Where are the robotic bricklayers? | Hacker News Reader

Where are the robotic bricklayers?

constructionphysics.substack.com

452 pointsbookofjoe543 comments

The value of work is not in the work done; it's in the decisions being made. It's the ability to handle edge cases, to work your way through ambiguity, to "unstuck" a stuck situation, and to resolve tricky unforeseen issues.

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.

What you're saying resonates for so many new products. I find that most time or labor saving ideas save time on something that is not actually the problem, or address a charicature of the actual workflow. I dont think it means we should give up and stop trying, rather that its critical to test with real users IMO before trying to sign deals on a product that doesn't make sense.

And sometimes the things that are automated were the only thing that was pleasant. It's not true for laying bricks because the heavy lifting makes it unpleasant.

I have never laid brick but I've done a lot of shingled roofs. The "fun" part of shingling is long stretches of full sheets in the middle of the roof. This goes quickly and is rewarding. The less fun, and what occupies the time, is where there is a chimney or a valley or a dormer or some other feature that you need to figure out and cut some flashing for, and custom fit each shingle that butts up against the feature, seal with tar sometimes, etc.

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.

Not just test! Real users need to be there from the requirements stage.

Yes agreed, sorry I was thinking in terms of a new product, testing the value prop with users, which is probably better stated as requirements gathering.

Not destroying your body lifting heavy weights for 50 years seems like something people might like.

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.

>Not destroying your body lifting heavy weights for 50 years seems like something people might like.

And that's why the exoskeleton system mentioned in passing in the article is more popular with construction labourers than any of these robots.

Better tools amplify human skills instead of attempting to replace them.

This always has seemed like a good goal to have. There is some work where automation makes sense, but I don't think replacing is always the right goal. https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-...

It does sound like a mason that can lift 5 bricks at a time is more productive than a machine that can lay bricks 5 times faster in a synthetic benchmark.

Think I'd put money behind a separate machine, but one that just delivers you the brick at hand height, rather than a continual bend-down/place/pick-up cycle. I would say "Brick Butler" or if a startup... Brcklr, the device is free, but the bricks have DRM and post instagram stories as you lay them.

Yeah, that seems like the best plan. It might not improve the speed of bricklaying, but it would certainly be an improvement on the bricklayers' quality of life.

Nice, also build a management interface so they can see the workers brick per hour stats.

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.

Most construction relies on fit young men to do the "heavy lifting". It would be interesting to see how the dynamics changesd if technology moved the needle on the brawn->brain scale, so that the core value prop of a construction worker was not their fitness. I'm not convinced it would be for the better.

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.

> physical job for 50 years

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.

I just want to iterate that working an office job also carries with it its own health problems. Low physical activity from sitting all day, forward posture from sitting all day, RSI from typing and mouse movement, eye problems, overwork (Arguably more than labor jobs).

As someone that has worked digging ditches and carrying shingles up a ladder all day. I respectfully disagree. They are not remotely comparabe.

One doesn't exclude the other. All types of work-induced health problems are possible.

Exactly

> RSI from typing

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.

Well not to discredit your point but a day in the life off wouldn't really bring to life any of the points we're discussing when it comes to physical injuries. Without you picking at each of my points in detail, RSI is still an injury people STILL DO get nonetheless. In the same way that the introduction of the hard hat hasn't completely stopped people having their head caved in.

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.

IMHO, anything that not enough people can find interesting and engaging should be automated — injury risk is also a great reason to automate something. Of course, there is a cost involved, so we shouldn't expect any of it to happen overnight.

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.

All of those are super low risk compared to having your hand chopped off by something or a ton of bricks falling on your head.

In addition, office workers have the option of engaging in exercise during their off time to compensate for the sedentary aspect of desk work.

Yep and in optimal amounts, which is surprisingly little.

>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.

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.

"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.

Office work is also less deadly than physical work. Just look up the numbers. Hard to fall off the office chair to your death, not so hard to fall off the scaffolding to your death.

> 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.

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.

This is completely untrue. Contrary to popular belief, sitting at a desk is extremely healthy in comparison to manual labour, which destroys your body over time.

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.

> freed up 40% of the workforce.

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)?

It improved the quality of life of people who didn't have to spend all day washing floors.

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

House prices are high because land prices are high. There are some cities where permitting is a nightmare and the "brainy" people displaced the "brawny" people but those are the exception.

>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.

People already have the option to not lay bricks. They don't choose it, because they need money.

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.

> 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.

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.

I’d add to the list of why partial automation isn’t worth it: it’s more satisfying to build a brick wall than babysit a bricklaying machine.

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.

Reading about your father having such a long career in brick masonry sparked joy in me. Thanks for sharing

My dad was a stair builder his whole career until finally becoming a freelance carpenter after getting laid off. Stairs, like bricks, are probably another implement that us techies use daily with absolutely no appreciation for complexity and skill involved. Spiral staircases are an incredible work of craftsmanship, or at least they were. I used to go to the shop with my dad when I was a kid. They would rig up these big timber structures to wrap handrails and stringers around to form the spiral. He worked out the geometry on paper (or more likely on the timber itself) writing with flat pencils that he sharpened with his pocket knife. You couldn't just mass produce the handrails either. It took time, pinned to the template, for the wood to become permanently warped into a spiral.

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.

Loved reading this post!

Nice story. Tech is not always an improvement. In fact, the more years I live, the less enamored with tech I’ve become due to many examples like this.

Couldn't agree more. The smartphone enabled a few very unique scenarios, like car sharing, and made everything else worse. It didn't use to be the case that you had to enter a PIN code, resist distraction from half a dozen notifications and hope you had got the power management right the night before when you wanted to read the morning news, but now that's the norm, just to give one example.

I don't have notifications, my phone has a fingerprint reader, and I get the news from the radio which turns on at 7am anyway. It might be the norm for you, but it doesn't have to be. Turn off your phone and charge it in the kitchen.

Same. I used to be absolutely starry eyed about the endless possibilities of digital tech. Now anytime I see computers getting involved where they previously were not, it's just a cost savings measure resulting in a severely inferior product that is just above the threshold of being unsellable. An example that comes to mind is information and entertainment itself. Humans used to curate content for us to consume, but more and more we're being entertained by machine-curated feeds with low quality content. The endless stream-of-conscious format of infiniscrolls and recommendations and 'related' or 'relevant' content is vastly inferior to carefully human-curated hierarchies of information.

This is a different kind of innovation. The issue is not every improvement will be to the consumer.

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.

Tech is not always an improvement, but not due to the reason described in the comment above.

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.

It may not spotlight the fact that lower prices facilitate accessibility, but I'm not oblivious to it. I definitely don't want to exchange cheap cotton knit t-shirts with hand-woven garments that cost me a month's labor or something. However, only considering the consumer-side satisfaction is characteristic of our culture's obsession with consumerism and economy at the cost of everything else. We all have to work, even with ever increasing tech we work probably more than anytime in history. I don't believe we're going to hit some inflection point where suddenly humans will be freed from labor. There is satisfaction to be found in craft and honing skill. If we delegate all that to machines that spit out crummy imitations, and humans are relegated to the mind-numbing task of babysitting a glitchy piece of tech, clearing a paper jam and hitting reset all day, I think that is a net loss for life satisfaction. Who cares if you can own a shitty McMansion when what you experience during majority of your wakeful life is mind-numbing frustration?

At a higher price you can still find craftsmanship. But now, as always, you have to afford it.

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'm also not a Luddite, so if it seems I'm making a vast anti-tech argument, I'm truly not. It's easy to get drawn into a futurism vs tradition argument, but I don't want to take either side in that debate. I love tools and I love inventions that amplify a human being's power and effectiveness. But there are tools that are miserable to use, produce horrible results, but are just enough to be acceptable and offer The Business enormous cost savings (or sometimes just the illusion of it). I don't have the energy to try and write a manifesto right now for which tools fall into either camp, but maybe some day.

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?

> we work probably more than anytime in history

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.

Cheaper stuff that lasts 1/10th as long is not necessarily a better deal. Just had a 2 year old Samsung tv lose an lcd strip yesterday for example.

> They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible?

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.

Sadly this is a global phenomenon. The same thing can be seen in, for example, movie/music industry as well. And we have to assume that the same holds in other fields as well..

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.

> may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the financial gain it brings.

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.

I'd love to see a study done on this. What you you wrote made me think of Phaedrus slowly losing his mind trying to define quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Quality goods are still available, even if they are buried in the marketplace of cheap disposable goods and hard to find amongst all the noise of advertising and sponsored content.

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.

Yeah, but for every craftsman, there's 10 people who just want a job that can make them a good living. That's really just how the world is.

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.

Could you link to some screenshots?

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.

Screenshots of woodwork?

