Month: June 2019

Imagine every household has a human-sized, multipurpose house robot that can do all the same physical tasks we can. What sorts of tasks could it do to make its human master’s life easier? The answers that first come to mind are that robot butlers (as I’ll call them for simplicity’s sake in this essay) will do the most common and time-consuming daily chores for humans, as they loom largest in our minds. These include tasks like cooking food, doing laundry, cleaning house interiors (e.g. – vacuuming and mopping floors), running errands to make recurring purchases of expendable commodity items like food or toiletries, and mowing lawns.

If every household had a robot butler that handled those tasks, it would significantly improve quality of life for humans, primarily by freeing up time for leisure. It’s common for American adults to spend an average of two hours a day on chores, and getting that time back would be transformative for most of them, particularly the busiest ones who are overloaded with commitments and long commutes. Even just one more hour per day could make the difference between, say, raising an estranged child who is bitter that you never spent time with him and raising one who has a good relationship with you because you had the time to help him with his homework every night.

We could stop right there and digest the extent to which robot butlers will benefit us. However, I think they’ll have many other overlooked but powerful benefits to their human masters and to the world as a whole, that at first glance might seem small and unimportant.

Having robots assiduously clean house interiors, clean plates and cutlery, remove trash, and wash clothing will improve their human masters’ health by reducing the number of pathogens they are exposed to. Keeping dust levels low inside houses will also reduce instances of all kinds of respiratory illness. Public health will improve and there could be a small boost to average life expectancy.

Hand-in-hand with that would be psychological and emotional benefits. Every human being has a different amount of what is sometimes called “psychic energy,” which can be thought of as an internal mental and emotional reservoir that gets quickly depleted by stressors and only slowly refills. Things like not getting enough sleep, being sick with a cold, dealing with a bad commute, having an argument with someone, or even just having to make a simple decision all drain a person’s psychic energy reserve to varying degrees. The size of a person’s psychic energy reserve is mostly predetermined and unchangeable, and people with very small reserves often end up in mental institutions or very low-stress lifestyles while people lucky to have large reserves more commonly become high-achievers like CEOs and politicians. Many Americans are chronically stressed out because they’ve bought into the oversimplified cultural belief that success is just a matter of effort, and that anyone can be as rich and famous as, say, Elon Musk if they work hard enough. This is wrong, as it ignores the existence of inherent, individual limitations like psychic energy reservoirs and IQ (on both metrics, Elon Musk was born very gifted). Unfortunately, too few Americans realize or want to admit this, so they overload themselves with work and personal responsibilities that exceed their innate limits so they can chase a media-manufactured vision of success, and then try to ignore the damage it does to their psyche and energy levels.

The work that robot butlers would do would help ameliorate this problem in surprising ways. Just the sight of an unkempt yard or cluttered house causes a person a small amount of stress. Glancing at a sink full of dirty dishes or a basket of soiled laundry drains one’s psychic energy reservoir a little bit since it is ugly and reminds you of unpleasant work you must do. By contrast, imagine the psychological benefit of coming home each day to a clean, orderly house and a hot meal waiting for you at the kitchen table. Imagine the emotional boost you would get from the aggregate effect of your robot butler taking care of all the essential but unpleasant chores I’ve listed so far. Also note that arguments over housework are a common cause of stress among spouses and housemates, so if a robot were doing all the chores, human relationships would be more harmonious.

That’s not all. Robot butlers would also know how to maintain the things you own, and do those million-and-one little tasks that you know you should be doing but probably aren’t, like changing your furnace filters each month or vacuuming your refrigerator’s coils each year. At some point, they will get smart enough to routinely test your devices for signs of impending malfunction and to take preemptive corrective action. The result would be fewer breakdowns of machinery, less money spent on emergency repair bills to plumbers or electricians, and less stress for humans. (I’m planning to explore this idea in a future blog entry that will be entitled something like “Why nothing will ever break in the future”.)

Taking it a step farther, robot butlers will know how to fix broken things, which will be obviously helpful to their human masters. For example, assume one of your coffee table’s legs breaks. Your robot would immediately see this, figure out the model number of the coffee table, contact the company about getting a replacement leg, and ask for your permission to order the replacement part, and install it by itself. If you didn’t have the robot, the task of fixing the table wouldn’t be worth your time, so you’d just throw out the whole table and buy a new one, which would cost you more money ($10 for a replacement leg vs. $50 for an entirely new table). A coffee table that was 80% perfectly fine would also get tossed in a landfill, which is wasteful. Your robot butler would thus reduce the money you spend on replacement possessions and reduce your waste footprint. Poorer people would benefit the most since they would have to spend less of their scarce money replacing their possessions.

