The response from users (operators, engineers, customers) is overwhelmingly positive. Quality of parts increases, quantity of parts increases, cost of operations decrease, quality of life seems to increase for all involved. My mantra is "People are bad at being robots. Robots are bad at being people."
Just yesterday, I worked on a cell that's automated the placing of small seals in a plastic assembly. For the past 8 years, for 12 shifts per week, there's been a person sitting at a dial table that indexes every 2.5 seconds. They were responsible for placing a tiny part in a magazine with a buffer of about 20 parts, a really fast operator could work ahead and have 30 seconds to stand up and shake their wrists out or take a drink, and then sit back down to place parts. Now, a robot pours the seals out and picks them up automatically; there's still an operator around monitoring stuff like the amount of talc powder on the seals, the quantity of parts in all the hoppers, running pressure tests every couple thousand parts, adjusting speeds and pressures of the multitude of actuators, and generally optimizing the cell. They can use their human analytical and decision-making work because they're not tied down clumsily using their fingers to grab a seal every 2.5 seconds; the robot does that mechanical function without complaint. The robot cannot refill hoppers, it cannot sense when new parts are contaminated with moisture that won't feed through the machine, or when a nipper is getting dull; outfitting it with sensors and algorithms to attempt those more complex processes would not be a productive endeavor.
People use tools because tools are useful. Scope and adjustability are critical; when a tool takes over the entire process and gets in the way, that's a bad thing, but a good tool is far better than no tool at all.
In the context of automation, the "robotic revolution" has already happened between the 4 industrial revolutions - basically, robots exist en masse already, we just don't call them robots. The majority of manufacturing and processing is already hyper optimized to only needing a few overseers to make sure the machines are running smoothly.
When talking about the automation revolution, I think it's important to make the distinction between robotic tooling and autonomous robotic systems, even though they evolve from each other. The difference is when humans interface and at what abstraction humans can operate it on. Generally, tooling is constrained to an individual's output. Robotic augmentation is in it's own category as well (human activities being enhanced by machinery).
Tooling is extremely useful, still has a lot of future potential and I don't mean to undermine work on new tooling. Just - usually when we look at robots, especially with the buzz around deep learning, we set the bar for problem solving at the level of autonomous construction because we assume, sometimes incorrectly, that optimizing our current tooling yields little efficiency benefits relative to the former.
Doing the physical labor is difficult. My father was a bricklayer from ten to fifty, when he finally had to stop working. But he loved showing me the buildings he built. He helped build city government buildings, schools, libraries. The pride he felt, that he’d built something with his hands that would outlast him, kept him going.
We don’t need to solve just for the physical actions, but also for the human experience of building and the feeling of mastery. Particularly for physical trades.
Years later, I ended up getting a job as a 5-axis CNC operator in the same shop. My dad thought it'd be a suitable job for me because I was good with computers, so he introduced me to the foreman in the strait stairs side of the shop. I was only cutting stair stringers, so it was basically mind-numbing data entry on some crappy Visual Basic app and then running the CNC which frequently got hung and ruined materials. The spiral staircase end of the shop was also different than from what I remembered as a kid. They still had a couple of the old-school spiral staircases in production at any given time, but those were special order. How do they churn out mass produced spiral staircases for tasteless McMansions? They glue a bunch of chunks of wood together and use a CNC to route out the negative space. Of course the grain of the wood doesn't match up like spiral constructed from one plank. The product looks like dog shit. The CNC screws up a non-negligible percent of the time resulting in tons of wasted materials. I and all the CNC operators I talked to loathed the machines we operated. They were all crappy Chinese tech, and it felt like tedious babysitting, not craftsmanship. I'd rather be swinging a hammer than do that job again.
I wonder how the finances even come out ahead. Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? My dad is a curmudgeon about tech in general, but it's not hard to see why. He was a master craftsman, and because "the industry" was headed in another direction, he was eventually replaced by a bunch of button pushers that can produce a low-quality simulacrum the same thing at a fraction of the cost.
Yes, very much. That's how a lot of trends and styles move "down market." The new consumers want teh appearance of what they see as wealthy/elite/etc. But they frequently dont understand, appreciate, or recognise, what actually goes in to the goods they're trying to copy. You'll see this everywhere from houses to clothes.
Sure. Now put the build cost of the mcmansion of say $200k (plus land), vs your hand crafted mansion at $500k (plus land), and see what people really want.
