There is a charity that my family supports that works with developmentally disabled people. One of the interesting things I learned when I attended one of their fundraisers was that part of their mission was finding jobs that developmentally disabled people would excel at due to their disability.
For instance: the guy who takes the ticket at the theaters in my city (Phoenix) is often a DD person. I thought this was odd, until I made the connection that this is literally a partnership between that company an the charity I'm talking about.
Most punk kids will get bored at this job, be snarky, not want to do it, etc. But some people with certtain DDs actually really enjoy it. They get to talk to people, they feel useful instead of feeling like a burden, they get a paycheck, etc. And for the company (harkins theaters) they get a happy, competent employee that enjoys their job.
It's a win win. And it's a perfect example of embracing the concept of "differently abled" instead of disabled. Made me really happy to learn that.
I once interviewed with a company in NC that only employed blind people (to manufacture reading glasses, of all things!). NC has a provision for sub-minimum wage payments for those with disabilities [0]. This is to encourage employers to hire those with disabilities and give them at least some form of a wage. Per the interviewing process, it really seemed to help a lot of disabled people have a life. Their jobs got them out of the house/care facility, interacting with other people, and gave them a purpose in life(however mundane). Though I declined the job, it was an incredible company and view into the day to day lives of disabled citizens and their struggles. More states should consider such provisions to see if they may work for their people.
Per the interview, the blind employees assembled and packaged the glasses. There was supervision from sighted employees, but most of the assembly was via the blind.
My mom used to be an executive director that found work and provided housing for developmentally disabled adults. I remember the challenge they had finding jobs they could excel at. They got a contract with Hitachi to pack boxes, once they worked with the factory to delegate the work, which involved color coding the boxes and determine the packing order, it became one of the favorite jobs for individuals with more individuals wanting the job then there where positions. It was great for the lower functioning individuals who were not in a position to engage with others. The other jobs that got filled quickly were custodial for the higher functioning individuals.
Interesting. Your post reminded me of this story in Australia recently. While this man wasn't placed through a charity, he found a similar enjoyment in his job
If we were creating them, then _Brave New World_ would be very applicable. But helping someone who has come to be through no intention of others accomplish good things in their life is good.
This is fantastic. Although I'm currently unable to watch the videos, I'm hoping that the people controlling the robots have various forms of feedback so that the interactions can give them some much needed human contact.
If they do open a permanent cafe of this type I'll be sure to visit next time I'm in the area.
They appear to have a video monitor with a camera feed from the robot, but I can’t figure out how they actually control the robot and how responsive it is.
The example i saw had a woman who had control of her eyes but nothing else. She had a computer monitor with eye tracking software installed. She could look at controls on the screen in order to command the robot. This was all overlayed on a live video feed from the robot. I'm assuming she also had sound since people were telling the robot verbally what their order was.
I always thought this is how we should clean our houses (when we pay other people to clean our houses). Robovacs are great for smoothish floors, but most other cleaning tasks are too complicated for autonomous robots. With a good humanoid robot controlled by someone living anywhere, it would be easier.
I don't really understand why, but the idea of somebody sitting behind a computer somewhere, controlling my vacuum is just really weird and unsettling. I also understand that this could help handicapped people or people in less fortunate countries earn a decent wage, but then again, it feels odd. Also, paying for a vacuum and then paying a fee to the person using it feels weird... Even though hiring a cleaning lady is pretty much the same thing.
Thanks for this, now I'll be thinking about this all day. And I'll probably have intense discussions with people about the ethics and their feelings toward this idea at parties... Because I know I'll bring it up.
I feel the same unease. In China, blind people are often given jobs as piano tuners and masseuses. In a country with few resources and opportunities for disabled people, I first viewed these types of jobs positively. However, people can be pressured or even forced into taking on these careers in order to be less of a burden on their families.
>However, people can be pressured or even forced into taking on these careers in order to be less of a burden on their families.
You could argue that able-bodied people are also pressured or even forced to take on careers. What fraction of piano tuners, sighted or not, could quit their jobs and live without being a burden to their families?
I frequently muse about how I was coerced into a 20 year "career" in software. I liked computers, but this is not what I liked. I've refound that balance and it's going well, but at no way do I feel like there was ever another road. I tried tons of things. To quote a popular cartoon, "It's like slavery with extra steps!"