Your robot butler would also help you by selling things for you that you would otherwise throw away. For example, assume your coffee table isn’t broken, but you’ve had it for ten years and want to get rid of it because you think it is out-of-date and ugly. You tell the robot you want to do this, and it instantly looks through eBay and other Internet marketplaces to determine how much money you could get if you sold it. If you authorize it to do so, the robot would then list the coffee table for sale on the Internet, find a buyer, and physically carry the table out to the curb to the buyer’s truck when they come by to get it. The money that they paid would automatically credited to your bank account or PayPal account, and the whole process would require no work on your part. If you didn’t have the house robot, it wouldn’t be worth your time to do all of that just to make $20, and you would probably have just tossed the table in the trash. Again, your robot would save you money and make cheap, used goods available to other people. Poorer people would benefit the most from the expanded marketplace of secondhand goods.

Additionally, your robot butler would know how to spruce up or restore items like the old coffee table at low cost, allowing it to sell them for you at higher prices, or improving them enough to keep you from throwing them out. YouTube has many channels devoted to craftsmen of various types who show the process of restoring or “upcycling” things like old furniture or just plain garbage to make them aesthetically pleasing, stylish and useful, all at very low cost (my favorite channel is “Dashner Design & Restoration”). I think robot butlers will someday be able to independently identify ways to make such upgrades to old human possessions, and to do the work themselves. Manmade objects would be thrown out less often as a result, and even poor people and people with no sense of taste would have functional and stylish-looking things.

Having perfect memories and a lot of time to poke around your house, your robot butler would also inventory everything you owned and update the inventories in real time. Over time, it would observe which possessions you never used, would recommend you sell or recycle them, and then handle every aspect of the transaction. For example, your house robot would know that you have an antique sewing machine in your basement collecting dust that you haven’t touched in five years. Based on a personality profile it constructed of you, it would know that your odds of ever using the sewing machine are 1%, and that your vague plan to restore it and experiment with old-fashioned sewing was just a flight of fancy you had years ago and should now relinquish. Without being prompted, your robot approaches you, suggests that you sell the sewing machine, offers to manage every aspect of the sale, and tells you that based on its research you could get $200 for it. The robot would periodically (i.e. – once every few months) approach you with these sorts of ideas. If you didn’t have the robot, it would never cross your mind to sell the sewing machine or any of your other clutter. Even researching sales prices wouldn’t be worth your time, and the idea of having a yard sale would be too tiring to consider. The end result of your house robot’s labor is less clutter in your house (itself a psychological benefit) and the transfer of things you never use to people who actually need them. If every household in your country had a robot butler that did this, the aggregate effect of expanding the secondhand goods market so much would make the prices of all sorts of things decrease. Again, poorer people would be helped the most.

Taking the next step in the “sharing economy,” your robot butler could rent out some of your important but rarely used possessions, making you money. The sorts of objects that come immediately to mind are hand tools and power tools. The vast majority of people only use these 1% of the time, and the other 99%, they sit idle in a garage or work shed (there’s something basically crazy about humans’ impulse to hoard things). Your robot could post an online portfolio of rentable tools for you, and loan them to other people during periods when you were not projected to need them. Again, it would manage every aspect of the rental operation (i.e. – listing the tools, verifying the identities of people who want to rent them, collecting the money, inspecting the tools for damage upon return). You would merely agree to the arrangement and start turning a small weekly profit for no work at all on your part. Once again, if you didn’t have the robot, this small-time enterprise would be too much trouble to consider. As a result, you would make more efficient use of your assets and earn money for doing nothing, and poorer people in your neighborhood would gain access to tools cheaply instead of having to spend a lot of money buying their own. (Let me note that a neighborhood “tool library” would probably be an even more efficient arrangement, as it’s still overkill for every household to have as many tools as they typically do, but that’s for a different blog entry.)