In my country cookie cutter housing goes back over 100 years. The massive post-ww2 housing boom had the same design of houses springing up across the country, it allowed slum clearence and gave people cheap housing.
The main housing problem in the UK is the land cost/availability rather than construction cost thanks to every house not being bespoke. When land is allowed to be built on, half a dozen standard styles are dropped down on an estate of 500 new houses over a few years (dribbling out at the right level to maximise sale price and maintain the illusion of high demand low supply), but that was the same in the 00s, and the 80s, and even before then.
Now sure you can craft your own bespoke house with lovely hand-crafted artisinal features, but you're going to be paying a hell of a lot of money for it, and most people just want somewhere to live.
sure, except old houses sell for pretty high prices, implying there are plenty of people who want more than just a house.
I think there is a big difference between people without a house, who want to get on the lower rung of the housing ladder, and escape the poverty of renting (where rent costs more than mortgage payments, without any equity) versus those that have a house and want something better.
Cheap houses should be build (maybe even w/ government funding) to keep otherwise exploitative rentals competitive, but there should still be healthy competition & industry in higher quality housing.
No way you could automate that kind of ingenuity. So, props to your dad, and there are more people like him still doing this work today.
His negative presentation obscures an obvious fact: lower prices create the miracle of accessibility - people who could have never afforded the previous generation can now afford the new one, and in some cases their lives are changed for the better.
I know most of us here are snobs, but let's not forget that only the King of France would have had access to colorful non-itchy clothes back in the day, and now everyone can have them.
And regarding consumerism, it's not only consumerism. Washing machines and fridges and freezers and microwaves changed the way we lived. Especially washing machines and fridges made our lives much easier and better.
I like writing code, and I think a lot of other people do too. But it's not just that I like writing the code and want it to be as low-level and arcane as possible. Give me a language that lets me be more expressive and accomplish more and I'll be all the more happy to adopt this tool and incorporate it into my craft.
But, imagine The Business decides that coders writing code is just too expensive, so we've purchased an AI that dials into all the conference calls stakeholders have regarding a project, and subsequently it can generate all the code necessary to meet the requirements. Well, kind of. After sitting in on the meetings, it can instantly generate the code that would have taken a dev team a whole quarter, and then send it over to QA. The only catch is that code is spaghetti and the defect rate is really high. Still, The Business only needs 25% of the coders that it used to have. But their job is a little different now. They don't write code per se. They just QA and fix bugs. The code is horrible, there's no design or architecture to speak of, it's hard to debug, and fixing defects is mind-numbing. But, at the end of the day, the low quality product is still good enough to sell, everyone else in the industry is doing it too, and besides, the cost savings is too huge to ignore.
No one has to "write" code anymore. Did our lives get easier and better? What is the ultimate end of easiest and best? No one has to do a thing and minimally acceptable food shows up when we're hungry while we continually slurp down personalized, proceduraly generated sitcoms?
I doubt that. Here's a rough approximation: https://clockify.me/working-hours
But that also ignores quality of life (as a result of work) and general work conditions. Working in a mine for an hour (or a hunter stalking prey, or working in a field) is not the same as an hour sitting in an office.
> where suddenly humans will be freed from labor
If by labor you mean physically intensive work, we are already there, most people live sedentary working lifestyles. If you mean any type of work - perhaps not, but at the same time "The Devil finds work for idle hands" so I'm not sure it's desirable, humans need something to do, and bored teenagers often cause mayhem.
> humans are relegated to the mind-numbing task of babysitting a glitchy piece of tech
Not sure how overseeing a brick-laying robot is more/less mind-numbing than laying the bricks yourself.
> clearing a paper jam and hitting reset all day
exactly the case with self-checkout, and the job doesn't seem more/less boring to me than working a checkout. At least the self-checkout machines improve over time.
Better weapons will enable you to kill better/faster/harder. Tech improves the "can", not the "should" - you still need politics to reign in control.
I think people care more than ever how their house looks, and that is exactly why they buy "ugly McMansions".
I mean why else would you buy a McMansion, other than for the look. From a construction point, most aren't built to last. From an architecture point they aren't great "machines for living in". From an economic point they're neither frugal or a great investment.
Bottom line is the main reason people by a McMansion is because they care more than anything how their house look, and whether you or I like it they really want a house that looks like a McMansion.