This sounds pretty common sadly. People need to make money so they get a job. At some point they get so into whatever they're doing it's difficult to switch.
Most people don't like their jobs. Most people tolerate it and appreciate it though because for most people having a job is a lot better than not having a job. However I can't say I really know anyone who would continue doing their job if they weren't paid to do it.
One issue is jobs are generally all or nothing. An equivalent pay cut for an extra 4 weeks off a year is appealing. But, most companies hate the idea of someone working 10 months a year vs 11 months a year.
Well, all the simple jobs that you can drop into and out of like that are being automated, so competition for the remaining jobs is fierce and accordingly pay and conditions are terrible. The remaining jobs are all, to some degree, knowledge jobs, and there are significant sunk costs in bringing each employee up to speed. Would you rather spend $50-$100k (minimum) to train one full time employee, or $100-200k to train two part-time employees to cover that same role?
I can’t think of any company that pays for that kind of training. Due to frequent job hopping company specific on boarding costs are generally kept fairly low.
More widely people truly work alone, companies need redundancy in the case of illness, vaction, or other such matters. Further, their is a benifit to be able to staff a team with a non integer number of people without splitting focus across multiple projects.
I'm not talking about formal training, I'm just talking about the fact that when you take on an employee in a knowledge job, it's usually quite some time before they start contributing positively, let alone reach their potential. In software, generally it seems to be around 6 months before a new player is a full member of the team, and the first 3 months of that they're a net negative because they're taking up more team time asking questions than they're saving by doing work.
3 months at say -10% productivity and 3 months at say 50% productivity does not add up to 100+k for most employees.
On top of that, new people really should be a net gain by week 3-4. It’s not about what they get done but the time they save other people. Inexperienced people may take longer to get up to speed, but they also cost less.
I'm concerned because I feel that society has already decided that blind people can only do these certain types of menial jobs, that these jobs are "good enough". They neatly tuck away blind people while giving them a function in society. And as a consequence there are few other opportunities given to the blind, the blind are expected to only be piano tuners and masseuses. Yes, we all must work, but we have some measure of control over our lives and can improve our situation through education and hard work, provided we have the opportunity to do so.
I think it's just that the disability added another layer of empathy for GP. Sort of like when people react more strongly to children suffering, or how D.C. freaked out over the Kashoggi murder. Everyone else's suffering is just as bad, but humans aren't logical about our emotions.
> I don't really understand why, but the idea of somebody sitting behind a computer somewhere, controlling my vacuum is just really weird and unsettling.
Understandable. But if there is a good value proposition many people could probably get over that.
Until someone from 4chan figures out how to use reflections and patterns of lights and shadows on the floor (or who knows what else) to figure out exactly what's in your house, and where it's at.
Until someone from 4chan figures out how to use reflections and patterns of lights and shadows on the floor (or who knows what else) to figure out exactly what's in your house, and where it's at.
Computer vision researchers have uncovered a world of visual signals hiding in our midst, including subtle motions that betray what’s being said and faint images of what’s around a corner.
Oh shit! So much for aiming the camera at the floor, unless you want to be watched and overheard.
It does seem unsettling to have a high tech cleaning robot that is simply an extension of a person. Privacy aside, I think it might be because it seems like kind of a waste of all that technology. I would feel less uneasy if it weren't a 1:1 relationship and the robot could do some of the work without a human controlling it.
For example, maybe the human trains the robot so the robot can do some of the work itself and the human just fills in the more difficult work or the work that is never the same. For example, it would probably be hard to train a robot to put away clothes and toys in my kid's rooms, we'll get there eventually of course, but a human could do that part of it and then they could trigger the vacuum to run when they're done with the hard stuff. The human would also need to be "on call" to sort out a problem when the robot gets stuck or can't perform a task.
With the current state of robotics, a robot would either be incapable of cleaning my apartment, or would be capable of doing serious damage to it, or, realistically, both.
Maybe in a few decades, but right now, the last thing I want is an ai-controlled, or remote-controlled robot that is capable of scrubbing tile and cleaning caulking, moving my crap around, and wiping down hard-to-reach surfaces inside my apartment.