Unused things in your house that had no market value could be recycled, and I imagine billions of old glass bottles, metal containers, articles of old clothing and bedding, and old newspapers re-entering the manufacturing stream as a result. This would mean less strain on the environment and less guilt about the impact humans have on it. Also note that robot butlers would vastly improve the cost efficiency of recycling because they would know how to properly sort recyclable from non-recyclable materials, they would always clean the outgoing recyclable items, and they would always crush/compact the items to reduce their volume. Even well-meaning humans struggle to remember which of their trash items are recyclable and which aren’t since the acceptable items vary from one municipality to the next, and too often they forget to clean their recyclable items, so recycling centers get large amounts of unusable material, which they are forced to filter out at great cost. Your robot butler wouldn’t make these mistakes, so your local recycling center would get shipments of much higher-quality items that would be cheaper and faster to process. Automated sorting machines at recycling centers will also be much better than they are today thanks to the same technology your robot butler will have, further improving efficiency.

Your robot butler would also have the time and knowledge to separate out the portions of your household waste that could be composted and to put them in a backyard bin. Not every scrap of food waste can be composted, which again sets the “bar” too high for most people given how busy they are with other things. Your robot butler would also mix in dead leaves, wood, grass clippings, dead animals, and whatever else it could find on your property that could be composted. The compost would be spread on your lawn to prevent soil erosion and to grow crops.

And that brings us to another benefit: Your robot butler will be able to create and manage a garden on your property. This would reduce your grocery bill, would probably be better for the environment since the food would be hyper-local in origin, and would give you complete control over its production (e.g. – no pesticides, no mishandling, no GMOs). I noted earlier how robot butlers would boost the efficiency of how manmade goods were used and distributed, and now I’ve shown how they could enhance the efficiency of land usage, with grass-covered land put to use growing food. Global food supplies would increase, which will become more important as the human population grows.

In summary, house robots could vastly reduce waste, improve the efficiency of our capital stock usage and land usage, and strengthen the sharing economy. They would give poorer people much better access to all sorts of things (furniture, clothing, tools, etc.), which would flatten out many class-based differences.

Additionally, once everyone has a robot butler, it stands to reason that the postal service and private shippers like FedEx and Amazon will use similar robots to deliver goods to doorsteps (think of it as a robot mailman who rides around inside a self-driving delivery truck), and it will become possible for robots to “hand off” items in place of the current practice in which a human deliveryman drops off mail and packages at your doorstep, unattended. The automated delivery vehicle will probably send a wireless signal to your robot butler informing it of its ETA, and your butler would make sure to be waiting at your front door at the given time. Because of robot handoffs, package and mail thefts will drop to almost nothing, meaning less emotional stress for would-be victims. Since vendors incorporate financial losses due to “shrinkage” into their prices, the near-elimination of these kinds of thefts will lead to slight price cuts to all kinds of goods.

Robot handoffs like this could also be used to send OUTGOING items, which would further boost efficiency in many ways. For example, if you ordered an item through Amazon, then during the door threshold handoff, your robot butler would accept the new package and then hand the Amazon robot an empty package from a previous purchase you made. Your Amazon account would be automatically credited a small amount of money for recycling, Amazon would saves money by getting its cardboard packages and packing materials back, and the Amazon delivery truck would return to its warehouse with something of value inside of it instead of hauling air. Note that this would be a more efficient way to dispose of Amazon cardboard packages than sending them to a general-purpose municipal paper recycling plant.

As a general practice, timing and coordinating outflows of household items and wastes to match inflows of useful items would move us closer to a zero-waste/closed loop economy, and would probably cut transportation costs. Your outgoing items would have to closely match the weight and volume of your incoming items for obvious reasons relating to the size of the delivery truck. To a degree, this model would compete with the one-size-fits-all, periodic waste disposal system we’re accustomed to, where there is a designated day of the week when a large trash truck comes through the neighborhood to pick up all items that residents don’t want.

I think this vision of the future will be realized over the next several decades, with the first, mass-produced robot butlers becoming available to rich people in the 2030s. As with their smartphones, humans will be able to download “apps” into their robot butlers to give them new, and increasingly sophisticated abilities. Initially, they will merely be able to follow orders given by humans, but later, the robots will gain their own powers of observation and reason, and will proactively suggest helpful things to humans (like selling unused possessions). This should be thought of as one small part of the broader trend of humans outsourcing physical and mental drudgery to machines. Every capability I’ve described in this essay (and surely more) should be commonly found in robot butlers by the 2060s.

Links:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3512386/The-REAL-cost-keeping-home-tidy-Americans-spend-140-000-lifetimes-30-days-year-boring-household-tasks-like-cleaning-laundry.html