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.

Ahh, so one continuous block of wood following the grain vs sliced together chunks that will bring to mind Frankenstein's monster.

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 =)...

> 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?

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.

> 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.

There are, on the other hand, ways to combine the old and the new harmoniously. I'm building a cabinet on stand, and because there are drawers behind a door, the pulls need to be inset.

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 just ordered two all-wood staircases to replace the steel spiral monstrosity that was built into the house where I live from the beginning. It was unsafe, unstable and way too steep so they really had to go. But the stairwell is a weird shape, there is partial overlap with the front door and the direction of turn had to be reversed. Enter the master carpenter who spent a 1/2 hour to measure up the stairwell and who then proceeded to create two new complete stairs that fit to the millimeter and solved all of the weird problems in one fell swoop. It wasn't cheap, but given the challenges and the materials used, the fact that they will probably last another 60 years or so and that they look amazing I figure that it was well worth it.

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.

Does no one care about how their house looks?

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.

I don't know anything about spiral staircases or masonry I build commercial furniture offices, libraries, courtrooms, etc.

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 was looking for a nice coffee table recently. I decided to try the unfinished wood furniture store, most of it made by the Amish or Menonites. I'm handy enough to stain but not equiped to build a table myself so I figured I'd save a few bucks doing the finish. Most the tables weren't our style but finally found one that looked great and was some real quality oak. Asked for the price and just about crapped my pants. We stopped by Ikea on the way home and bought probably the nicest table they had for a quarter of the price. The nicer Ikea table will be able to make it through any moving we do in the future but it most certainly won't be an heirloom like my parent's old oak stuff.

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.

That is also something people don't think about. Solid wood is great because it's easy to fix, but it's heavy and hard to move. Also it's less stable than a plywood and has to be taken care of.

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.

Thanks for your take on it, I really don't want to be the anti-tech curmudgeon so I'm sincerely happy to read a different perspective. Especially your last paragraph makes me feel better. Maybe it's because CNC technology has come a long way since 15 years ago, or more likely because the staircase company I worked for were just cheapskates willing to strip mine their company's reputation. I feel like I had to recalibrate the damn thing hourly. The vacuum that held the stringers in place was not strong enough, so they would break loose and end up jamming the routing bit constantly. Having PTSD thinking about it.

Well CNC technology has come a long way. The 5-axis machine we purchased was actually cheaper in absolute $ than the 20 year old 3-axis machine we were replacing it with.

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?

Wait until you discover how well made old clothes were. It's this x100.

Since when do we account for people’s feelings when deciding to automate something or not?

> 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.

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.

I don't know. You are trading strange things here: Even if you like doing brickwork, is it worth the toll on your body? I've met a lot of construction workers: I've met fewer that are nearing retirement age that are still working - and generally, when they do work, they use the machines while folks who haven't hurt their back, shoulders, and other bits do the physical work. Not everyone needs mastery of something physical and not everyone needs to get "pride" or other positive feelings from work so long as their work isn't horrible and the hours aren't overly long.

And I bet there are plenty of folks that would rather babysit this machine than babysit the machine at the fast food place.

From a financial perspective, no one cares if the blue collar laborer has a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. We've automated away plenty of jobs out there with little concern about the devices having to be babysat or how the observers feel.

> 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.

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.

I remember around 10-12 years ago my son had a birthday party at our house and one of the children's fathers asked how long we had lived here. We told him and he replied "OK, I was pretty sure this house looked familiar: I built your stone fireplace. You have some boulder retaining walls out back, don't you? I built those too." The pride on his face, finally getting to meet the homeowner and show off his work, was amazing.

The cool thing about bricks and rock is that those walls will probably be there 100 years from now.

Construction is an economic activity, not a hobby.

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).

Perhaps we should structure life differently, to give more power to the worker, instead of reducing a vocation to an economic formula of parts to be sold.

Automating any repeated sequence of actions is a valid concept that doesn’t need to be rebranded as “convenience tooling”. If decision-making is required, that sounds more like an autonomy requirement to me. Autonomy is a concept distinct from automation, and not mutually exclusive.

> This is both economically unviable and largely unpopular.

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".

If you can automate 80% of the jobs your customers require, you can make a billion dollars and send the other 20% potential customers to talk to Mailer Daemon. If you automate 80% of every job and leave 20% to every customer, you have no customers.

If you have bugs in an app or website people get mildly annoyed, if you have bugs in a bricklayer a building can fall down. The cost benefit calculation is very different

I'm planning to build a house, and it has surprised me that standardised house plans are not readily available online - particularly for European weather conditions - the emphasis is instead on custom floorplans.

Creating new designs millions of times over seems like an obvious inefficiency.

People who want a house built want to build their house. Cookie cutter is for subdivisions and apartments, which those folks are often trying to escape.

Prefab houses are a thing and they aren't exactly rare. People escaping apartments usually complain about neighbors or lack of a garden, not about the floor plan.

They are pretty rare, at least here in the US, and widely seen as undesirable or 2nd-3rd tier at best.

Where I live, they aren't that rare. People like the fact that they can be built fast.

Near as I can tell from Googling around, they make up 2-6% if the US housing stock.

This is one of the corporations that has been popular in my country for the last 10 years or so:

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.

In Hungary we had house templates since the socialism.

(following sites are in Hungarian)

https://kulcsrakesz.hu/tipushazak/

https://hellohaz.hu/tipushazak/

https://www.leier.hu/tipushazak

These are prefab houses. They are built in factory and then pieced together on site. What the poster was asking for was free/cheap plans to build a house, without support.

Kind of like open source design of a house.

Only the Leier one is prefab, the others are from protherm (clay) brick. And yes the planes there aren't free.

However there also exists a state level catalog of free (open source) templates as well:

https://www.oeny.hu/oeny/nmtk/mintatervek

It seems it's only available for Hungarian citizens, as it needs Hungarian Electric Id to login. I'm not sure it qualifies for open source but it's free as in beer to Hungarian citizens with the right to adapt the plan to your demands.

I think the middle ground is something like https://wudl.co.uk/ where your house is essentially put together from smaller modular pieces. This allows pre-construction and the efficiencies in "mass production" while allowing semi-customisation.

I wouldn't be surprised if the architects making the plans had catalogues with existing designs. I would however be surprised if they gave weeks/months of work to get them into compliance with non trivial legal requirements away for free.

Local companies doing construction in Serbia will happily provide you with a plan as well as a building cost ahead of time.

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).

You're probably right. It makes more sense to sell those mass-produced floorplans to architects, who will make slight tweaks for local conditions and perhaps pay via subscription, rather than directly to consumers who will probably just copy the floorplan .jpg and take that to the builder anyway.

> 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.

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".

Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car. Sometimes you have to lay down every row of bricks differently with a ton of unplanned (or unplannable) things to account for, because the electrician might work while you lay your brick etc.

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.

Just wait for electrobot 2000 and the problem is resolved :)

> Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car.

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.

For me this feels like robotics operating at the wrong layer of abstraction. It's like those old tomorrow's world programs where they show the robotic helper diligently sweeping the floor with a grass broom.

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.

In many ways this is what much of prefab is. Building is carried out offsite by robots, and humans just assemble panels onsite. However, this reduces the adaptability of the building, increases transport and storage costs and complexity, and creates new issues (apparently prefabs can be at higher risk of fire).

Construction is one of those things where the process is much less regular and perfectly-repetitive than outcomes would suggest.

Have you seen the concrete 3D printers? They printed weird looking houses with them. Very nifty. There are even people living in them.

Yes I have seen concrete 3D printers. Does it also print rebar into the concrete?

The change is already there, prefab build techniques lead to construction companies keeping everything in-house - from crane operators to plumbers. The building is split into parts that can be built in-house and then assembled on-site - the aim is to have the structure with a roof on it as quickly as possible, since that makes you more independent of weather for finishing it. Especially for warehouses and facotries it's really impressive.

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...

> the aim is to have the structure with a roof on it as quickly as possible

Couldn't you just build a tent-like scaffolding for this purpose? Maybe one that can be extended as the internal build progresses?

You would need to build a tent like scaffolding that you can still work in, e.g. with a crane. That would be a non-trivial thing to design, put up and maintain, especially if it has to withstand stroms without damaging the building etc.

It is simpler to just put the house there quickly.

In my country houses are build in factories and then assembled on site. You rarely build a single house you build an entire neighbourhood in one go.

You rarely get to build a new neighbourhood here, often it's renovation work done on already built areas. Building a whole new block all the time is simply unsustainable.

This is a great way to build out when your city is growing like mad. I think China and Russia have seen and still see a lot of development like this.

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.

Are the factories mobile and/or relocatable to reduce transport costs; and/or are the neighbourhood location requirements somewhat specific (e.g. flat stable land, good road access etc)?

