Robots in Everything: Innovation or Complacency?

This story in today's New York Times about robotically-folding laundry brings to mind Tyler Cowen's current (and very provocative) book, The Complacent Class. Cowen's thesis is that innovation in America has gone stale, that as a society, we are more concerned with avoiding risk than pushing at the boundaries. In Cowen's telling, most of our "innovations" of late are really just incremental improvements on previous designs, rather than truly transformative technologies. Laundry-folding, regardless of how much one dislikes it, would have to be cut from this same cloth in terms of a use for robotics.Just a side note: Cowen and Matthew Yglesias are two of the bloggers on economic issues that I follow. Some would place Cowen on the right (by a bit) while others see him on the left, and Yglesias is firmly on the left, but Cowen's own summation in a 2014 blog post of his political philosophy is strikingly in accord with mine:

"Just to summarize, I generally favor much more immigration but not open borders, I am a liberal on most but not all social issues, and I am market-oriented on economic issues. On most current foreign policy issues I am genuinely agnostic as to what exactly we should do but skeptical that we are doing the right thing at the moment. I don’t like voting for either party or for third parties."

Coincidentally, this comic (mentioning laundry-folding) ran today in U.S. newspapers: http://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2017/05/24.