If you look at those appliances, they all basically take one relatively narrow and labor-intensive household task and either automate it or reduce the amount of labor involved.<p>I&#x27;d argue that one area of invention that has continued is essentially outsourcing home tasks in areas like food prep rather than creating new appliances to do them in the house.<p>More broadly though, if you think about where time is now spent on housework, it&#x27;s a lot of generalized cleaning, straightening up, and putting things away that don&#x27;t lend themselves well to the types of simple, repeated tasks that machines are good at handling.<p>Arguably automated vacuuming is the closest thing which is handled to some degree--depending on the environment--with Roomba&#x27;s etc. But it&#x27;s hard to imagine the automation that takes clothes from a basket, washes and dries them, and then folds and hangs them even if one assumes that the workflow can be adjusted to better fit with automation.