After WWII there was a big boom in houses made that way in the United States too but then homebuilders were able to get legislation passed so that "a small manufactured house is disfavored because it’s mobile like a vehicle but it is also required by law to be mobile like a vehicle" and the problem for them went away.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trailer-regulation

Very interesting read, we're facing similar regulatory capture issues here in my country.

And outside it can be sunny, rainy or even snowing, sometimes even on the same day.

take a look at the seers catalog houses of the 30s

Yeah, my point wasn't really well stated, I think that was why it generated discussion.

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.

> The value of work is not in the work done; it's in the decisions being made. It's the ability to handle edge cases, to work your way through ambiguity, to "unstuck" a stuck situation, and to resolve tricky unforeseen issues.

The first part describes programming perfectly.

Exactly. If you need an expert to constantly babysit the machine then you may as well dispense with the machine and have the expert build the wall themselves.

That's only true if the machine builds walls at the same speed as a person and the person can only babysit one machine at a time. If the machine is 10 times faster, or the person can babysit 10 machines, then you've reduced your labor costs by 90% or your output by 1000%.

This is just an example of not enough software has been written to handle all the edge cases, and/or not enough has been done to the field to turn it into a factory (groundworks not level etc)

> If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything.

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.

>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.

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...

Robots in factories can only do one job, building the same car over and over again.

Which is neither here nor there.

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.

Have you ever worked in construction?

Again, a non sequitur. Is there a point here?

The point is that it's easy to, from a distance, think that something is just like another thing. Without experience in a particular domain, you really don't know how things work. No two walls are alike.

That somehow hit home regarding software development (and technology in general). Brick laying is a metaphor for something else

This is a well written point.

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.

By that logic, power tools don't exist.

Also, adding complex robots adds the need for more qualified (hence more expensive) personnel. It's better to have only have to recruit and pay "bricklayer"-profile instead of the rare "can fix complex robots and is a bricklayer"-profile.

I don't really understand this. When I see a small house being built, it will have four or five builders on-site at all times, mostly doing labour (and they're, frankly, extremely slow. It will take months to lay the bricks). If you still need the decisions, can't you cut that down to one, or maybe two? That strikes me as a dramatic reduction in labour cost.

Multi-story buildings take only a few days of brick-laying by 4-5 people. Before you can lay the bricks though, you need a firm foundation to carry those bricks, including those concrete floors which take a while to dry up.

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.

There's a build happening at the end of my road at the moment, I can see how this maps onto that. Thanks - this explains a lot.

> including those concrete floors which take a while to dry up.

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.

Sounds like FSD.

Where I live, there's often master bricker (who does all the skilled work) and dumb labour assistants who are doing dumb work like moving bricks, mix the cement and so on which does not require skill. Master gets all money and assistant gets some low payment (something like $1-$2/hour). I think that assistant work could easily be automated. But probably in my country low wages would make it economically unviable. But in US something like boston dynamics robot dog might actually be viable for such dumb labour I guess.

The odd thing about "dumb labor" is that many of those tasks are only easy for humans. Dealing in a messy world of human-to-human interfaces and cluttered unstructured worksites is generally hard for robots.

The dog for instance might be able to drag a load, but would probably need help refilling it.

I expect dog to have a robotic hand and eyes, so it could refill himself, move bricks to a target location and put them onto the top of the wall, use stairs and so on. Of course it should not be a one-trick pony, the whole point is in something universal which could easily configured to perform different tasks.

> economically unviable

> 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.

The construction industry is full of these "convenience" tools. If you had a working human-sized robot that could just lay some bricks, pretty sure everyone would use it, even if it didn't do the angles or whatever.

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...

>> robot that could just lay some bricks

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 do not know where you live, but I can speak for Czech republic (mid Europe): basically all houses are made by layling bricks. Its not "the" small brick, it typically range 10-50 cm in depth, which is its shortest dimension. Sure, theres ytong and such, but that too is essentially a big brick. Module or wood houses are absolute minority here.

In north american, hand-laid bricks are just to expensive. It is far cheaper to build wooden forms and fill them with concrete. Bricks are then stacked as non-structural decoration on the outside of the concrete or wood walls.

My guess would be that the main reason is that in the event of the earthquake you would survive in the second and die in the first.

Would you not consider a power drill a "partial robotic system"? Is this a situation where once something is useful it switches from being a "robot" to just a "power tool" and so "robots" are a kind of endless frontier?

I was confused at first; I thought you were talking about self driving vehicles, or cooking robots, or practically any "automation" that has to interface with the chaotic, random, and analog, real world. Hmm.

I build robotic cells, specifically industrial manufacturing automation. They are definitely designed for the main workflow; they handle the most common exceptions gracefully but when something rare happens they just throw a fault back to the operator.

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.

I didn't expect this comment to get this much discussion, I should have been clearer.

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.

An example I know of that resembles the bricklayer problem is synthesis of human singing vocals into MIDI sequence data. There is now a history of products around that check off the boxes - one (Vochlea Dubler) debuted just last year - and every time, it demos well but the potential audience ends up rejecting it, because it does not really add what they thought it would add to their workflow. Even if the results themselves come out usable(already a wicked problem since the DSP has to deal with a multitude of recording scenarios while achieving low latency), users discover that they need to be talented at "singing like an instrument" if they want to play instruments by singing, which is a technical barrier, not an assistance to spontaneous creation. Practically speaking, they're better served creatively by button input tools that work top-down(e.g. pick a scale, then the keyboard only plays notes within that scale) since those define down the medium and therefore perform a creatively assistive function with a legible design paradigm(different scale = different sound).

Why does the robot have to handle all the "edge cases"???

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)...

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.

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?

The question I would have around automated building construction is "why use bricks?".

Bricks are great for humans to build with, they are just the right size and weight for the human hand to manipulate and place. They are not optimised for machine manipulation.

I would guess that if you wanted to automate construction you would start by making things like walls on an automated production line, then ship the largest practical piece to the construction site. Once there I'm guessing some automated cranes could move them into location far more easily than thousands of slightly randomly sized pieces of hard clay.

Work out what problem you are trying to solve. Do you want cheap construction? then why choose a material that requires thousands of operations just to build a wall regardless of if it is a human or machine doing the building. There are far more efficient building materials used every day... Just see how fast commercial buildings can be constructed and you can be sure that they are optimised both for speed of construction as well as (hopefully) energy efficiency and ease of maintance after construction.

The problem seems to be people have a emotional idea of what a dream house is, an idea that is firmly stuck in the red brick house of 1970's sitcoms.

Bricks are easy to maintain and remodel and repair. It's a modular system.

>The problem seems to be people have a emotional idea of what a dream house is, an idea that is firmly stuck in the red brick house of 1970's sitcoms.

Your fully automated house-extrusion company isn't going to have many customers, especially after you explain to people why their ideal dream home is obsolete and that they should pay you for a plascrete tube to live in instead because the profit margins are better.

Those "emotional ideas" are what drive market incentives, you can't simply ignore them.

Plasteel is even better.

> ideal dream home

It’s weird to focus on the upper end of the market for a thing like this. If the utility in automated construction is to reduce costs, it might make more sense to consider the more price-conscious portion of the market. I.e. starter homes and the like. My guess is that since there are so many other large costs involve in home construction, automating this one component just doesn’t make a significant price impact in almost any market segment.

Because they’re pleasant to look at. Half the time, the wall isn’t even “needed”, other than for aesthetic purposes.

Whenever a wall is purely functional, it’s almost never made of small clay bricks today. I’m talking about foundation walls, subsurface retaining walls, and similar things. The types of walls that aren’t meant to be looked at, but instead meant to hold something back or up.

Whenever you see a wall being made of red clay bricks, that’s because the builder wants it to look nice. I suppose you can cast a concrete wall and apply a façade of bricks. But there’s still a skill required for that final step.

Of course, you may have a different design aesthetic, wherein exposed concrete or large modular sections are both functional and pretty. But brick laying is all about looks.

CMUs are a different story, and kind of prove your point. They’re much larger and so reduce the piecework involved, but still small enough to allow for onsite flexibility in construction.

So bricklaying it’s basically an ‘artisanal’ type of product not a mass production type of thing that is ill suited for automation anyway.

The article links to the MULE product (which was an evolution or pivot of their 15yr attempt at making a traditional bricklaying robot) makes more sense as it takes advantage of the lifting power of machines and uses much larger/longer bricks that would otherwise be too heavy to pick up by humans while accelerating the process.

https://www.construction-robotics.com/

This is much like why pigeonholing AI into traditional cars is more difficult than say having a fleet of cars region wide which all talk to each other and coordinate movements with roads and crosswalks that are also designed for automated cars.

