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To be more precise, it's not actually 'low-skill' labor that is vulnerable - it's 'routine' labor that is. Autor and Acemoglu talk about this in their paper 'Skills, Tasks and Technologies':

'Following, ALM, we refer to these procedural, rule-based activities to which computers are currently well-suited as "routine" tasks. By routine, we do not mean mundane (e.g., washing dishes) but rather sufficiently well understood that the task can be fully specified as a series of instructions to be executed by a machine (e.g., adding a column of numbers). Routine tasks are characteristic of many middle-skilled cognitive and manual jobs, such as bookkeeping, clerical work, repetitive production, and monitoring jobs. Because the core job tasks of these occupations follow precise, well-understood procedures, they can be (and increasingly are) codified in computer software and performed by machines.'




This is a very important distinction. A robot to wash dishes would be ridiculously expensive for such small payoff.


~$500 to Amazon will get you a "wondrous machines from the future that washes dishes", which many find indispensable to modern-day living.

eg. http://www.amazon.com/Whirlpool-WDF310PAAW-White-Console-Dis...


Does it take the plates one by one from my hand and then puts them back in the cupboard, already dry? What if I need this plate RIGHT NOW, it's just a single plate, shouldn't take more than a minute. What if I burn my food, will it scrub the pans for me?

Thought so.


> Does it take the plates one by one from my hand and then puts them back in the cupboard, already dry?

Replacing all of your kitchen cupboards with the 4 or so dishwashers would only cost $2000 dollars, so yes, you could do that if you were so inclined. Also note that top end models do have a drying feature.

> What if I need this plate RIGHT NOW, it's just a single plate, shouldn't take more than a minute.

Do you only own a single plate? Just buy more and use a different one, you've already got a robot to clean them for you.

> What if I burn my food, will it scrub the pans for me?

"soak and scour" is a feature on high-end commercial machines these days, but soaking the pan overnight and then throwing it in the dishwasher in the morning has served me well. My teflon coated pans don't seem to have as much problem with requiring scrubbing after burns though.

Maybe owning dishwasher isn't quite the robotic maid you were promised, but having lived with and without one, I consider a dishwasher a requirement for modern living.


Fair enough, I'm not familiar with the high end dishwashing machines.

Although I do have a single plate.


I actually find it far easier to have one of everything per person and just clean it when you're done and put it back in the cupboard, than to put every dish that's touched food in the dishwasher and have to run and unload it every couple of days. If it wouldn't make my house hard to sell, I'd rip the damn thing out and put in more cabinets.


But similar objections apply to bookkeeping, clerical, monitoring, etc. There are always exceptions, and it takes humans to handle exceptions.

I disagree that dish washing is any less susceptible to automation than clerical work. I think we just take dishwashing automation for granted since that transition happened decades ago.


Man, this thing is going to destroy all the dish-washing jobs in the service industry within 5 years, mark my words.




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