The most labor-intensive and time consuming activities in the past were, in no particular order:<p>- Farming, raising animals, gathering food<p>- Food preparation and cooking (including e.g. grinding grain)<p>- Taking raw plant&#x2F;animal fibers and turning them into cloth<p>- Sewing new clothing and mending old clothing<p>- Chopping firewood and tending fires<p>- Making pottery (or similar containers from other materials)<p>- Carrying water home from a well &#x2F; river &#x2F; spring<p>- Raising (typically many) children<p>- Cleaning &#x2F; tidying<p>- Washing clothes<p>- Building homes, fences, furniture, etc.<p>- Transportation by walking&#x2F;horse&#x2F;carriage<p>(The reason peasant societies are poor is that these tasks take up more time than anyone can possibly stay on top of. There’s just always an unlimited amount of extra work to do, and the only folks with leisure time are those with plentiful servants to handle all the basic chores.)<p>Of those, we started with the low-hanging fruit, things that could be done at industrial scale in factories, and then added on-site appliances to handle the parts that couldn’t be centralized, steadily ticking items off until the overall amount of labor required to keep a basic household running is a tiny fraction of the labor required in an unindustrialized agrarian society.<p>At this point, there aren’t similar opportunities for new home appliances the way there were in 1850–1950. Sure we have 3D printers and floor cleaning robots and all kinds of computerized gizmos, but as for mass-market labor-savers, we just don’t spend nearly as much time on the kinds of machine-tractable labor-intense tasks that we used to.<p>Self-driving cars and trucks are one big one coming up.