> But brick laying is all about looks.

I’ve seen stores with moulded facades designed to look like bricks that are attached to reinforced concrete.

From what I'm understanding the hard part of doing that stuff concrete is curation time. There's a lot of projects trying the "easy" route and effectively do additive 3D printing with concrete instead of glue. Conversely, they have the same problems... they look pretty ugly: https://www.realestate.com.au/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...

Doing it "properly" means building proper moulding, rebar, vibration casting all the stuff that sounds like almost impossible to automate with 2021 technology.

Bricks have the advantage that they're pre-cured, so you don't have to wait ages until the wall actually supports something — and if that something is just the next layer.

So what people do is you build the "ugly" way (usually large panels, maybe even prefab, I doubt 3d printing is working that well right now), then cut bricks into 5 slices and stick those slices on top with glue. You can't tell it's not a brick wall except when you're standing right against it.

And of course, you only do this on visible walls. It can even be done on top of wood.

https://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/skills-and-know-how/carpen...

Paint or stucco would be a big improvement to the aesthetics of the primary exterior surfaces that house … and changing the hideous orange puke trim color.

> Because they’re pleasant to look at.

I expect that this is less a case of "bricks have long been used because they’re pleasant to look at", and more a case of "Bricks are considered pleasant to look at, because they have long been used, and have that old-timey feeling"

I don't think so. I see a lot of buildings that are 30 years old and they look ugly because they don't have any complexity in their facade, just a single color of paint. Bricks add natural complexity to a facade. You can make a single color building look nice by adding details.

Actual clay bricks even more so with their imperfect uniformity and consistency.

FWIW, at least here, in construction even the thermal insulation clay blocks (basically, any wall-construction material made from clay, those red blocks :)) is called "bricks".

They are laid exactly like the regular (uniform, filled) bricks, so I would assume that's what's mostly used in construction everywhere even when not going for looks (they are lighter and have better thermal properties).

It's funny how hard it is to fake imperfections.

People frequently try to mass-manufacture imperfections by having a larger block with smaller imperfect sub-blocks artistically arranged.

It looks fine at first, but once you notice the repetition of the imperfections at regular intervals...

I went to an exhibition (Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty) where they dedicated some part to this. They claim that classical buildings are usually beautiful thanks to all the details and that modernist buildings are usually not so beutiful thanks to the missing details.

They also had this experiment where the visitors choose shapes and colours they find pretty. Rectangles and brown-red were the least favourite by far. And then they asked why do we build buildings out of the vomponents we find the most hideous?

----

I have my doubts whether their reasoning is valid, but it is somewhat relevant to your comment.

Also people like to think they are buying something substantial that is literally made of bricks - even if those bricks are just a façade.

This is the reason for a lot of design trends - This morning I have been:

* On a laminate wooden desk, in a room with laminate wooden floor (The same logic - neither are real wood, just an old-timey construction).

* Wearing a knitted jumper (which again could be considered stylish from an old-timey perspective, as the manufacturing could have used less thin cotton, but thick cotton is supposed to make it look hand woven)

* In a office which has LED lights hanging down which are designed to look like exposed old lightbulbs (same logic)

* While typing email on my laptop (the logo to which is an envelope, arguably to remind you of the old-timey mail system).

Heck, even my headphones have some fake leather on them, which is effectively just a fake material just to look like older materials which are actually less soft, and my coat has some fluff that is designed to make it look like coats used to look like when they were made from animal fur (even though, now, that is considered abhorrent, fake fur is still a thing, everyone just knows it's simulating the old material for whatever reason, because that was the old style).

So I think design trends in general come from historic use-cases in the context.

These aren't always aesthetic though, sometimes they are practically: leveraging knowledge of the well-known tech to help people understand the new.

Yup. I'm from Amsterdam, the Netherlands as an example. A ton of the city and country has been built with brick. But modern construction typically is built with concrete with a thin facade of brick infront. The brick is just cosmetic, and typically pre-fab in large slabs of 20x20 bricks.

For old homes that get renovated, it's popular to keep the old brick facade standing, demolish everything behind it, then build it up again.

It's rarely functional.

Although there are still a lot of old (mostly built between 1400 - 1950) brick buildings that get maintained with proper masonry, all of which is functional.

> and typically pre-fab in large slabs of 20x20 bricks.

which were likely robotically brick-laid

> Because they’re pleasant to look at.

The article mentions cinder blocks ("CMU") -- those are not typically pleasant to look at. Even the ones that are less unpleasant are usually covered, with sidings or paint.

At some point cinder block construction will become it's own aesthetic (or an element of an aesthetic), perhaps something like the current 'industrial' trend or maybe an architectural equivalent of 'tactical' stylng.

> Whenever you see a wall being made of red clay bricks, that’s because the builder wants it to look nice.

There is a scene in Penny Dreadful (Which is set in a fictionalized Victorian London) where a character laments all the brick buildings that are being built, replacing wood buildings that have "character", because wood "holds its history" unlike bricks which are all the same, forever.

The main appeal of bricks is essentially nostalgic, similar to the appeal of low resolution 8-bit graphics. We call one 'traditional' and the other 'retro' but those labels are arbitrary.

Agreed. Bricks aren’t great for construction. Not structural, poor R-value, a ton of labor.

Just have concrete poured or stick frame and a fake brick facade. Will probably last longer as well.

Seems like the wrong problem to solve.

Bricks can last a long time.

Brick houses also hold their value well.

No one cares about a brick facade.

Also why do you say bricks aren't structural? I assumed those 100 year old brick houses used bricks for structural support.

Bricks are for decorative purposes nowadays (pretty siding). They aren't practical as you won't meet code for insulation. You will also need to frame another interior wall for vapor control.

A single layer brick wall isn't structural.

There are foam bricks which meet the insulation codes in europe - in one wall with no additions. Will all be special waste though one day.

> A single layer brick wall isn't structural

My 92-year old house with single layer brick walls says otherwise. (And yes, it insulates badly, but it kept standing through a lot of storms.)

> My 92-year old house with single layer brick walls says otherwise. (

Not structural by current building standards. No doubt it is carrying a load today, bit you can't build a house that way anymore.

Structural bricks absolutely suck if you are in a high earthquake risk zone. Earthquakes or slumping really screw up brick buildings (and brick façades).

Even in 100 year old brick houses (like the 1920s craftsman I once owned), the brick is almost always non-structural. Only in old urban commercial buildings do you typically find structural bricks.

What you are talking about are facing bricks, which are used on the facade. In Europe almost all new residential construction is made from masonry blocks, which are basically just bigger bricks.

They are structural (in terms of compression, but have low tensile strength which is probably why they aren't popular in North America)

They have a good R-value

They are easy to work with

We are building a house right now, and the cheapest, quickest and easiest part so far has been building the walls. We are using clay blocks[0] which are R-10. Compared to other tasks no specialised equipment is needed, it's literally just manual labour. When you get to a corner or window, they can easily be cut with an angle grinder or even by hand (for a rougher finish). The house is two floors and the exterior walls for each floor took less than a week to build. It's quicker (building forms takes a long time), cheaper, better insulating and better for the environment than monolithic concrete.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__T8PWnntkU - Not this exact product, but this was the best explanation I could find in English.

> but have low tensile strength which is probably why they aren't popular in North America)

out of curiosity, why do the blocks need to be different in North America?

The person appears to be from Europe. If HN is the bulk of their exposure to mundane topics regarding the US I can see why they'd be unaware that California building codes are not representative of the rest of the nation.

But not your Texan school textbook regulations…

Meh, every state has crap curriculum. They all just skip different chapters of history or science depending on the way the local political winds blow.

Tensile strength is equally important when you have strong winds.

The half of Florida that's made out of masonry (typically cinderblock) does just fine.

> The question I would have around automated building construction is "why use bricks?".

Well, eventually roads will also be optimised for self-driving cars not human drivers. But until then, self-driving car have to interoperate with the existing, pervasive, legacy infrastructure, even if it isn't optimal for their needs.

My brother lives in an apartment building from the 1930s made of bricks. It is absolutely horrendous.

This (and similar comments below) are a very American view of the situation.

To be honest, as a kiwi I was the same when the first moved to the UK "why are they building NEW buildings out of brick???" It's because there's so much clay here, the materials to make bricks are abundant and this is similar in other parts of Europe.

Brick is also more resilient to the weather here, if they build hosues with wood like NZ (or America) they'd degrade incredibly quickly.

It is a great question, but it's like jumping on refactoring: you'll solve all the problems that were obvious with the old solution, but introduce new ones that you didn't think of that were already solved by the old one.

Basically, "thermal blocks", which is mostly what's used in construction in areas where they are used (Europe, rather than filled-in bricks) need to be modified to accommodate imperfections: you need half bricks, third-bricks, and they are easy to make on the spot.

