The TA, right? Hahahahhahahah… aha. Ha.
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Riiiiiiiiight.
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Dang - fooled me for a minute. But I can just see it happening, just to listen in.
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It’s hilarious that the regular players are now wringing their hands and their pearls that “the average person” is going to be hurt.
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It’s simple. The market is supposed to shut down the businesses which can’t extract the most profits for the job creators. The market isn’t supposed to shut down the latest investment scheme of our all-seeing all-wise job creators, just because of some meddling kids, so bailouts are necessary.
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Here’s the thing. If I could afford a robot that could pick things up and put them away? If such a thing actually existed for the consumer? I would have one so fast…
I’m ADHD. My problem with cleaning isn’t something solveable by a roomba… hell, I don’t mind the actual vacuuming part. Vacuuming is easy. Getting the floor into a condition to be vacuumed, or counters in a position to be washed… hell, I am already in the process of replacing all my dressers with shelves, because it plays nicer with putting clothes away than drawers do (pandemic has put some things on hold, though). But a robot? Even one that could pick laundry up from the floor and stick it in a laundry basket to be ready for washing and empty the garbage can and have the bag at the door for me to carry down? Would be a game changer.
Executive function issues mean the more steps in a task, the less likely it is to happen. That’s why shelves > drawers: two less steps and you can see at a glance what’s there. A robot that could make sure laundry goes in a basket, that garbage is ready to go out (bonus points for putting a fresh bag in), that could load and unload a dishwasher (and yes, if you have executive dysfunction, a dishwasher is also an important robot to have), cuts down on so many steps. It takes things from “near impossible” to “probable”.
Abled people mock the idea of a housekeeping robot, or call it lazy, but for someone like me, or someone with mobility issues… for some of us the quality of life improvement would be immense. Less stress at the idea of someone dropping by and judging you on your housekeeping (women, especially women with invisible disabilities deal with this a lot), more independence for someone physically disabled. And yes, less guilt around hiring someone¹ to do a job you “won’t” (there’s that internalized ableism again) do. Less emotional stress from another person being “the only one” to do any of the chores.
Really, before you mock anything as being only for lazy people, try to think through a disability lens. You might be surprised to find that you don’t need to be the intended market.
¹ Don’t come at me about taking people’s jobs away, because a better solution would simply be to pay all people enough to live, regardless of whether they work or not, so that such jobs can’t be used as leverage.
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Thank you for this. My work areas are a mess, but I can focus on what I’m doing and create good stuff. Yet I always think I’m a slob and need to clean up. I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD (plenty of other things), but a psychiatrist friend suggests I can hyperfocus (which makes sense), which I guess is part of it?
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Hyperfocus is definitely a symptom: ADHD is an attention regulation disorder. Hyperfocus is also disregulated attention.
Time management is also a big flag: there tend to be two times – “now” and “not-now”. Anything that is “not-now” often gets ignored until it needs to be done “now”, which is generally too late.
A lot of what gets seen as laziness, including procrastination, is actually due to the brain being unable to process everything and choose a course of action. Or we procrastinate on things we want to do, simply because it’s an overwhelming amount of work at that moment. An example I like to use is leaving the office to go home. I am not a workaholic, but can often be found in the office late because my brain won’t motivate itself to do all the tasks required to get home: gather keys, coat and wallet, make sure computer is shut down, make sure I have my cellphone and lunch cooler (if I keep my lunch at my desk I am more likely to remember to eat), drive home (and do any necessary errands along the way, like get gas), either plan to get dinner or figure out something to eat (decisions? Don’t give me decisions)… it’s a lot. It’s easier to just stay put.
Cleaning often fits into that, because all the little things that get put off add up and become overwhelming. And no, we can’t train ourselves into picking up every piece or thing that is out of place immediately. Nobody actually does that. Everybody leaves something that they’ll “get to later” sometimes, because they’re running unexpectedly late, or something else has popped up that is more urgent, it’s just with executive dysfunction, it happens all the time. So your coffee cup in the sink has become all of them by the end of the week, and some of them now need scrubbing, and this is so simple, everybody says so, why can’t you just be a responsible adult…
Yeah, a lot of ableism gets drilled in and internalized, especially when people are like “well, everybody’s like that sometimes.” One of the big pushes for me that it was a real thing I might have, was when my mother had a stroke and suddenly was having problems with forgetting where she put things, or remembering she was cooking something, and for her it was traumatic, to my sister and father it was a sign of how far she’d slipped (and honestly, I think my father is ADHD, too, but for him it was a case of suddenly having no one managing all the things she used to), but I was like: you’re describing my everyday. 3 cups of water, tea or juice going at once? Yup. I either lost the others or forgot I poured it and got a new one. Milk left sitting on the counter because I forgot to put it back? You betcha. Late for work or an appointment because I can’t find my keys, or because I had to go back and check that I locked the door? So often.