Wondering how finances come out ahead is silly. Take for example take a CNC beamsaw. It does one thing cut straight lines. A person stands in front of it (or a robot but smaller shops it's a person) and puts a board on the machine. The machine grabs and executes a series of cuts. Then you take the parts it spits out rotate them feed them back in the machine to cut the other way. A person standing at a cabinet saw can do the same thing, faster even, with a nicer finish... for the first 10-20 cuts. The machine gives the same 95% quality cut every time in the same amount of time from cut 1 to cut 10,000.
When my shop first got one I by myself cut twice as much material in 1/5th of the time as it took 3 workers on cabinet table saws. And I actually had enough downtime while the machine was running to also put the parts through an edgebander to put a finished veneer edge on the cut parts at the same time.
The 3 CNC machines I run now don't screw up often and waste time or material. Even when there is a problem it's actually often due to user error. I just had to spend some time fixing our 5-axis machine because the operator accidentally left some loose material in it which a sensor on the machine detected to prevent the machine being damaged. The emergency stop it triggered ruined the part and the machine stopped so fast that the machine racked and I needed to re-calibrate it. But that is fairly unusual. Maybe instead of crappy tech they should have bought quality machines? Or maybe the machines were fine and someone should have invested in software instead of a crappy vb script? Or maybe the operators just needed more training?
A master craftsman can use a machine to create the same quality of work in less time if that is the goal. You can steam bend a board and then 5-axis machine it to create a very complicated edge detail that would be tedious to do by hand. Or you can glue blocks up with different grain directions and materials so the completed railing has an interesting design that would be impossible to create otherwise. Or even spend some more effort gluing up those blocks to make a better grain match.
The reason they are gluing up blocks and machining them is because it is cheaper and faster for an okay quality. Almost no one buying the "McMansion" staircase was going to buy your bespoke custom master craftsman spiral staircase. I work in a shop that makes all custom-built to order furniture. Sometimes potential clients call and have sticker shock when they hear the price or sometimes they need to furniture sooner than we can build something custom. They just go and buy something they can live with from a larger company that mass produces a furniture line where they will have inventory.
I don't see an issue with making something affordable for people who want it. I'm not even sure anything is lost, there are still people who will want the high quality product and someone will be there to supply that.
There is whole world between button pusher and master craftsman. Master craftsmen that embrace the technology can expand what is possible. And a button pusher cannot exist unless there is a master craftsmen to do the setup work.
I want try my hand at some furniture building in the future but just don't have the space or some of the standard tools for it now.
We had a customer with a reception desk that had solid wood 5-piece raised panels in it. One of the panels cracked, so we sent them a new one under warranty and over 3-4 years it cracked more times. We finally sent someone to try to figure out the issue.
It was winter and the building was unusually warm and humid. The desk was positioned in front of the front door in a way that whenever it was opened the panel would get hit with an large blast of dry cold air. After convincing them to replace it with a more stable plywood raised panel simulacrum we haven't heard of an issue since.
But yes vacuum clamping is still annoying. There are of course strategies like onion skinning, leaving tabs. On nesting machines I often cover the table with laminate if I'm running small parts and need to prevent vacuum loss through the spoil board.
Most people that I talk to that brought CNC into a shop haven't seem to have laid anyone off but instead seem to be able to retrain people and grow sales because of the new capacity it brought.
Although if there are people who are actually button pushers and legitimately bring nothing else to the table I think their time is limited. I wish I could find the video but last year our CNC vendor sent me a video of a concept manufacturing cell using an autonomous guided vehicle. It blew my mind. There was no operators or conveyors just robots cutting a whole lot of different sized parts of of different material at the same time. The parts got stacked on a pallets which the AGV drove around to the different operations. They were even showing off handling non rectangular parts with no problem.
Probably not that expensive either I was thinking maybe $2 million based on the prices of machines I knew and... wildly guessing at the price of the robotics. Expensive but imagine 15 more years?
Sorry it's really hard to get a sense of the difference you're describing and I'm really interested to see what it looks like.
Edit: sorry that was unreasonably snarky. I know you're looking for pictures. The CNC-milled kind that I am talking about are easy to find. Google image search 'curved handrail cnc.' I'm actually having a hard time finding pictures of classic steam-bent curved handrails amongst tons of content marketing from bendywood and contractors. If you happen to tour an antique house with curved, wooden handrails, study the way they look. it's usually one long beam, maybe with carved, ornamental caps at the end. I don't really know when the change took place, but if you look at any house built at least since the nineties, the handrail (if not painted) will look like a bunch of disjoint blocks stuck together.