For automated construction, you'd have to have a bunch of these pre-made, and the larger the block you are building with, the more types of those smaller ones you'll need.

These blocks are also relatively simple to put electrical and plumbing installations in (it's a lot more demanding to make "channels" in concrete than bricks).

Anyway, block construction is way cheaper than eg. gypsum board construction for interior walls in Serbia, and other than taking a lot more space, being heavier, and requiring curing time, it has a bunch of better properties (acoustic, thermal,...). The price not being high is actually the reason this is not further improved.

Filled-in bricks are mostly used for decoration of outside walls these days (and usually as plasterboards these days), and as far as paying for things go, humans will happily pay the most for good looks!

pre-cast concrete slabs made offsite and then lifted by cranes to lock on to make walls. eg this builder's projects https://www.providenthousing.com/

Three dudes can do the bulk of a cinder-block foundation in a few workdays with no special equipment. Blocks and bricks are cheap to work with because there are no special material handling requirements to increase overhead costs. This approach is economically viable pretty much everywhere except the urban areas most heavily represented on HN.

When you get into fancy high dollar construction in HCOL areas where time costs more money that's when you get bigger blocks that need machines to move them or you get formed and poured structures.

If you think bricklaying is a simple task, you've probably never laid bricks, or likely ever worked a construction job.

There is _a lot_ that goes into laying a brick wall. From excavation, base compaction, material choice, mortar composition and viscosity, wall type, overlap patterns, leveling, overhang patterns, set time, and much more. Using an incorrect overhang pattern for instance can allow water drops to fall and contact the relatively soft surface of bricks and destroy them in a few years. Having an incomplete mortar seal allows the elements to penetrate through what would normally be waterproof, especially in places with high wind. An improper excavation, compaction material or compaction of said material, improper leveling, and many more factors will lead to failure within just a few years.

The best way to learn about this stuff is to go try it! One could volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or a local shelter that builds homes and get some time with the tools. None of this stuff is simple, straightforward, or easy, and there are a million ways to do it incorrectly.

there's another comment to this effect and it's spot-on. I suspect a lot of the people quick to work on these automation projects don't fully understand the complexity behind it. Just reading the descriptions of the early and later machines shows the comical oversimplification of laying bricks.

A lot of complex tasks are done by machine today, and they do it better than master craftsmen.

The thing is, designing a machine may be really complex, but it only has to be done once. After that, the machine will repeat the process with extreme precision. A machine can position bricks within microns and mix mortar to the milligram, doing things level and with the correct overhang is jokingly easy for a machine.

What machines are not good at is dealing with variation they can't control. Bricks are not perfectly sized, mortar behaves in unpredictable ways, the ground is not flat, not even solid. We humans have no problem with that, and anyone can do a wall shaped construction, but the machine, with its microns and milligrams may fail catastrophically at the smallest bump.

You forgot trees in the yard, how much sunlight the wall receives, moisture content of the soil beneath the brick walls, roots that are growing there, and existing structure.

The hard part isn't laying bricks. It can be already be done in a day efficiently. The hard part is the near infinite things that are different between every construction site.

I feel like bricks were probably shaped the way they are today specifically to help bricklayers do a good job easily and quickly. If we're moving to automated wall building maybe using traditional brick is just a waste of effort. Automation will probably benefit from using different shapes or materials. For example a human can't handle a 30 pound brick but a machine might be a lot faster if you use larger bricks with different mortar configurations.

>If you think bricklaying is a simple task, you've probably never laid bricks, or likely ever worked a construction job.

If you think the bulk of the actual laying of bricks, siding of a wall or shingling of a roof isn't a simple task you've never worked a construction job.

Thinking is required around corners, windows and other interruptions. The bulk of the material laid, hung or otherwise expended is done so in a simple and repetitive manner. Once you've figured out your non-standard bits of the job you basically just run on autopilot.

That said, I agree that 99% of the the engineers who try and design this stuff never actually have the requisite experience to understand the nuance of what's going on.

I've laid a little block and brick for myself. I found it kind of fun and pretty rewarding work. As soon as I saw the headline and started pre-thinking about the content, I immediately thought, "well, the mortar for one thing..." The bricks aren't all that uniform either. My big takeaway from doing myself was that it's easy to obsess over each brick (like a machine might) but when people look at a brick wall, they see the forest, not the trees: it's not necessary for each brick to be laid perfectly.

I also heartily second volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. It's rewarding work, fun if you're with a good crew, and a great way to learn new skills.

We had an "automated" pothole filler, in my town. When they purchased it, there was a bunch of hooplah. They had a news crew, in front of my house, showing it off. It spritzed asphalt into the pothole, tamped it down, then went on to the next one. All automatic! There was a driver, but he looked really bored.

Months later, I have only seen one (probably the same one they demoed in front of my house). It was clearly defective. The crew was using it to dump the asphalt, and they were tamping it down manually.

> They had a news crew, in front of my house, showing it off.

Sounds like it did its job - it got some positive publicity for the people that bought it and manufactured it, and the fact that it doesn't actually work is a problem left with taxpayers and town employees.

Don’t forget the tire and wheel shops: loads of potholes boost their sales from repairing the damage done to the cars as a result of encountering the deeper potholes.

> tamping it down manually.

In other words, the problem was that the machine worked perfectly, and would have resulted in a bunch of union job losses.

Hence, it was "no good" and had to go.

That may be the case. I am not in a position to say.

That seems like a large assumption.

> a typical SV anti-union response

if we do such low level comments then let me speculate it was not the union at fault but the developers, they used node.js and 1000 buggy and bad coded libraries.

To be fair, highway/road construction is notorious for being an industry where the .gov and the unions bloat things in order to make more easy money for each other.

Tropes about one guy working and four supervising or tearing up recent work just to fix something you didn't fix while you were at it don't persist because the industry is a shining beacon of economic efficiency, they persist because they're universal enough to be relatable.

Or it could be also that we the web devs have no clue why some engineer that needs to know to read plans and maps is always needed when some guys need to dig. Mistakes happen with this engineers supervising (cables and pipes get cut or damaged) I imagine without them there will always be more problems.

The robotic bricklayers are in the factories. They do construct prefab elements that then get hauled to the building site to be quickly assembled.

Usually it's done with wood but there are also factories that build prefab houses with bricks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJIDjdFTVW8

So, I don't understand how this can be cheaper. I just saw a neighbor put together a house out of large bricks with six guys in two days. Doing the same using this method seems like it would have been more expensive. Is this an economies-of-scale thing or what?

Edit: Here's a second video [1] where they use concrete. It says that factory can makes enough for 60 houses per year. It also says, at the end, that it's not cheaper but faster and "easier on the nerves" for the builders.

1. https://youtu.be/CBZYwI3BJ9E

From what I've heard from friends who build, it's less about having six guys show up and two days later there's a house, it's about what happens when they're busy and don't show up for three months while the cost of materials goes through the roof and you're stuck renting and/or paying two mortgages.

If you can engineer out some of the potential delays that can take a huge amount off the overall cost.

> it's about what happens when they're busy and don't show up for three months

This sounds like a problem with the process and contracts, not something that cries for a technological solution.

In the end it's about the same cost (for the same quality).

Also prefab houses have a lead time of about 6 month.

But once the on site build has started it's fast and those elements come with electrics, water piping and (sometimes) windows preinstalled. They just need to be connected.

You basically have the choice between the classic building methods with an architect and contractors, or an All-in-One Firm that has it's own contractors and almost always uses the prefab model. The later also is way less hassle for the once-in-a-lifetime home builder, usually.

But it also does not use mortar, which according to the article seems to be the biggest issue.

Probably the biggest problem in automating construction is not just that every job is in a different location but these materials are so bulky and heavy and composite that the cost is not in the labor of installation but moving the materials to location.

Asphalt paving requires 4 guys to level the asphalt but a truck to pour it. The best you can get is an attachment on the truck to level the asphalt. This attachment is called a paving machine. And it requires an operator and two-man crew to maintain. So no real advantage besides workers won’t be tired. And the leveling will be done super well.

Other automation problems are similar. If there is no need for precision, there is no need for automation.

Even with leveling I can imagine a bunch of problems: to drive water away, roads are usually tilted to one side, or even to both, and there's a slight curve to them. Depending on the width of the road, that curve will have ever so slightly different characteristics which makes it harder to achieve (compared to humans doing it manually but less consistently).

Still, a lot simpler than laying bricks, which is why it's already there :D

Roads are "crowned"; that is, the center is supposed to be higher than the edges, for water to run off.

Banking curves is a real thing and you notice when someone got it wrong.

