This is such a weird question because I already have a part time housekeeper who I pay a solid $40/hr to do this. Realistically though, we just don’t have that much housework, and it’s like 2 hours per week, so my instinct is that it would need to be a pretty cheap robot to be worth it. But also, I feel bad about basically having a low-key servant. But also, I legitimately think she would be pretty pissed if she got replaced by a robot.
Like yeah, labor alienation and all that, but this is kind of a great “in the weeds” question about the path to post scarcity society. For me, replacing my housekeeper’s labor with a robot is a question of cost, but for her it’s a question of perceived livelihood. How do you convince her to support a socialist path which does not give her ownership over her surplus labor (which she already has to some degree as a private contractor), but negates it entirely?
To me this is why that transition is a generational project and not a revolutionary one. It is simply unrealistic to tell someone that the negation or reassignment of their economic value is for their own good without being able to demonstrate the iterative benefit of this new normal over the span of years and decades. People are simply too damaged by generations of labor alienation to throw their agency into the fire of revolution.
This is such a weird question because I already have a part time housekeeper who I pay a solid $40/hr to do this. Realistically though, we just don’t have that much housework, and it’s like 2 hours per week, so my instinct is that it would need to be a pretty cheap robot to be worth it. But also, I feel bad about basically having a low-key servant. But also, I legitimately think she would be pretty pissed if she got replaced by a robot.
Like yeah, labor alienation and all that, but this is kind of a great “in the weeds” question about the path to post scarcity society. For me, replacing my housekeeper’s labor with a robot is a question of cost, but for her it’s a question of perceived livelihood. How do you convince her to support a socialist path which does not give her ownership over her surplus labor (which she already has to some degree as a private contractor), but negates it entirely?
To me this is why that transition is a generational project and not a revolutionary one. It is simply unrealistic to tell someone that the negation or reassignment of their economic value is for their own good without being able to demonstrate the iterative benefit of this new normal over the span of years and decades. People are simply too damaged by generations of labor alienation to throw their agency into the fire of revolution.
Most probably, the job you do will be more reliably replaced by robots before her job, though