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Comment by sciencejerk | Hacker News Reader

Toddlers should learn to pick up their own toys...? Unless we're grooming them for a life of pampered self-absorbed entitlement?

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This is one of those "tell me you don't have kids without telling me" situations. The process of teaching a kid to be a responsible human is long and arduous. If you expect a 2 and a half year old to successfully be picking up their toys, well, I don't know what to tell you. Go spend some time in a daycare, I guess.

And of course, that's completely ignoring the fact that I also would like to not have to pick up my shit if I could buy a robot that would do it. Yes, I can. And in fact I currently do...mostly. But I'm not happy about it and if there was an even quasi reasonable amount of money I could pay that would mean I would never have to do it again, I 100% would do so.

And if you can honestly say that you wouldn't...well I hope you are enjoying your life in the monastery.

Teaching kids responsibility and autonomy cones in right after keeping them healthy.

2 year olds do a bad job. They are 2. Yet it is valuable for them to learn to manage themselves. They love helping put silverware away from the washing machine. Kids _need_ to help as part of their development.

Eh, I actually do have kids, and like other North American children they usually don't pick up their toys. When things get messy enough, the "toy sheriff" comes into town and sets things straight. He's got a hat and a badge and a thick mean southern accent. Toys that aren't put away get locked in "jail" for indefinite time.

I won't lie, I don't do this often, and I end up picking up plenty of toys, and would welcome robot assistance, but it still seems wasteful and privileged to use advanced tech in this way

The entire arc of human progress is taking things that used to be the domain of only the privileged and making them the domain of the masses. There was a time when if you were not actively contributing to the production of your own food (to the exclusion of almost any other activity), you were extremely privileged. Now, ~ no one (in the West) has to grow/raise/produce their own food and the proportion of most western's productive output that goes to purchasing food is a tiny fraction of overall work.

A new category of task starting to move along this trajectory is to be celebrated. Maybe some day people will clean some small portion of their house the same way that some people now have backyard gardens.

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