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.