Hmm, I wonder if you can feel the difference when you rub your hand over it if it's just polished, probably not if painted. So perhaps people who want polished wood for their staircase might go for the older style even if it's more expensive?
Yea, flubbed on the screenshots bit, was just thinking images of stairs and as I expected them to come from your computer my brain clearly went to screenshots instead of pictures =)...
Carving the undercut by hand is pretty time consuming (i.e. unprofitable). But I have access to a CNC router. I laid out a template in FreeCad, and cut it out. Using template bushings and an edge fluting bit with the bearing boss ground off, I can cut the pulls with the undercut in a couple minutes each. And they come out more regular than doing them by hand.
I'll admit that I'm not much of a carver, but I don't think I could get the time per pull down anywhere near that while maintaining the same consistency even with a lot of practice.
I wonder if we can generalise the lost quality and attribute it to a lack of case by case application human ingenuity and experience that an experienced craftsman brings to the trade.
Or may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the financial gain it brings. There is no free lunch, and somethings got to give to make gains elsewhere. And it is inevitable that when one of those two things is extreamly measurable (finance) and the other extremely un-measurable (aesthetics), the measurable thing always ultimately wins.
That's an element, but another big element is specialist-subject education.
If you are an old-money guy, you can spend your life figuring out the best attributes of everything around you, and pursuing excellence in what you own. Your parents and grandparents can educate you in what a great staircase looks like, and you can spend weeks going from shop to shop until you find the right thing, or hire a carpenter to make it for however long it takes to be "just so".
If you are somebody who's just made their money, and maybe are still neck-deep into the rat race, you don't know anything about staircases and you have no time, nor contacts, to educate yourself on what it should look like. Developer shows you the staircase, it looks alright, sold.
More and more people are chained to their day job for longer and longer. More and more people are coming up in the world and buying stuff they don't know anything about, enriching companies targeting the mass-market more than specialist ones. This is nothing new: in the XX century we've seen this happening for anything from clothes to cutlery. In a way, it's a good thing: objects become more and more efficient and functional, eschewing aesthetic values that are somewhat irrational and often just classist. It's true, though, that we lose a cultural element.
What worries me more is the receding availability of _quality work to be done_. If you've ever worked with tools and materials, I mean physical ones, you know. It's among the most satisfying experiences in the world to feel the sensation of being good at (and becoming better at) something through practice. To be able to select the materials you use and discern their quality. To feel a familiar and trusted tool manipulating the materials to produce something. Those things are innately pleasurable.
McJob robot babysitters that only intercede when the machine screws up, overseeing the production of low-but-acceptable-quality products at a predictable pace is, in my mind, a dystopia. Getting a Bricklayerbot 2000 unstuck a few times per hour is not the kind of skill I can imagine being pleasurable to hone. There's a very low ceiling on the craftsmanship there.
There will always be people who take great pride in their work and enjoy doing the best job they can with the tools & materials they have. But they will always be a small minority.
Why? At the end of the day there'll be two companies offering to build your wall. Human vs Tech-assisted Human (and eventually, robot). If one is faster, more accurate and cheaper, the buyer will choose it. The other will go out of business.
It's not about masons embracing this, it's about clients embracing superior outcomes (quality, price and/or time). Eventually the few masons that make the switch to superior outcomes will push the others out of the market.
That is of course assuming tech-assisted/robot will actually be better. At the moment it's not in the vast majority of cases. But granting that assumption, I don't think 'satisfying the human experience of a mason' will go into the equation for long.
That's not a value judgement, I think building good human experiences is important. I just don't think in the decision making process it'll matter due to inevitable competition.
And I bet there are plenty of folks that would rather babysit this machine than babysit the machine at the fast food place.
The cool thing about bricks and rock is that those walls will probably be there 100 years from now.
This is like complaining that cars did away with the pleasures of horsemanship, or how laser printers have destroyed the pride engravers derived from their work.
The history of technology is full of taking hard tasks that people took years to master and therefore derived status and self respect from, and replacing them with machines. People cope.