Unlike humans, if it is using too much force for the task at hand, it will have no awareness that it's likely to cause damage.
The hard part of cleaning isn't pushing a vacuum cleaner around.
A roomba[1] can't, but something that can put in the elbow grease to scrub tiles in my bathroom can trivially destroy the caulking, or damage the drywall.
Something that can reach up to dust the moulding on my ceiling can trivially knock over a standing lamp/potted plant/etc.
Even something as simple as the pin that switches my bathroom from shower to bathtub mode needs to be handled carefully (Otherwise, you'll snap the bathtub faucet off.)
Futzing with my dishes? Thanks, I'll figure out how to do it myself.
[1] And as I said, vaccuming is not the time-intensive part of cleaning. I have disposable income to blow on toys, I hate cleaning, but I'm not remotely interested in a roomba.
I've mulled getting one from time to time. But they'd do a fraction of my house. I'm sure they'd have issues with cords and stuff lying around waiting to be packed or to be put away. Etc. And that's just vacuuming. Properly doing my kitchen floor requires a mop (or a wet Roomba version) as well as a vacuum or broom. And we've still just talking about floors.
The wet version of the Roomba is the Scooba. The Roomba is a broom (anagram), and the Scooba is the mop.
We have received both as gifts, and while they are slower and less powerful than the manual tools and electric vacuum cleaners, they can be tasked to clean the same area for much longer than my attention span for cleaning. It is also true that it is much easier to clean a mostly-clean floor than a more-filthy one. If you let the mop robot clean up for two hours, you can service the robot and then manually mop up the parts of the floor it couldn't do properly, in less time than manual mopping alone. With the sweeper, you never have to repeatedly vacuum over the same bit of popcorn, trying in vain to get the cleaner to pick it up, because all the larger floor debris are already in the robot's tray. And you don't need to worry about coins or Lego blocks in the vacuum bag.
But yes, cords are the Roomba's kryptonite. At best, it temporarily halts the cleaning process. At worst, it destroys your cords and also renders the floor sweeper inoperable. This alone destroys most of the utility. The sweeper cannot be left to operate unattended, because given enough time, it will always find a cord and try to commit suicide with it.
My "solution" about a month ago was to get a slightly older cordless Dyson on sale. I realized that my issue with vacuuming wasn't so much that I minded pulling out a vacuum for a few minutes now and then. Rather it was hauling my big canister vac downstairs, screwing around with the cord and hose, etc. Now I can pull out the Dyson in about 30 seconds and vacuum things for a minute or two.
(I also don't have kids or dogs and don't stress out if I can't eat off the floor so having a very imperfect robovac that will run itself every day isn't a particular win.)
Instead of at the consumer level, I can see this being viable at a commercial level. Robot vacuums and floor cleaners that clean office and retail building surfaces controlled by those who are not physically able to do so.
Then that human being has to actually travel to your house and do the entire job start to finish. The idea of a robot vac (or similar) that can do 80% of the job itself but ask for help from a trusted operator over the internet is really interesting.
Yuck, that is a good point. At the same time, is the need to house residential cleaning staff really what drives the creation/maintenance of integrated neighbourhoods?
For my part, I live in a pretty blended downtown neighbourhood (Kitchener, Ontario), and balancing the need for affordable housing with the constant pressure to "clean up" certain areas and turn brownfields into glitzy new condo towers seems to be something that's largely managed at the city council level.
Maybe less now. It used to. Look at cities like London (UK, not Ontario), and you'll see lots of "mews" (1) that are rows of stables with associated housing for servants tacked onto the back of large housing and backing onto "service streets", so the rich could have their horses and servants housed where they were needed.
Today, of course, most mews have been converted into expensive standalone housing units, and most new integrated neighbourhoods are the result of council planning offices.
Why yuck? I bet if you flipped it around and said "that opens the door for poor people to score lucrative contracts in richer markets which would be otherwise unavailable to them" then you'd think it was alright.
As the cafe job for disabled people, this also opens up the possibility of remote work for people with social anxiety, people in very rural areas with a lack of opportunity and so forth.
According to the article the waiters are paid about 9$ an hour. For a person in a destitute, remote small town jobs like this could be a really sweet side gig. It's not like they somehow would meet insular rich people anyway.
