Automation Where It Matters

Matt Yglesias writes

These days people are perhaps more likely to book a reservation or order a takeout meal with an app rather than a phone call, but the core work of serving and preparing food has seen very little progress.  

At the higher end of the salary spectrum, we still don't have robot doctors who can treat patients in lieu of costly and inconvenient human ones. Indeed, we can't even get medical records digitized properly.  

As it becomes clearer and clearer over time that smartphones and the internet simply aren't economic game changers on the same scale as air conditioning, jet planes, container ships, and televisions, it's become increasingly fashionable in Silicon Valley to simply retreat into denial.

          ...

Rather than hot business trends relating to new equipment that allows workers to deliver more value than ever before, one of the signal trends of our time has been a proliferation of online services that reduce the friction associated with having people get in their car and bring you things. Washio, for example, will send someone to my house to pick up my dry cleaning. Seamless will ping a restaurant and tell it to deliver takeout to my door. Postmates will send someone to get a takeout dinner from a restaurant that doesn't offer delivery. Homejoy will send someone to clean my house. These startups are okay business ideas, but they are not doing anything to advance the efficiency with which clothing is laundered, meals are cooked, or houses are cleaned.

Read the whole thing. As it turns out, one in fact cannot eat a smartphone. This ties into a recent conversation about inflation. To wit, the following:

That is, to a first approximation: prices of things you want are going down, and prices of things you need are going up.

The counter-argument is that these price increases are tied to meaningful increases in quality. I am not a subscriber to this for any of the "blue lines" above over the last ten years. For food, child care and vehicle maintenance, this is clearly nonsensical. For education, I am doubtful one could successfully argue that a four year degree today is of greater quality than in 2005.

Health care seems like the one area where this seems plausible. But cost of healthcare is another story.