Paving a road is a small step compared to building the roadbed; but its what people see. It's probably better to think of that like painting a house, building the road is a much bigger thing, but then it gets the surface refreshed often enough you see that.

If there is no need for precision at scale, there is no need for automation.

With human bricklayers, you can find enough people who have that skill that the pay is low. Here in the US, the availability of illegal immigrants means that the pay is often literally criminally low and you don't have to provide benefits.

Replace those bricklayers with a robot and its caretakers and now you need:

1. Someone with technical training who can keep the bot running happily. Since the technology is new and changing, the available supply of trained people is necessarily low and therefore wages for them would be high.

2. Drivers to get the bot to the worksite. If they stay, they are doing essentially nothing when they could be laying bricks. At that point, the robot is saving you basically nothing. Or they go off and drive for other jobs, but now the logistics of coordinating multiple work sites get harder.

You could argue that robot bricklayers are better for the workers' health. But contractors don't pay health benefits and don't care about that externality at all.

If a contractor gets one of these bots, now they are obliged to maintain it and keep it busy to amortize out the expense of buying it. That puts them in a precarious position of maintainence prices change, the bot company goes out of business, or work dries up.

Meanwhile, labor (until COVID) has been getting cheaper as the gains of the labor movement have been steadily eroded.

It is absolutely no surprise to me that we're still paying people to build brick walls, even without accounting for the fact that bricklaying is a pretty skilled activity.

The cheapest way to automate something is always poor people.This applies even more so in the developing world. Where the vast majority of new construction is happening.

Though it would be interesting to see what the state of construction is like in developed countries that don't have access to a vast pool of cheap immigrant labor. Maybe New Zealand? Northern Europe?

Not everywhere in the US has a vast pool of cheap immigrant labor. That's a fairly localized thing.

I'm just outside of Pittsburgh and, I guess I can't say conclusively, but the vast majority of landscapers, construction workers, and other outdoor laborers appear to come from the general local population. It's not like what I hear about California / Texas where hispanic immigrants are disproportionately represented.

> The cheapest way to automate something is always poor people.

The corrolary to this, if you are a tech nerd who wants to see more automation is: If you want more automation, work to reduce poverty. Support unions, high wages, and other systems that give people the freedom to say no to shitty jobs that robots could do.

I recall finding the below blog post on HN not long ago which I think pairs well with this.

https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/construction.html

This should be required reading for probably anyone who votes.

This quote is my take away -

"Almost every advancement in construction is small enough for a man to carry"

Not quite. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau

The article mentions those. There's a reason they are not used much outside of parking garages.

modern plattenbau is used extensively in Europa. almost all modern construction uses pre made segments.

it doesn't look the same as a Soviet era building project, but the technology and system is roughly the same.

In some cities in Europe as much as 97% of population lives in those and they rise in value faster than other types of housing there.

Article dismisses them unjustly.

Looking at the documentation on those -

"Industrialized Building In the Soviet Union" (1969) - "Panels and slabs average 5 tons up to a maximum of 10 tons. Transportation is considered within economic limits if factory to job site is no more than 150 kilometres"

Which is what the original article says on pre-fab -

"Because of transportation costs, they are all limited to selling within a few hundred miles of their factory."

They were also considered disposable in the USSR, and no one wants to live in them. Also talked about in the article, it's a good article give it a read.

These are quite common in Finland, not just Rovaniemi (which does not really have extraordinary cost of living unless you have electric heating). So, here's how I see it:

- When whole new neighborhoods are built, it's not unusual to start with building a factory to manufacture the elements. For smaller projects there's usually a factory within 150 kilometers. This is not Siberia.

- There's always insulation and outer wall on top of the panels. The result is not always pretty, but not necessarily worse than concrete poured on site.

- The construction crews aren't always competent and there are many ways to screw up a concrete cast. Quality wise both precast and on site casting have their own problems.

- The seams between element need periodic repair. If the house owners decide to save money here, it's going to be expensive later. They're also a huge sound insulation problem.

For my new house, laying the bricks (aerated concrete blocks actually) took 2 days. The rest of the house took more than one year to finish. Not really necessary to optimize this step in many cases.

Yep, that's the real issue. It optimizes one of the less expensive steps in the construction process; therefore the savings are not significant enough to matter much.

I think about that every time I see yet another article on 3d printing houses.

My parents added a bedroom to a stick framed house. The floor joists took a weekend. Nailing together and erecting walls took one weekend. Framing the roof, another weekend. That was my dad, mom, brother and I. And we used a skill saw, hammers and nails.

I think the issue is each task of itself is fairly optimized. Yet there are a large number of them to do. And a problem is automation generally requires tight tight tolerances or you're back to hand fitting everything. For instance with molding a skilled tradesman will just install it without any detailed plans. Working around any small variation won't slow him down at all.

Another issue I see is lot of focus on single family. Gut feeling is mass produced single family is a dying industry in the west.

Why? Isn’t most of the West one of the the least densely populated areas in the United States? Seems there would be lots of land to build single family homes.

Wow that is an incredibly US-centric view even by HN standards. They meant the western world, not the West in the USA. Try Googling "the west" and look at the top results.

I don’t base my definitions on the most popular search results. Referring to the west as you reference makes little sense in the context of what I was addressing. HN is not only largely US focused, but I would say it is hyper-focused from the Silicon Valley FAANG perspective. Basically, a few companies in a single metro area.

I meant the US and Europe. And by extension places of that nature. Slower growing aging populations and the realization that low density single family both burdens local government with costly infrastructure that generates low revenue. Like a sewer main with 100 customers per mile. Only sustainable when growing fast.

There is a lot of multifamily being built despite fairly intense NIMBYism. And despite that you're seeing cities getting rid of R1 zoning.

There is no fundamental reason for urban sprawl to stop. Western living standards and wealth are increasing, and the actual material costs of laying a sewer pipe or road become negligible.

With the advent of electric self driving cars, transportation becomes cheap and hassle free. A network of highways converging to an urban center served by Boring co Loop tunnels can gather trafic from a 30 mile area. As long as travel times are less than say, around 45 minutes, those people will be living "in the city".

A 30 mile radius means about 7 million plots of 10000 sq feet, so you could accommodate more than 20 million inhabitants in this suburbopolis of single detached family homes.

The factors preventing it are land prices, regulatory pressure and homebuyer tastes.

In most major cities the real cost is the land and paperwork to be able to build there. The actual physical materials the building is made of are mostly aesthetic

Hey, I want to take a break from the normal HN flow to wish everybody a happy Tuesday. Take a moment to appreciate the people around you. It's easy for life to speed by.

Anyway. I better quiet down. I'm sure the robotic bricklayers will be here to take our jobs soon enough. No need to rush it.

(Well actually, laying bricks is one of those fiendishly complicated problems at scale...)

thank you! hope you're having a good day :)

The last few decades I've seen a lot of bigger buildings have slab concrete walls with brick veneers. This seems a quicker and cheaper way of doing it. Would seem like a good place to try to automate the veneer placement.

Seems like it's another mini-mills waiting to happen, with perhaps ML as the required technological innovation.

Current low hanging fruit is long, straight walls. So a few customers will bite, using the human masons (who are paid more) as the high quality, judgement based service. The easy sections will be done by the machine.

Over time the machine maker uses their foothold to encroach on the more juicy work. As they collect data some ML will creep in and solve some of the harder brick laying issues. Maybe it will figure out about the mortar too.

Eventually the machine will be doing the whole job, and you can use an app to build yourself a heart-shaped wall just for fun.

Or perhaps there's just no economic incentive, and more inexperienced masons will do the easy bits for the foreseeable.

Combine ML with a wire system used for stadium camera, and you get a cheap robot that is both strong and have a long range

Wire camera example: https://youtu.be/j0K3XUqZI9w?t=187

They state in the article that the main problem is not in positioning the bricks/blocks, but on handling the cement mixture (non-Newtonian fluid...)

True. Hard to get enough people to work on the non-Newtonian problem when the robot is expensive. Easier to have several of them, and fix any mechanical problem on the robot, when the robot is simple and inexpensive

Great read.

This kind of reminds me of auto manufacturing. It's almost unintuitive how difficult, expensive & error prone paneling is. Also painting. Stamping out panels, painting and installing them is a very hard job to do with robotics. Most of the space, treasure and expertise invested into an auto factory is panel related. The "possible, but perpetually difficult" space can be a deep valley for robotics, it seems.

...And bricklaying, while conspicuous and important, is still just one job in construction.

lol.. and we're talking about AI replacing humans next year so come get your basic income check.

AI replacing humans as workers will not result in basic income. It will result either eradication of non-ruling classes or humanity itself.

Maybe it'll be like that cow that wants to be eaten. Don't count your evil crow chicks before they've hatched.