I swear by my auto-shutoff electric kettle, InstantPot, stand mixer and dishwasher. I would kill for my own washer and dryer, on account of they would help so much in eliminating roadblocks to doing laundry.
Again, in my NT mother, those things I listed happening regularly were signs of damage after a stroke. For me, it was Tuesday. Or maybe Wednesday. I can’t be sure. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to try for the third time to make a morning cup of tea.
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I would never mock the idea of domestic robots for what they can do for disabled people (I have neuroatypical issues too). I mock the idea for what they cannot do for the foreseeable future, and for the fact that the idea has become a stand-in for domestic slaves and mind-controlled minions.
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Yeah, right now the cost for anything close to useful and availability to the consumer is basically putting this in pipe dream territory.
I don’t want a self-aware butterbot. I do want something with sensors that can recognize basic things like dishes and clothing, differentiate them from each other and the cat and can be programmed or scheduled to do basic tasks with said things. My dishwasher doesn’t care if I ask it to wash the dishes. A washing machine doesn’t fret that it’s had to do two loads today with extra rinse and spin on both.
A cleaning bot needs to be more mobile, dexterous and able to follow more complex instructions/steps, but otherwise I don’t see it as any different than the machines above. And I don’t see a benefit in paying another person to do those things when we could pay them to literally do anything else, including nothing. I sure as hell don’t want to offload that onto a life partner.
It can also prevent emotional abuse in the other direction, with the chore-doer unable to exploit the guilt or inability to fight back on the part of the person who needs the chores done.
Is it an easy problem? No. Is it achievable? I think it could be. Maybe not perfectly, but in much the same way that washing machines cut back on the abusive laundry industry (not eliminated, mind you, which should be a long term goal… eliminate the abuse, anyway), these could impact exploitative housekeeping industry.
But as a woman who has spent her entire life being judged, shamed, berated and even punished for her housekeeping I can tell you right now that I am not just going to be able to overcome it. And women get the brunt of that far more than men. A man can get away with an untidy work or living space. A woman cannot – especially when too many people don’t believe women can have this disability.
So, yeah, I am going to get hopeful when I see that there’s a possible assistance technology that could become available. And if they market it as a time/labour saver to have a wider market and make it more available to those who need it, because it’s developed while we still must live under capitalism, it’s not going to stop me from wanting it.
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Thanks for the description. You’ve helped me feel better. Some of what you said definitely sounds familiar. I still have a strong sense of “what will the neighbors think?” that my mom instilled in me from an early age. I was so embarrassed to have the plumber this morning see my mess in the basement. (So what?) And it took me ages to actually phone the plumbers’ to get them in to fix some things that have needed fixing for months (of course, COVID didn’t help with that).
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The reality is that a trained doctor’s diagnosis (psychologist or psychiatrist specializing in adult ADHD is best) is the only way to be sure. But if these reasonate hard, that may be a clue.
To bring this back on topic, it’s a bit of a cyberpunk dystopia that some of the best help we can get is from random people on the internet, because our mental health ecosystem is so fucked up.
Here’s the other funny thing: strategies derived by NTs for staying organized and on task don’t always work for us, but it’s astonishing (to them, at least) how much of a difference our coping techniques can work for NTs. I once shocked an efficiency expert brought in to help us with our overload, because his conclusion was that there were no efficiencies to be found, we’d already discovered them all, and the only solution really was more staff. Uh, yeah, because one of the classic ADHD coping strategies is eliminating any unnecessary steps.
Out efficiencying the efficiency expert is simultaneously something to be proud of and profoundly depressing, BTW. Efficiency experts mere existence is a sign of dysfunction and dystopia.
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If we want to discuss smaller solutions, I think I created a Useful Things thread…
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