Also, construction appears to heavily involve manual labour. I am prepared to be wrong, but are there robots on construction sites yet or are humans still manually stacking brick walls?
thou ime construction has moved to prefabricated elements (import wall from factory) in order to cope with less skilled workers and higher labor costs while retaining some margin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IQB5S1N5I (2019 - 4 years ago)
Mind you we (Uni of West Australia) built a sheep shearing robot back in 1980 and use robot trucks | trains | excavators to mine ~ 800 million tonnes of iron ore per year.
My guess is that any tech like this coming out now is at the far right end of an S curve and the real gains are to be made politically and socially, though i doubt it's a regulation issue like the quote.
*turns out its australians.
I would like a boreout job.
Being imprisoned 40h/week with literally nothing to do and - depending on your work culture - being forbidden to do anything unrelated to work is by far one of the worst things for your mental health.
It's actually a known tactic to force workers to quit.
whoever came up with that idea ...
srsly thou, while this scenario certainly can be soul crushing, i think that this is not the case for everyone or even most.
The crisis was there before that. I've seen many people do nothing work related for hours on end. It's a lot easier to hide it with instant messengers and browsers.
And finally, apparently one of the reasons construction has seen no net productivity gains is because regulations have grown more complex and expensive. I bet that's true of many industries...