Every time you turn on a light bulb, you take away a job from a human who could be standing next to you holding a lit candle. Traitor!

You have presented a false dilemma. In other words, they don't actually have to choose and nothing prevents them from eventually doing both. In addition, your idea that it is more efficient to do it the way they are now than they way you have imagined is presumption not fact. Maybe the way you are imagining it is more efficient still than their new, improved version.

I can imagine some workers zipping around on Segways to get special or large products. Maybe they just didn't think of it or haven't yet solved the coordination problems of having two different moving subsystems. Or perhaps they just assumed workers walking around is the most efficient solution.

Amazon.com didn't build these robots anyway, they just bought out the company that builds them (Kiva Systems). Maybe you should get to work building a company that makes smart, self-driving Segways, then Amazon.com can buy you...

Ok, I admit it was lame. But according to the Wikipedia article, Uranus beat out the previous name, given after George III. The planet would have been called Georgium Sidus. Yech... how exactly is that a great name for a planet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Elert_Bode

If their project is successful, it may address those concerns. From the article:

They seem to be aiming at a whole new level of flexible, adaptable robot with custom, 3d printed appendages and large amounts of in-built behavior that can be quickly adapted to the task at hand then repurposed for some other task later. This is very technically impressive to me and seems like a potentially dramatic reduction of overhead costs and difficulty.

That doesn't work for every planet. Clearly, your head is stuck in Uranus.

Ok, but can we at least bake the shit into some brownies first?

It can be non-obvious. Both Newton and Leibnitz developed calculus around the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculus_controversy). More recently, Diffie-Hellman key exchange was independently but secretly developed by Ellis, Cocks and Williamson around the same time, but secretly because they were working for British intelligence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange). Do you think those things are obvious?

Source: http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/sanctions

So why do they use sanctions? To take tangible action that demonstrates the seriousness of their commitment without actually going to war. Sanctions are generally used to further moral causes, I think, where you want some person or nation to improve their behavior but it doesn't make sense to kill a bunch of people to force them to do it.

Sanctions are also costly to the countries imposing the sanction, which further demonstrates their seriousness.

Maybe they'll pool these sorts of experiences together and go into the robotics business. I agree with you though that this isn't exactly in agreement with their mission statement to organize the world's information and make it available. But if you think about it, their mission statement is a passive, desktop-oriented vision of the IT world. Maybe it's their mission statement that actually needs to change to fit their actions. The future probably belongs to robots, not computers on desktops.

Yet if you look in the past, the bottom 90% of today live as well as the top 10% did from 100 years ago. In the future, many of us will enjoy the same living standards as the top 1% do today. If you look at in in absolute rather than relative terms, that's progress. Just think of all the kings, popes, and presidents from centuries past that had to make do without penicillin or indoor plumbing.

Trying consuming experiences rather than things. I always ask for a vacation with the family for Christmas. It's fun, and it's always something different! :-)

Remember the Hostess bankruptcy? Sales of Twikies kept going down, and they said the reason was because "customers have migrated to healthier foods." Which supports your claim about people wanting to live better and feel better.

America wants to throw money and technology at every known problem in order to solve it. We're a bit like the ancient Greeks and their dislike of manual labor that prevented their further intellectual and practical advance. They thought that manual labor was the duty of slaves, and did not want to get their aristocratic hands dirty. So I think your advice, as fine as it is, will fall on deaf ears.

That's a great quote from Helen Keller, and I enjoyed your signature quote from Blade Runner as well. Did you know that the form of that quote was actually improvised by the actor, Rutger Hauer? It's true... see the Wikipedia article for the usual hows and whys.

In the video, they mentioned that the target audience was hotels or high end apartments. In a hotel, this actually makes sense. The business traveler can use it to catch up with the market or the news, and the leisure traveler can catch the weather while someone else is watching TV. There probably won't be steam issues since mirrors in hotels are often not actually in the bathroom. The device is probably a good selling point for the room as well, because it gives it a sense of high tech and luxury, which would attract a well-heeled geek crowd. Furthermore, I think this device is just one of a wave of future similar devices where cheap electronics are integrated with every other piece of consumer furniture, toy, or clothing, which in many cases will be quite useful. I would use it just for the novelty.