitrogen for fertilizer. Otherwise we'd be back to leaving a third of the fields empty to regenerate with clover or similar plants that deposit nitrogen, plus having lower yields in general.

I guess tractors/combines made a much bigger difference than fertilizer.

> The base level of complete chore automation that we've apparently all forgotten about.

This is easy to forget. I try to occasionally remind myself that a safe office job, nearly unlimited food, and electric machines (boring robots?) to do work for me at home are all pretty incredible. The majority of my physical exertion is for fun and health reasons.

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