We generally do not structure our economic activity for maximum enjoyment on the part of the worker, but for lowest price and best quality to the consumer. To the extent that this translates into catering to the worker, it's by way of the increased efficiency allowing higher wages (though, as recent US experience shows, companies can also grab all the productivity gains for themselves).
I think I understand your overall point, but what you said isn't exactly true. Isn't "speed up a repeatable process" essentially a partial robotic system?
Just look at a modern car manufacturing plant - it's essentially one big chain of robotics with human overseers. There aren't that many exceptions to car manufacturing once the set car variants are establish (LX, CX, blah blah model variants). I would consider that whole system a "partial robotic system".
Not that you cannot automate whole houses and sell them off the shelve for cheap (see prefabs), it just isn't something that could be done at a site where your brickbot 2000 has to share the job both with the workers whose jobs it replaces and with people from non-brickbot-2000-educated workers from different companies.
But aren't many of them? May be country specific, but in the one I currently reside there are tons of neighbourhoods that were built at once, 1000 homes+. In the US I've seen areas like that too. I can easily imagine a robot puts down the basics, and the individual tweaking is done later by hand.
In car manufacturing robots are used to bolt and weld together stamped metal panels, this feels more like someone designing a robot which would be given a flat sheet of metal and using hammer and dollies forming the complete panel to be attached to the car.
In short, if we ever see a major change to automate housing construction I expect it will also come along with significant changes in construction methods.
It's the difference between trying to take the factory to the site and just taking the parts to the site.
Also, as far as I understand, 3D-printing concrete does not give you any way to construct larger buildings, where you need pretensioned and reinforced parts...
Couldn't you just build a tent-like scaffolding for this purpose? Maybe one that can be extended as the internal build progresses?
It is simpler to just put the house there quickly.
Construction is one of those things where the process is much less regular and perfectly-repetitive than outcomes would suggest.
Eventually you end up with a dense city when you need to upgrade or replace a building in a constrained environment (think NYC or London or Tokyo), you have very different limitations and technology.
Robots exist en masse already, we just don't call them robots, we call them washing machines and dishwashers and factory lines. There's a blurred line in between machines that do stuff and robots.
In discussing the automation revolution, I like to think the difference is robots functioning autonomously (sorry dishwasher, you're not included). While there is still a lot left to do in speeding up repeatable processes, building robots that can run themselves with higher abstract operational input ("build a brick wall") is where the revolution is at.
Robotic tooling plays a huge role in this, unsurprisingly - robots need to do everything humans can do. But... we mostly build human interfaces, not robot interfaces - switches instead of electrical signals, handles instead of joints, etc.
This is for good reason; mass produced robots can't do basic movement, precise placement, etc. (well, not at cost). So robots are extremely limited to being bolted in factories or otherwise constrained environments. But when robots can start to do generalized tasks, I'd be interested in seeing exactly what kinds of autonomous stuff robots will start to do.
We automated looking after the house after it's been built, no need for people scrubbing floors and clothes any more, freed up 40% of the workforce.
My partially automated vacuum cleaner, clothes washer, dish washer, food cooker, water heater, all work well.
And that's why the exoskeleton system mentioned in passing in the article is more popular with construction labourers than any of these robots.
Add in GPS, keep all the data and later sell the database to insurance companies so they can charge higher rates for construction that happened too fast.
Also just want to add that working in a physical job for 50 years is much better for your body than sitting at a desk for 50 years.
The experience of my neighbors from an industrial city is 100 per cent opposite. Physical jobs tend to consist of endless repetitive tasks that put a huge strain on certain joints and sinews while leaving other parts of your body idle. And many physical jobs will expose you to health risks such as breathing dust.
All the miners, steel workers, construction workers etc. I knew had major problems with their joints around 35 years of age and none of them could continue to work in their original job after 50.
On the other hand, negative effects of sedentary work can be mostly compensated by not eating processed crap (to prevent obesity) and exercising moderately three or four times a week. Plenty of people do that.
I think you’re envisioning jobs with high skill requirements or low demand, or a mix of both. Like landscaper for the town, or garbage truck operator.
Otherwise you’ll generally be met with a combination of RSI, hazardous product ingestion (dust, paint fumes, exhaust…), allergies, injuries, or sheer overwork.
Working a low wage low level physical job is more often than not closer to Amazon warehouse worker than artisans healthily exercising their bodies.