Historically, most people were farmers. That got automated, and yea, I guess the non-ruling classes were eradicated in the sense that we stopped having serfs and slaves and everyone became more powerful, could own land, etc. It was good news, not bad.

> ...And bricklaying, while conspicuous and important, is still just one job in construction.

My understanding is that bricklaying is a bottleneck. You can do things before bricklaying, and things after, but not really at the same time.

I think Tesla had a lot off issues when trying to automate as much as possible, possibly trying to push the envelope too much at the beginning.

Last year they've started installing "Giga Presses" - the largest high-pressure die casting machines in the world, in order to reduce parts and increase automaton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Press#Tesla

Falsehoods that computer programmers believe about bricklaying:

\ bricks are all the same shape and density

\ bricks have flat sides

\ mortar batches are mixed to the same consistency

\ a batch of mortar has the same consistency over time

\ bricks are laid in a climate controlled environment without changes in sunlight, precipitation, or humidity

\ mortar solidifies immediately and bricks do not move once laid

…I’m stretching* it a bit, but you get the point. The linked article gets to these points* towards the end, too.

We don’t have robot brickies for the same reason we don’t have robot chefs. Kitchens are all different and a general purpose cooking robot can’t adapt the same way a human can to either a dynamic environment or dynamic raw materials. Robots win when you change the playing field: cake factories producing one thing in bulk in an environment designed from the ground up for machines. Robobricky will happily churn out 6x4 prefab panels in a factory, but it’s much harder to make that process portable enough to bring to a building site.

*Puns not intended: stretchers are lengthways bricks and pointing is the process of smoothing the mortar in rhe gaps.

Your comment reminds me of the old classic post, "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names": https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Simplifying a complex problem to look like an easily solvable problem is something that businesses and engineers are really, really good at. It's one of the reasons we leave people behind at the margins all the time, and it's one of the reasons that a thousand failed brick laying robots will be built.

The problem is not the science or the mechanics. The problem is the economics. And not just the economics of any single builder, but of the construction industry as whole.

Perhaps wall construction / partition construction itself needs to be thought from the ground up, to enable automation.

For example, is it possible to have LEGO like slot fitted bricks, with cavities in slots filled with mortar?

Alternatively, toothed bricks that can be slotted, such that the top brick slots into two lower bricks.

Definitely a curious idea!

But it would make the "hard" part of laying bricks (on wall connections which might not be right angle, when you only need 1/5th of a brick to reach the wall/window/door opening...) even harder. Basically, you'd move the mortar laying complexity into "where and how do we join the joints".

Basically, how many non-right angles did you make with regular Lego bricks? And how many types of Lego bricks did you need to get that nice figure built out? :)

Insulated concrete forms (ICFs) closely match what you described. They are hollow LEGOesque foam bricks that get filled with concrete.

Here is a great video (and a great channel generally) on the subject: https://youtu.be/MRipzKkeQik

The article is very informative, but its title feels like "Where are the airplanes that flap their wings like birds?"

Bricks aren't very suitable for automatization and 3D printing seems to be quite a lot more promising, even though the current early forms look clumsy.

Printing a wall gives you an ability to leave precisely calculated empty spaces for plumbing, cables, electrical sockets and whatever we are going to need in the future. This is valuable, speeds up the construction process and reduces total dust.

The number of edge cases is simply too high

Important insights from this article:

- The hard part is the mortar

- Any useful number of brick lays will require after placement adjustment to maintain level/true alignment

- Those adjustments are where a good deal of 'skill' comes in

- Finishing / jointing is even harder

So it looks like this is an RL problem and the focus of the research needs to be geared toward the above. Basically you need a system to understand mortar and how to place various shapes of objects in it so that over time you achieve the goal of a specific wall shape.

This problem suggests an arm-farm like setup. Normally I always urge sim-first, but I'm not aware of any useful simulator that can do non-Newtonian fluids and robotic systems well. (either sure, but both? Let me know if you know of one.)

The robotic bricklayers are in the future and on the moon. Intelligence, dextrous, cheap labor is plentiful on Earth, but that won't necessarily be true elsewhere.

As for contemptuous automation, consider that it frees up humans to do more emotionally, mentally, or physically challenging work. We do need to provide for those immediately displaced by automation though, since despite economists' wishes, humans don't instantly retrain and self-allocate to new jobs and industries.

In the post-scarcity world that I hope we are working toward, people will have more time to pursue their interests, which may include hobbyist bricklaying, while machines labor to make living safe, affordable, and pleasant.

There's no need for robotic brick layers - it's requires significantly less dexterity to just 3D print a house, and it allows for shapes and contours that are simply impossible to construct from bricks.

Indeed. If you have heavy machinery available, why use bricks?

Bricks are good at demolition time, compared to poured concrete, and can be recycled. They also look kinda nice.

Demolishing a brick wall and cleaning the bricks by hand is expensive though, compared to running a bulldozer through it

Bricks are easier to remodel and repair than concrete. You can take them out, replace them, etc.

Why don't we use (something like) Legos?

I think this reveals a much more interesting trend that's likely to continue.

It's not that existing jobs will always be automated, we'll come up with tools that completely automate several layers of work.

It's a different view than all current jobs will be automated. Automation can be used to remove several verticals and improve efficiency by magnitudes in the process.

And yet, almost no houses at all are 3D printed.

People are very good at bricklaying, and are paid a reasonable rate by the hour. No one has made a machine that can beat that feature set.

edit: more great features of human brickies that robots are terrible at: very small working volume; very small and agile footprint; safe for other humans to work near; half-day built-in power supply.

Which is still infinitely more than 30 years ago.

Are there buildings that aren't demonstrations that are being printed? There's always been demonstration homes and buildings using novel techniques, and that's no indication that the technique will go anywhere.

Most people don’t buy brick houses. They buy vinyl siding which is 1/5 the cost of bricks and bricklaying.

That’s not the case in my area. Lots of homes are wood framed and 3 sided brick with vinyl in the rear.

Depends on price for sure. In Chicago where a new single family home is 1.5 million dollars, better believe its brick.

Where I live in Indiana an average single family home is like 200k. No one is paying 50k for brick on that, so vinyl siding you go.

In the US, perhaps, but brick construction still predominates in many countries including much of Africa, the Middle East and India. Not coincidentally, all three also have limited supplies of timber.

> And yet, almost no houses at all are 3D printed.

It's brand new, give it a minute.

We've had the technology to make arbitrary shapes quickly and cheaply for decades: poured concrete.

The problems with new building tech are twofold:

First of all, for most people a house is the biggest investment they'll ever make, so they're not really keen to gamble. Oh, they'll make minor gambles - but a complete new way of building houses is a tough sell.

Second of all, building a house involves so many different costs that even a big saving in one area is only a drop in the ocean on the total project cost. If I'm building a brick-and-block house, the total cost of materials and labour might be $180,000 with brickwork comprising 10% of that. That's nothing to be sniffed at - but no matter how great and cheap your brickwork replacement is, someone taking a risk and using your new tech can't possible save more than 10%.

Print a house out of what material? Will that material stand up to sub freezing and very high temperatures? Can it withstand a temperature variable between indoor and outdoor temps? Does it have lateral strength against wind and snow? Does it deteriorate in sunlight? Will it last more than 10 years? Is it flammable?

I can walk down my street in Northern New England and see brick buildings that are over 100 years old in a harsh climate, and that were reasonably affordable when they were built. The shapes and contours are usable and attractive to most people. They are able to be remodeled and repaired using very basic technology.

There are reasons that Dymaxion Homes weren't popular.

Why 3D print a house? You can buy a trailer aka mobile home. They’ve been around for decades maybe a century by now. They come preassembled, on wheels, and are utility hook up ready.

The only problem is they seem to attract tornados.

"People don't want to buy a drill, they want to buy a hole".

If I was building construction robots, I don't think I'd be aiming to replace skilled human crafstmen directly, but rather render them unecessary. Most likely that would mean robots in factories churning out standardised components that somehow let you build strong, aesthetic walls without bricks.

I've seen brick effects that get applied to flat walls, which seems like one solution to this if you want the look but not the expense.

Obviously, it's a conspiracy by the Freemasons to control their ancestral art. (sorry)

Printing brick roads actually sounds like a pretty interesting step forward even though it isn't the most obvious use of bricks. The drainage is much better than asphalt and that could make a difference in many cities that are dealing with increased flooding. Not so great for snow-plows, though. Before I saw that machine I never would have thought it would be a scalable solution to the problem, though.

If this specific problem excites you and you're a hardware engineer, get in touch with us. We're working hard on solving this specific problem with the goal of getting construction speeds and cost down significantly: https://about.terraform.industries/engineering

What's your solution to the systemic problems they raise?

