What mundane pleasures will I be robbed of by domestic robots?
Sometimes I feel like my job at home is putting things into machines and taking things out of machines.
I don’t mean to sound unappreciative about “modern conveniences” (modern being the 1950s) because I take care of laundry and emptying the dishwasher, and I love both. We have a two drawer dishwasher so that is a conveyer belt. And I particularly love laundry. We generate a lot of laundry it seems.
There was a tweet in 2025: woodworking sounds really cool until you find out it’s 90% sanding
And it became an idiom because 90% of everything is sanding. See this reddit thread… 90% of photography is file management; 90% of baking is measuring; etc.
So when I say that I love laundry I don’t mean that I love clean clothes (everyone loves clean clothes) but I love the sanding. I love the sorting into piles for different washes, I love reading the little labels, especially finding the hidden ones; I love the sequencing so we don’t run out of room on the racks, I love folding, I love the rare peak moments when everything comes together and there are no dirty clothes anywhere in the house nor clean clothes waiting to be returned. (I hate ironing. But fortunately I love my dry cleaner and I feel all neighbourhood-y when I visit and we talk about the cricket.)
Soon! Domestic robots will take it all away.
Whether in 6 months or 6 years.
I don’t know what my tipping point will be…
I imagine robots will be priced like a car and not like a dishwasher? It’ll be worth it, assuming reliability. RELATED: I was thinking about what my price cap would be for Claude Code. I pay $100/mo for Claude right now and I would pay $1,500/mo personally for the same functionality. Beyond that I’d complain and have to find new ways to earn, but I’m elastic till that point.
Because I don’t doubt that domestic robots will be reliable. Waymo has remote operators that drop in for ambiguous situations so that’s the reliability solve.
But in a home setting? The open mic, open camera, and a robot arms on wheels - required for tele-operators - gives me pause.
(Remember that smart home hack where you could stand outside and yell through the letterbox, hey Alexa unlock the front door? Pranks aplenty if your voice-operated assistant can also dismantle the kitchen table.)
So let’s say I’ve still got a few years before trust+reliability is at a point where the robot is unloading the dishwasher for me and stacking the dishes in the cupboard, and doing the laundry for me and also sorting and loading and folding and stacking and…
i.e. taking care of the sanding.
In Fraggle Rock the Fraggles live in their underground caves generally playing and singing and swimming (with occasional visits to an oracular sentient compost heap, look the 80s were a whole thing), and also they live alongside tiny Doozers who spend their days in hard hats industriously constructing sprawling yet intricate miniature cities.
Which the Fraggles eat. (The cities are delicious.)
Far from being distressed, the Doozers appreciate the destruction as it gives them more room to go on constructing.
Me and laundry. Same same.
Being good at something is all about loving the sanding.
Here’s a quote about Olympic swimmers:
The very features of the sport that the ‘C’ swimmer finds unpleasant, the top level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring-swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say-they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. … It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.
From The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers (1989) by Daniel Chambliss (PDF).
But remember that 90% of everything is sanding.
With domestic appliances, sanding is preparing to put things into machines and handling things when you take them out of the machines.
This “drudgery” will be taken away.
So then there will be new sanding. Inevitably!
With domestic robots, what will the new continuous repetitive micro task be? Will I have to empty its lint trap? Will I have to polish its eyes every night? Will I have to go shopping for it, day after day, or just endlessly answer the door to Amazon deliveries of floor polish and laundry tabs? Maybe the future is me carrying my robot up the stairs and down the stairs and up the stairs and down the stairs, forever.
I worry that I won’t love future sanding as much as I love today sanding.
What mundane pleasures will I be robbed of by domestic robots?
Sometimes I feel like my job at home is putting things into machines and taking things out of machines.
I don’t mean to sound unappreciative about “modern conveniences” (modern being the 1950s) because I take care of laundry and emptying the dishwasher, and I love both. We have a two drawer dishwasher so that is a conveyer belt. And I particularly love laundry. We generate a lot of laundry it seems.
There was a tweet in 2025:
And it became an idiom because 90% of everything is sanding. See this reddit thread… 90% of photography is file management; 90% of baking is measuring; etc.
So when I say that I love laundry I don’t mean that I love clean clothes (everyone loves clean clothes) but I love the sanding. I love the sorting into piles for different washes, I love reading the little labels, especially finding the hidden ones; I love the sequencing so we don’t run out of room on the racks, I love folding, I love the rare peak moments when everything comes together and there are no dirty clothes anywhere in the house nor clean clothes waiting to be returned. (I hate ironing. But fortunately I love my dry cleaner and I feel all neighbourhood-y when I visit and we talk about the cricket.)
Soon! Domestic robots will take it all away.
Whether in 6 months or 6 years.
I don’t know what my tipping point will be…
I imagine robots will be priced like a car and not like a dishwasher? It’ll be worth it, assuming reliability. RELATED: I was thinking about what my price cap would be for Claude Code. I pay $100/mo for Claude right now and I would pay $1,500/mo personally for the same functionality. Beyond that I’d complain and have to find new ways to earn, but I’m elastic till that point.
Because I don’t doubt that domestic robots will be reliable. Waymo has remote operators that drop in for ambiguous situations so that’s the reliability solve.
But in a home setting? The open mic, open camera, and a robot arms on wheels - required for tele-operators - gives me pause.
(Remember that smart home hack where you could stand outside and yell through the letterbox, hey Alexa unlock the front door? Pranks aplenty if your voice-operated assistant can also dismantle the kitchen table.)
So let’s say I’ve still got a few years before trust+reliability is at a point where the robot is unloading the dishwasher for me and stacking the dishes in the cupboard, and doing the laundry for me and also sorting and loading and folding and stacking and…
i.e. taking care of the sanding.
In Fraggle Rock the Fraggles live in their underground caves generally playing and singing and swimming (with occasional visits to an oracular sentient compost heap, look the 80s were a whole thing), and also they live alongside tiny Doozers who spend their days in hard hats industriously constructing sprawling yet intricate miniature cities.
Which the Fraggles eat. (The cities are delicious.)
Far from being distressed, the Doozers appreciate the destruction as it gives them more room to go on constructing.
Me and laundry. Same same.
Being good at something is all about loving the sanding.
Here’s a quote about Olympic swimmers:
From The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers (1989) by Daniel Chambliss (PDF).
But remember that 90% of everything is sanding.
With domestic appliances, sanding is preparing to put things into machines and handling things when you take them out of the machines.
This “drudgery” will be taken away.
So then there will be new sanding. Inevitably!
With domestic robots, what will the new continuous repetitive micro task be? Will I have to empty its lint trap? Will I have to polish its eyes every night? Will I have to go shopping for it, day after day, or just endlessly answer the door to Amazon deliveries of floor polish and laundry tabs? Maybe the future is me carrying my robot up the stairs and down the stairs and up the stairs and down the stairs, forever.
I worry that I won’t love future sanding as much as I love today sanding.