Most office jobs don't involve that much typing. You can also buy keyboards with softer switches. (RSI was more common in the days of mechanical typewriters.) Low physical acitivity can be made up for going to the gym after work.
It sounds to me you never did a day of manual labor in your life.
My point, was that both physical/labor intensive jobs and office jobs bring their own types of workplace related problems. And just because the job may carry with it a risk of physical injury doesn't mean the job should be automated. Afterall, any type of movement the body does carries with it a risk of injury.
While your point is true that every profession has an injury risk, it's the type of comment that misses the point: there is a significant difference in those stats, and by trying to equate them, you are purposely watering down the significance of one where injuries are more prevalent (or at least harder).
It's a response similar in style to deflecting from attempts to solve one crisis by introducing another crisis.
This is a pipe dream of white collar who never did any actual, real, physical job for a very prolonged time. It's not like going to the gym for free or doing just the right amount of sport. It's something that stresses your joints and your muscles day in day out. Obviously you will partly get used to it and be "more fit" than a white collar but you will also develop back pain and joints pain.
Not for my carpet-fitting granddad. And it's not like he has a private pension. Desk job damage can mostly be undone by proper exercise: it takes surgery to fix knees.
Standing all day is also worse for your back than sitting all day. Even being a shop assistant is harder on your body, and particularly your back, than sitting at a desk. (Alternating, i.e. an office job with a sit/stand desk, is best.)
The primary issue is complete lack of inactivity (a large component just being weight gain), which you can combat by exercising outside of the office.
I get that everyone is going to say, "well then, UBI" but bear in mind in an automated society, power is disproportionately in the hands of the people who own the machines, and they're unlikely to part with their wealth voluntarily.
And did that actually improve everyone's quality of life? Or did it just increase the cost of positional goods (check out house prices in the West)?
Isn't the point that house prices are high because they've not been automated? And also that people expect to buy a house using a massive loan over decades.
Although from the videos it looks like the brick walls don't actually hold anything up half the time, so might as well replace them with brick patterned wallpaper
>Although from the videos it looks like the brick walls don't actually hold anything up half the time, so might as well replace them with brick patterned wallpaper
Idea: Assemble the wall paper on the ground with a machine and install it in one go.
Which is still automation.
Robots in factories making cars still leave most of the "decision making part of the job for humans".
See, the size of the "decision making part of the job" matters...
It's still automation (which, as a concept, doesn't require being able to do multiple jobs, or even to do a single job from start to completion).
A mechanical system that frees a human from having to do do part of a job is already automation, and can still save tons of time and worker costs/effort. E.g. a system that automatically assembles 95% of a car door, and a human just has to come in at the end and attach some hard to automate part, is still better than the human having to assemble to whole door.
You are wayyy underselling the importance of convenience tools. Even without working out edge cases you can reduce a workforce of 100 people to 95 robots and 5 supervisors/decision makers.
Sounds to me like this criticism could have been made of the dishwasher and washing machine, too. I suppose what matters is the ratio of edge cases to regular cases.
And yet, you can make billions of dollars on it.
This is literally the modus operandi of modern tech companies like Google and Amazon. Automate the main workflow, silently ignore exceptions, and if anyone complains about problems (or your non-existent customer support), just wave your hands in the air and mumble something about "scale being hard".
The problem must be somewhere else: setup time is too long, too many constrains or whatever. It's not that the edge cases are not handled, it's that the main case is not handled well...
How often does that actually come up in modern construction? We don't really do brick buildings anymore. Bricks are generally only a façade, a decoration, rather than the structure of a building. They have to look great because that is now their job. They have to fit between other decorative features and adapt to curves and non-perfect angles. Previous edge cases are now a daily norm.
I say that the robot brick machine is already common. Those trucks that pump concrete into forms are the automated brick layers. This is an important point for all robotics. It is always very hard to build a robot that can directly replace a human. The way forward is to build a robot that gets the job done using different means. The human "dishwasher" was replaced by a machine that does the same basic task but via very different means. The concrete pumping robot now creates solid walls faster than any team could ever lay bricks.
I picture a lot of automated solutions focusing on the "in the field" part where the work is easy and rewarding, and glossing over the manual intervention and craftsmanship that is needed for all the nonstandard bits. I don't know about bricklaying though I imagine it has similar characteristics, where a square windowless wall goes very fast, and could be pleasant work, and all the time is spent dealing with windows and the frame not being level and other edge cases.