There's no reason to be cynical about this. Closing physical distance, which is one of the big contributors to lost opportunity is a good thing.
Expensive in most of the developed world, possibly higher risk and less reliable depending on the specifics of the employer and employee(s) in question.
Interestingly. You could remotely train a robot. Which things go where. After that the robot could do a lot on its own. And you could remotely manage a fleet of robots.
My vision of the future for the cleaning service industry:
Robot at home on stand by a la I,Robot movie
:"Good morning Mr. Anderson,
our remote cleaning specialist is ready to clean your home, do you comply?"
pass code confirmation needed
:"Thank you, our services will take approximately 45 minutes. Please stand clear while we complete our task. Thank you Mr. Anderson. Have a Wonderful day!"
:"Please note that your next remote cleaning will require a renewal of your service agreement. Please take time to fill in the survey, confirm your subscription, and adjust your cleaning times, and thank you again for being a valued customer here at CleanTech"
What if we took it to the next level and made it a game where two players compete to clean the most debris via remote controlled vacuum cleaners. A map would show areas cleaned and point values.
I don't think this is just semantics—isn't this actually a cafe staffed by paralyzed people, who control robots? This headline is bit like saying a warehouse is staffed by forklifts, controlled by operators.
For those wondering which novel: John Scalzi's Lock In. I enjoyed it, though I generally find his work hit-and-miss. It' s a detective story set in the near future where a significant percentage of the population is paralyzed due to a pandemic. The paralyzed operate in society by using android avatars.
I enjoyed the book and the premise is interesting, but there was just something missing that made it truly good. (I know this is the worst book report ever)
The concept of that movie was really insightful, but the trailer looked kind of terrible. Was there any Ghost In The Shell kind of deep philosophy, or was it just a Hollywood excuse to blow things up and do completely unrealistic action scenes?
But it’s a bit scary that the telecommute, which maybe hasn’t, I think, caught on - at least as a means to include in-demand, distributed “information” workers - might catch on at scale when purposed in a way that could physically exclude workers with “menial” jobs from the need to live locally.
This is fascinating! If you're interested in some of research on neurotechnologies (e.g. BCI-controlled robots/robotic limbs), check out the BrainGate research group: https://www.braingate.org/
This is a great concept. It does feel weird though that it’s tied to an anime... I can’t tell why exactly this exists. Is it a venture into much needed independence for paralyzed people? Or... is it horribly distasteful advertising that will soon be taken away?
I highly doubt that advertising a 10 year old anime would be very profitable. If anything it's an ad for the robots. The robots designed specifically to help disabled people.
Two of the three cofounders of the company were bedridden for long periods of time due to illness and wanted to help people in similar situations. They also employ several physically disabled people as remote workers.
It won't soon be taken away though, it already shut down. It was intended as a short pilot run. They plan to partner with some existing restaurants for the same sort of thing on a more permanent basis starting next year.
Robots are autonomous mechanisms. These are waldoes. Not to belittle the purpose and sentiment (and kudos to the effort to better enabling those with physical restrictions), but an androideqsue waldo is just not a robot.
I bet you couldn't find a single person on the street that is aware of that distinction if you went out right now and asked 100 of them.
"Cafe opens in Tokyo staffed by waldos..." is a complete regression to me, though I suppose I'd click the headline just to find out what the hell a waldo is.
It seems like most actual robots and waldos would contain the other. These waldos presumably have many autonomous mechanisms, for not bumping into each other, not dropping things, wayfinding, etc.
And the robots at a car factory are monitored and frequently reprogrammed, stopped and started, etc by humans. So in many respects they are a waldo.
How do you draw the line? Is it by percentage of mechanisms? Or frequency of human input?
It's a news article, after all -- and fundamentally more about, you know, people rather than technology. So in that sense the distinction hardly matters.
>No, you're right, Well Actually Guy. It's not just used by emotional abusers. It's also used by socially tone deaf people who seek to belittle the experiences of others in order to score debate points, or force their way into a discussion that has absolutely nothing to do with them.
