Washing dishes is so incredibly dumb. What should have been done long ago is standardising plates, cups and cutlery and creating integrated dish cabinet/washer that can wash those standardised items and store them.
The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work.
You can't standardize consumer goods. Non-standardized goods will instantly acquire a prestige premium and all your hard work on all that labor-saving tooling will go out the window in a matter of years.
You can still have prestige mount for you flat screen tv but bulk of the market will go with standardised one. It's hard to standardise things that don't interoperate with anything else but when there is some interface with other object there's trend toward standardisation.
Plates to large to fit in a dishwasher or that can't be washed or microwaved didn't acquire prestige premium as far as I know.
> Washing dishes is so incredibly dumb. What should have been done long ago is standardising plates, cups and cutlery and creating integrated dish cabinet/washer that can wash those standardised items and store them. The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work.
And what, exactly, do you propose that we do about this "oversupply of cheap human work"? If we simply ignore it, there'll be hell to pay. The old saying, idle hands are the devil's workshop, is based on millennia of human experience.
Suppose that all the dishwashers in the U.S. were suddenly to find themselves both (1) out of a job, and (2) as a result, unable to earn enough money to feed themselves and their families.
Now consider that for some of these people, retraining them to seek out and hold other jobs might not be much of an option. There are some people who, for whatever reason, simply can't learn the necessary skills / behaviors / motivations. (If you're inclined to scorn that notion, or such people, consider how little we really know about human learning abilities and motivation; such people are more common than you perhaps imagine.)
Are our unemployed dishwashers going to sit around passively and accept their fate, watching their families do without while they see others around them prospering? Not bloody likely --- they're going to try to do something about it. And some percentage of them are going to make trouble, e.g., by robbing or cheating others, dealing drugs, rioting, etc.
From a purely-pragmatic perspective, if we want to keep our vaunted social order intact, then we're going to have to figure out how to keep people (A) occupied in reasonable contentment, and (B) reasonably-well fed, -clothed, -housed, etc. This is a brute fact, which we can like or not, but which we disregard at our peril.
> were suddenly to find themselves both (1) out of a job, and (2) as a result, unable to earn enough money to feed themselves and their familie.
That's only true if you give things to people only on condition that they do something, anything, useful, harmful, obsolete, whatever you can call a job.
Food is cheap, housing can be cheap if it gets detangled from financial speculation and protected against rent seeking behavior. That's not excessive burden to keep all the people fed, clothed and housed and even entertained at minimum standard without making them do stuff.
Only obstacle is the mental one. Hate towards freeloaders, that makes people pretend they do useful things and makes other people create schemes that help to pretend.
People hate the idea that young father could get food or other things for free. He should be given at least a pretend job where he can simulate doing useful stuff away from his growing up kids.
Interestingly people don't mind the freeloading descendants of rich people. They didn't contribute themselves but their ancestors contributed so much. Unlike the ancestors of young poor father. He should be severely scorned for any of his attempts at freeloading.
"The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to stack dishes in washer cabinets is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work."
Less sarcastically, automating that part of dirty dishes would not solve the whole problem of dirty dishes, would directly cost a lot and would make life more boring (standardized dishes!).
Not sure what you have in mind. Standardised thing would still be hand washable if you can't afford machine that washes and stores them.
About your ironic remark... I'm not sure if you consider current state of dish washing technology an optimum that we need not to progress any further from, or that you are perfectly happy at the current pace of the progress of dish-washing technology. I don't. And if we already had washer cabinets, I'd be wondering why they can't be integrated into a table or why we can't have mobile robots to collect the plates. Although I wouldn't call lack of robots a disgrace because robots are hard. I believe combining washer with cabinet is not and it doesn't exist mostly because of silly cultural thing called "but my plates would be boring then" and "what would humans do with all additional free time"?
The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work.