> You're not reducing labor costs by much
You could make the same argument wrt supermarket self checkout. They still need a worker to manage the machines. Yet you need fewer human workers overall, so productivity still increases per-worker at the right scale. Allow the tech to develop and they may become more viable.
arguing "you still need humans" seems to me to be a straw-man; there no rule that this is useless so long as humans are still involved - if productivity increases, that's enough.
> you're building a convenience tool
Which seems fine to me. Removing the majority of the "labour" part of the job removes the most unskilled part that humans are least appropriate for (repetitive uncreative/boring work) and freeing them up for the "hard/creative decisions" aspect that humans are better at.
> largely unpopular
> workers lose control over their job
This might be unpopular among workers; not sure, other worker might prefer it. At least, if this requires fewer workers to lay brick, either the demand is such that it can still meet worker supply, or workers suffer (from lower wages or unemployment).
But this is irrelevant - barring union influence, it's not the workers that get to decide. If the job is to "babysit machines" you either refuse the job, or you don't - so long as people take the job, they will grow.
There is still a bunch of work in construction that can happen while brick laying happens (plumbing and electrical installations in the floor, pillars to carry roof/next floor, ...) and there is usually a mandated licensed professional to oversee the construction (or few, one for safety, one for quality and ensuring the project is actually followed).
And you can also start doing things as parts of walls get completed (installing windows, insulation, more electrical installations). After the building is put under a roof, that's when the real work begins :), though that's even easier to parallelize.
Brick laying is literally one of the quickest parts and most effective parts of making a building look like a building, but it's nowhere near the most costly thing.
FWIW, the slower concrete dries, the stronger it gets. To the point where critical concrete buildings like bridges are kept moist for days or even weeks with hoses and wet blankets.
The dog for instance might be able to drag a load, but would probably need help refilling it.
That seems really stupid to think that the robot must be able to build the whole thing or it's useless.
Just have robots put up large, long, straight walls. Have a separate one for curves, or a special one that only handles corners etc...
Or have a robot that just preps the brick with correct amount mortar and hands the brick to the human for placement, maybe there is an aligning contraption (doesn't have to be a robot)...
In our interactions with robots, I feel the future valuable work will come from work where humans have the agency and direction, while robot’s functions have been specifically tailored to augment the specific human’s skills or relieve the human of certain repetitive parts of the process.
The first part describes programming perfectly.
Creating new designs millions of times over seems like an obvious inefficiency.
However, plots and legal requirements differ significantly that in urban environments, it's hard to make the most of the plot without going custom (requirement to be that far away from the neighbour and the street, whether you can have windows facing that side or not, what kind of foundation is required by the terrain, etc).
https://www.rdrymarov.cz/en/all-about-building
I do not know the percentage of the housing stock either, but housing stock here is very conservative. Many people still live in 100+ year old houses. New houses are being built, but the turnover rate is probably less than 1 per cent of all units a year right now, due to the vast bureaucracy.
But among the newly built houses, I see quite a lot of prefabricated houses out of wood. And the process of building them is rather quick. Once the lot is ready, a semi and a crane arrive and the house just grows in front of your eyes. Brick houses take a lot longer to build.
(following sites are in Hungarian)
https://kulcsrakesz.hu/tipushazak/
Kind of like open source design of a house.
However there also exists a state level catalog of free (open source) templates as well:
The key part is that, much like what humanity got from washing machines, automating some parts of the process is enough to have substantial savings in both cost and turnaround time, which also reflects in cost.
> If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the decision making part of the job for humans.
I'm not sure this "all or nothing" train of thought makes sense. Shipping containers were a terribly simple solution that covered only a very specific aspect of a logistic chain but it was enough to revolutionize international trade. Washing machines only focus on one specific task but they revolutionize economical and even social aspects of society. Heck, a crane only lifts weights up or down but it radically simplifies operations to the point of being indispensable.
Why should the value added by a brick-laying robot be any different?
If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the decision making part of the job for humans.
This is both economically unviable and largely unpopular. You're not reducing labor costs by much, because you still need humans around. And workers lose control over their job, and have to "work around" the robot's limitations. Instead of being freed up to do more work, they become babysitters of machines that they have to oversee so it doesn't mess up everything.
This is why partial robotic systems don't really exist; either it's a nifty tool that speeds up a small repeatable process of your work, or it's building the entire house.