This seems much too assuming; sometimes technicalities are important to a good discussion, and of course this ties into the concept of sealioning[0] too, but revealing sealioning is a better tool to use against such people. Sealioning is where people don't recognise that you don't want to debate everything, so they continue to pester you. But once committed to a discussion, the tools of skepticism, doubt and rigor are all very useful. They may be useful (within some margin some of us might find agreeable or disagreeable) on a site almost expressly for interesting perspectives - Hacker News.
Often I'm happy that there's a "well actually" guy to provide nuance where it might be needed. Maybe it's not needed, but often it is. There is a time and place, and many of the author's examples are examples of the wrong time and place to "well actually". It doesn't mean the points are wrong.
For me even better idea would be to create coffe&chat type of Cafe. When real people can talk with other real people, though via robotic interface (contrary to human controlled robotic waiters which can be replaced with AI controlled robotic waiters at some point).
wow, using technology to increase productivity to make up for stable population rather than importing millions of people who will be out of jobs due to technological advances in a few years. Truly a game changing strategy
That doesn't make sense. If productivity increase is inevitable, it's not a game changer strategy.
If technology increases human productivity, then immigrants won't be unemployed in a few years, consumers will be wealthier.
Consumers will be wealthier only if the productivity gains from automation end up in consumers' wallets--and because employment is the main way that money gets into consumers' wallets, this is not a given.
Similarly to rural Italy, France, Spain and USA, as people move to urban centers, rural population falls and small towns die. Japan’s demographic situation makes their case extra difficult at the moment.
It's strange how these discussions are framed in terms of the dehumanizing "importing people". Maybe it's a reflection in the minds of those who say it of the idea that people are only means to an end, commodities to be imported and exported.
On the one hand, giving disabled people some activity that helps them be independent and care for themselves sounds great!
On the other hand, the idea that this could become a weapon against disabled people (why are you staying on benefits? go out and get a job for yourself, you lazy paraplegic!) is... scary.
Especially given that it sounds mostly like a marketing gimmick, and that the very thing allowing them to interact with the world is not their own, but property of the store owners - i.e. they can't take the robot and move to a different caffe, they are tied to the benevolence of their boss.
Overall, this is much more distopic than utopic, and should be discouraged in this form; but the technology is interesting and could be an asset in the lives of many people.
>On the other hand, the idea that this could become a weapon against disabled people (why are you staying on benefits? go out and get a job for yourself, you lazy paraplegic!) is... scary.
This one restaurant can't employ more than a tiny fraction of paraplegics, so I doubt that will happen. Sure, irrational people could use that argument, but irrational people can already use a lot of irrational arguments. If remote operation of drones by paraplegics suddenly becomes a major part of society, so that operations like this restaurant would be a significant part of the policy debate, paraplegics would be better off and potentially not need benefits. Wouldn't that be an ideal goal?
As someone who has experienced it, I believe that the neoliberal concept of "workfare" and the related idea that just any job is good for the disabled is something we need to be really careful about. This isn't just a "late capitalism" thing, it's a historical problem where, for example, the mentally ill have been expected to work as gardeners at the institution which houses them, whether or not this is a fulfilling job for them. It goes back to the idea of the workhouse and beyond.
One crucial issue is that the person who is being asked to do the work needs to feel that they can say no.
Finding ways to extract labour from people who would otherwise be a "pure burden" on society is obviously fraught with risks of exploitation.
>One crucial issue is that the person who is being asked to do the work needs to feel that they can say no.
If more than one tele-operated cafe is founded, then their employees will have exactly the same choice as most people who work in the service industry today. If only one tele-operated cafe company is ever started, then it will not be a very big social change. That's really all I'm saying.
Of course, we could imagine that one company would become gigantic and also the world's only employer of disabled people, but that concern applies equally to every commercial enterprise and people group. Any company could become a labor monopsony in the right (wrong?) environment.
It depends on the nature of the work as to whether it is an ideal goal or not. If it is dehumanizing work, or perhaps even the fate of a paraplegic child to have their only career option being a "robot waiter" in a cafe, maybe there's a problem with that. Being "better off" is not only measured in terms of having wealth or a stable place to live (indeed with the same argument one could argue that slavery is justified because the slaves are "better off" living under a master rather than dying on the streets), it is also measured in life choice freedom and happiness.
