But Can It Do My Laundry?
Automation is freeing up our time. The real question is what we’re doing with it.
I saw an article not long ago about a Silicon Valley company developing robots trained on actual human movement. The data comes from willing participants (gig workers) who get paid to strap their phones to their foreheads or bodies, basically like body cams, and record short bursts of themselves doing household chores like laundry or loading and unloading the dishwasher.
Their data is then sent back to the company and fed into a giant dataset that will be used to train actual robots to do these chores.
Once the purview of sci-fi, things like this are happening every single day.
Companies are developing ways to offload chores that, for many people, are a nuisance. I’m not going to claim I love housework. When it comes to housekeeping, I definitely don’t tip the scales at the top of the five-star reviews. I’d much rather pay somebody who likes to vacuum, dust, and get into the deeper crevices with a toothbrush to make my house sparkle.
I am, however, one of the weirdos who actually enjoys folding laundry.
It’s meditative. It gives me space to think, or not think at all, while doing something tactile. I also happen to enjoy the smell of fresh laundry right out of the dryer and the feel of the fabrics as I put them into neatly folded piles and carry them to their respective destinations in the house.
For many people, a robot that does laundry will be a godsend. So I’m not knocking it.
My bigger question is this: if we remove more and more things from our day using automation, what exactly are we using that time for?
This is a question I’ve been thinking about for a while now, especially as someone who works in the creative space. There are a lot of tasks AI can do much faster, and sometimes much better, than I can. That frees me up to do heavier lifting like thinking, writing, and connecting ideas.
In fact, the origin of this essay was me standing in my kitchen dictating thoughts into the voice app on my iPhone so I could capture the raw material from my brain and later shape it into something cohesive and meaningful.
I am not anti-tech.
I make that clear over and over again because it matters. I love technology. I invest in technology. I benefit greatly from technology. But I am cautious about handing everything that makes us human over to machines.
And even more than that, it isn’t only the machine that concerns me. It’s who controls it, and how quietly our behavior can start to change when convenience becomes the default setting for everything.
When we willingly surrender our personal data, including the way we move through ordinary life, the way we interact with dishwashers and washing machines and dryers, we are giving up more than convenience may be worth. Not immediately. Not dramatically. But slowly, in small increments, over time.
That’s usually how big changes actually happen.
I look outside at the bird feeder across the driveway from the window where I stand and wash dishes by hand. I see the cardinals and sparrows and blue jays and doves and nuthatches and red-bellied woodpeckers and squirrels showing up to the feeder at intervals throughout the day.
They aren’t sitting there gorging themselves all day long, even though they could. The food is there. It would be easy.
But they don’t.
That is not how they are programmed. They still fly, search, watch, leave, return. They still move through their day with patterns that require effort and awareness of their environment.
It makes me wonder about us.
If more and more of life becomes frictionless, automated, optimized, and handled for us, what happens to our awareness? What happens to our decision-making? What happens to our ability to sit with our own thoughts, or do something slowly, or even be bored for a few minutes?
Automation doesn’t just remove tasks. It removes moments.
And many of those moments used to be where thinking happened, where reflection happened, where ideas formed, where we processed our lives without even realizing we were doing it.
There is intrinsic value in each of these “invisible” activities.
So when I hear about robots learning to do laundry, I don’t really think about laundry.
I think about attention and time. I think about awareness. I think about what we are slowly training ourselves not to do anymore.
There will be incredible gains from these technologies. There is no question about that. But there will also be consequences, and we rarely understand those until much later. (Hello social media.)
So before we blindly allow another wave of technology to roll over us, it is worth asking a few simple questions:
What is this giving me?
What is this taking away from me?
And what am I doing with the time and attention it gives back?
That last question is probably the most important. Because the future probably won’t be decided by whether robots can do our laundry.
It will be decided by what humans choose to do with the time when they no longer have to.