What of paraplegics as restaurant managers, for instance? A related point from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on Affirmative Action[0]:
>Many factories and businesses prior to 1964, especially in the South, had in place overtly discriminatory policies and rules. For example, a company’s policy might have openly relegated African-Americans to the maintenance department and channeled whites into operations, sales, and management departments, where the pay and opportunities for advancement were far better. If, after passage of the Civil Rights Act, the company willingly abandoned its openly segregative policy, it could still carry forward the effects of its past segregation through other already-existing facially neutral rules. For example, a company policy that required workers to give up their seniority in one department if they transferred to another would have locked in place older African-American maintenance workers as effectively as the company’s own prior segregative rule that made them ineligible to transfer at all. Consequently, courts began striking down facially neutral rules that carried through the effects of an employer’s past discrimination, regardless of the original intent or provenance of the rules.
>If it is dehumanizing work [...] maybe there's a problem with that
You're comparing a reality I am welcoming (disabled people being able to do something) with a possible future reality that I would welcome even more (the elimination of disability), along with a little bit of an even better future that might be even further away (the elimination of menial labor and the intellectual liberation of humanity). Sure, let's intellectually liberate humanity, but you aren't going to accomplish that by telling disabled people that they can't remote-operate commercial robots because you would rather them be intellectually liberated instead.
I never proposed that such work should be disallowed, I offered a critique of promoting such schemes while ignoring the qualitative aspects of life which are very important, even to the disabled. So there are two possibilities to be weighed up here: firstly, the current situation in that there are fewer jobs for the disabled, who need to be supported through state assistance, but such an arrangement may offer more time to pursue intellectual liberation, and secondly a possible future in which the disabled must adopt some jobs like being robot waiters or live in poverty. If the question is related to social programs then I argue this is not at all a false dichotomy.
It's curious I'm being downvoted in my original comment for arguing for a more human approach to jobs and labour in society.
On HN, one is not supposed to comment on being downvoted:
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Past attempts to exclude political discussion from HN reflect a belief that, somehow, what Silicon Valley does can be fully understood without recourse to political thought.
The reality is that the HN community harbours readers with a wide range of political views, and those readers can downvote people with whom they disagree with total impunity. It's not good for the quality of debate, to say the least.
> i.e. they can't take the robot and move to a different caffe, they are tied to the benevolence of their boss
The same can be said about a lot of jobs. If your quit your job in a metal working shop you can't take your lathe with you, it belongs to your employer. A bus driver usually can't take the bus with him. A crane operator usually doesn't own the crane. The only thing different in this situation is that there is only one such cafe equipped with remote controled servers. But that just means we should encourage such cafes so that more spring up and workers can move to another employer with similar equipment.
> On the other hand, the idea that this could become a weapon against disabled people (why are you staying on benefits? go out and get a job for yourself, you lazy paraplegic!)
If there were enough job opportunities for disabled people, this "attack" would be entirely valid reasoning. After all they get benefits mostly because they can't participate in the job market in the same way other people can. In the reality we live in those job opportunities don't exist in sufficient quantity, so any such attacks are empty rhetoric.
>Overall, this is much more distopic than utopic
Giving disabled people a more normal life, enabling them to participate more in society, is distopic? Even ignoring any financial aspects and the interaction during the work day, just working in itself is shown to have positive effects on mental health.
> the idea that this could become a weapon against disabled people
Possibly you're taking it a bit far there, but at least in England I could see that being the case. The lengths they go to to stop people getting benefits are ridiculous.
For example, Scotland now has devolved powers for benefits, and are being much more generous: Having a baby? Here's £300. Is it your first? Here's another £300. Twins? Another £300. Then they make sure you can apply for all this online.
In England they tried not to have an online presence because, "we don't want to make it too easy for people to apply."
If it's important enough that people should be aware of it, it's important enough to break an NDA over, although that might require a technical workaround such as posting under a throwaway account. Since this comment is already attached to your name that's impractical here, but it might be worth keeping in mind for other forums.
Someone may object that contracts are sacred. I don't care about contracts that are designed to conceal or perpetuate abusive behavior.
Fair point, but Japan has a pretty commendable culture of including and enabling people with physical disabilities. I once encountered a large group of Haneda airport employees participating in an exercise where each of them had adopted a different disability (one in a wheelchair, another blindfolded, another with crutches, etc) and the group was methodically navigating every centimeter of the airport with a separate team taking notes.
California has lawyers doing the same thing at businesses across the state, and suing accessibility-law violators.
Sadly, it's more of an extortion racket using the letter of law as a weapon than a vehicle for improving access.
This does happen in California but it's important to observe that this is mostly private lawyers in California rather than lawyers acting on behalf of a state regulatory agency, ie disabled people have a private right of action against businesses that decline to accommodate their disabilities.
This is what 'leaving it to the market' looks like. Now, some would say that the market should only involve decisions about where to spend your money or not, but every libertarian and market theorist I've ever talked to says that if someone is being unfairly excluded from the market they should sue for inclusion, so here we are. Now, it's true that for some businesses the costs involved in serving some customers (eg installing a ramp for wheelchairs) is likely to exceed the benefit of doing business with those customers which can hurt profitability. But given that people decided systematic exclusion was a sufficient ill to pass a law about it, either businesses make themselves reasonably accessible or a public agency does it and recoups the cost via tax.
Of course, it's often not so much the cost of the accommodation as the confrontational manner in which the issue is litigated. The culture of diametric opposition and winner-take-all outcomes that pervades our legal and political systems may be the biggest part of the problem.
But like, if society can produce an abundance of jobs that disabled people can actually do safely and happily, why not push them to take those jobs?
Nothing scary about that, though if we get good enough at building interfaces for robots like this, the scary part could be how everyone ends up working "remotely" and we find ourselves in a WALL-E like chair all day...
looking busy is important in Japanesd culture. Japanese salarymen sit all day at makework jobs that are essentially privatized welfare with lifetime commitment.
Gonna split the difference. What you describe is absolutely a thing, but there's a strong 'no work, no food' tradition in Zen Buddhism that is firmly rooted in the history of subsistence agriculture under moderately difficult weather conditions (only one growing season, tough winters).
If they get a contract, in most countries they'd just be remote workers with the same rights as any other worker. At many desk jobs, the employer can just lock your account and stop you from doing anything. Even a computer can do that these days. [0]
While yes, this could go to a distopic place, it also creates opportunity for disabled people. Let's say you get a job as a robot waiter where before you couldn't get that job. You then start to learn the restaurant industry and start helping out with process or management. And then you are qualified to become a restaurant manager, owner, franchisee, etc. For any restaurant.
> they can't take the robot and move to a different caffe
taking on the risk of owning an expensive bit of capital equipment that moves, requires maintenance and is put into use at an employer's facility doesn't sound like a fiscally sound idea for someone who has difficulties leaving their home.
> weapon against disabled people (why are you staying on benefits? go out and get a job for yourself, you lazy paraplegic!)
As the sibling comment indicates about the UK, there's no reason why the benefits system or politics thereof has to have any connection with the reality of what disabled people can and cannot do.
The UK system has been restructured around "prove you cannot", with the interpretation of "can do occasionally with extreme effort" as "can do for a 40 hour workweek with no assistance". Many of these absurd judgements are overturned on appeal, but the goal is to discourage as many people as possible not save money or minimise bureaucracy.
Most disabled people on benefits want to work but for obvious reasons cannot or are not given opportunities too. If it were easy for them to work they would be lazy for not doing it.
I guess special regulation is required. After all, there isn't a huge market for paralyzed people out there, thus the cost of opportunity of changing jobs is small anyway. I see your point though but disagree with the dystopian tag: if there is any chance to free mentally healthy but physically paralyzed people it is through robotics and technology.
For instance: the guy who takes the ticket at the theaters in my city (Phoenix) is often a DD person. I thought this was odd, until I made the connection that this is literally a partnership between that company an the charity I'm talking about.
Most punk kids will get bored at this job, be snarky, not want to do it, etc. But some people with certtain DDs actually really enjoy it. They get to talk to people, they feel useful instead of feeling like a burden, they get a paycheck, etc. And for the company (harkins theaters) they get a happy, competent employee that enjoys their job.
It's a win win. And it's a perfect example of embracing the concept of "differently abled" instead of disabled. Made me really happy to learn that.