I had a career in the robotics field for almost 5 years a while ago. I think my experience is best summed up bye a business analysis done by someone who actually went on to do several y combinator startups. Very smart kid at the time.

His report basically said that anything you want a robot to do, no matter how difficult or dangerous, you can get a human to do for a few dollars more than they would charge for safe, easy work.

In trying to create machines that have anything close to the capabilities of a human being, you're competing with billions of people, many of whom are desperate for work. You're also competing with millions of years of evolution.

Then again, when they reach a critical capability level, I suspect robots will suddenly be everywhere and doing tons of things we don't like to do. But it's very binary, and until you can really compete with human beings effectively, there's basically no market for it.

Fun read! I feel like that’s one of the first thing you learn out of college that’s a bit of a rude awakening. While ideas are fun, economics kill during execution. Without a scalable product that solves the right problem, it’s pretty hard to make a good product (unless you get VC money and sell things at a lost anyway).

As mentioned in the article. There are brick laying machines for roads that are really interesting.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cGhzzcgfHNc

but that still has a human loading it and arranging the bricks, which i presume is amongst the largest time sink, sometimes 2. It is probably a vast improvment in terms of human-power required though

it was originally designed to prevent the street brickmen from breaking their backs and knees when building a street.

I mean, there are already prototypes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVWayhNpHr0

It's only a matter of time. A building is planned, the step-by-step orchestration is QA'ed by a qualified engineer, and a set of robots go to work to build a whole building. Construction jobs will be phased out.

Also, in the movie Runaway - which actually predicted police areal drones as well, almost 30 years ago (but the concept of a drone did not exist yet, so it was called a "floater").

It seems to me many software engineering types vastly under kL estimate the difficulty of automation in a lot of different fields. Why do you think this is? I suppose I could come up with some hypotheses but I am interested in what other people think. "Edge conditions" are actually core conditions for automation. If your automated process can't self-regulate it often negates the point of automation. If your process costs more than human labor then it may not be price competitive.

Mostly unrelated, but the headline reminded me of this very satisfying video.

https://youtu.be/-BTWiZ7CYoI

This may be because robotics companies don't want to stop at just laying bricks - they would prefer to 3D print the entire house. There has been huge advances in the space of 3D printed buildings in just the past couple of years with printers capable of printing far more complex designs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xqnx0EwOk

The reasons are economic, not technological.

There's a surplus of cheap labor in the world, so it doesn't make financial sense to bear the upfront costs.

That's oversimplified. First robots usually did not make economic sense. After they were made useful and sold in quantities, this made them worth their initial investment.

The problem is simply fricking hard. Bricks need to be split into pieces (half-bricks, third-bricks etc) to accommodate windows, doors and edges. Due to real-world plot plans, there will be plenty of non-right angles. And yes, there's laying mortar which is an art form :D

It’d be nice to see an actual cost breakdown. All-in cost per brick laid at a certain capacity factor between major maintenance events and so on.

Anyone taking part in the design of one of these machines should be required to stop, prior to starting design, and build a wall of bricks by hand. In a grassy field. From scratch.

The problem with all of those (less the exoskeleton) seem to be a poor grasp of the challenges involved in doing the job. They all seem to assume a perfect environment; something rare (impossible?) for most on-site work.

Robotic masonry is the "faster horses" version of cars. It's everything humans do easily but is nearly impossible for machines

Right.

I'm expecting something like a cement truck with a long arm and a multiple pass deposition process. Possibly foaming the concrete at the nozzle; if anyone ever gets that chemistry to work. It might well be called "manually operated", I'd anticipate someone at the controls at all times even if it can do some sections by itself, just for safety and "shit happens".

I'd also anticipate at least one person at the nozzle at almost all times, dealing with inclusions and inspecting etc.

Even this won't be cheaper or faster than current techniques, but the onsite foamed concrete extrusion might become popular enough to endure for insulation, looks, or other reasons.

Houses of the future will be build from sustainable materials like wood. The walls will be prefabricated in factories and then just assembled at the construction site like IKEA furniture.

There simply is no need for robotic bricklayers as there was no need for robotic horse feeding. Instead humanity invented cars.

If non-newtonian mortar and bricks are too complex for robots, it's ok.

We did not come up with mechanical horses, did we? We came up with automobiles.

Let the robots build houses in their own radically different ways: for example, 3D printing on site. Or anything else, really.

Don't let's just get obsessed with bricks in particular.

They are kind of here, not the classic concept, however: https://www.dezeen.com/2021/06/22/broad-group-modular-apartm...

I have always been amazed at the number of brick buildings that exist and think about the fact that every single brick you have ever seen was manipulated and touched by a human hand.

TRILLIONS of bricks through the ages.

I'm equally surprised that I have (not that I recall) seen a brick building being laid IRL.

It's a good article, but he doesn't mention TBMs which use robotic arms to lay the concrete semi-circular blocks that line the tunnel, and I believe that's mostly or completely automated. Of course that is a more narrowly scoped problem than general wall building.

Very good overview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAD48rqqcd8

Its just a very intricate process, a messy material and probably a manual job for a long time.

also food for thought: GFRG construction. essentially pre-fab. lighter material.

https://www.ijser.org/researchpaper/Rapid-Affordable-Mass-Ho...

https://publications.iitm.ac.in/publication/mass-housing-usi...

The article mentions many current companies in R&D regarding 3D concrete printing. What is it about brick laying that makes it more difficult or less likely to be pursued?

If laying bricks is so difficult, should we not look for building other types of walls?

And what about adding mortar (or glue) after lego-like bricks have been added on top of each other?

Where are the robotic hod carriers?

Without looking closely at the economics, my impression is that brick work is expensive, but if you want it cheaper, you can get siding installed.

The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. We haven't automated driving; we haven't automated picking tomatoes; we haven't automated bricklaying; we can't automate cooking a fucking hamburger. But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.

Frank Bardacke in his book, _Trampling out the Vintage_ describes the great skill that agriculture workers bring to the job that they do, from knowing whether something is ripe enough to pick to the dexterity required to pick it without destroying the fragile fruit or vegetable. Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely never will be.

Please, learn some humility and try to understand the skills that every human possesses and that they bring to their work.

I think this is a rather harsh take. Most of the people working on automating it understand how hard it is and are striving through it. You need some of these irrational believers for progress!

Robots that can identify and pick up things in the environment haven't materially improved since the 60s. What has changed is how factories and warehouses are built, so that the 'environment' and the 'things' are strictly constrained to enable robotic arms to grab and move them. But let one thing get a little out of place, or worse, let a human get between an industrial robot and the thing it's trying to pick up and.. well. RIP.

That simply isn't true - the machines of the past were pretty much blind but safety interlocks are able to detect an approach. The reason for the constraints are efficency in manufacturing is preferrably reducing the process to simple repetitive actions for improved throughput and reliability.

> simple repetitive actions

Exactly, and those actions are able to be simple and repetitive because the machines don't have to try to identify objects in the environment, they just reach X meters, open their grappler Y centimeters, close it until it reaches Z Pascals of pressure, move, repeat.

No real "AI" required, just programmed to handle expected conditions. But get just a little bit outside the pre-programmed constraints and... https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-06-amazon-workers-hospitali...

As a result, the humans are now forced to accommodate the failings of the machines. https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/8346932/amazon-factory-workers...

It looks like he has contempt for the people trying to automate something. He doesn't realize how hard they are actually working, nor they insight they have into the problem. From his perspective he thinks they are wrong for thinking they are taking on an easy job.

> But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.

Can you think of any other reasons that people might believe something like automated driving is right around the corner?

Or is "contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people" the only reason one might believe this?

You can phrase it more nicely. But it boils down to things like: "How hard can it be?" "Humans suck at it (though they really don't)" "We do great at 90% of the problem" and so forth.

Computers can do really well in controlled, specced situations. Not so well in a complicated environment where humans live and operate.

I agree with you in general, but not about the hamburgers. https://www.creator.rest/

That thing is well-known to break all the time. You can even find people on Yelp talking about how the robot is broken. It's mostly old technology anyway; it's still a fundamentally mechatronic system similar to what AMF made several decades ago.

https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE

That one didn't make money either, and it also broke a lot, and had all sorts of other problems. Believe it or not, the core technology has improved a lot less than you might think. They may have put a prettier skin on it but it's still the wrong approach.

I don't have contempt for the skills; I have great respect for the skills. I have contempt for the prices of things.

If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000?

Why is the permits process nationally broken? And despite being skilled, that doesn't mean they're informed: why do contractors not know what they're supposed to do? Why do the people handing out permits not know what they're doing?

See also: trying to renovate or buy a home in Arizona.

Construction costs are cheaper than ever? The prices have skyrocketed in the past year. Is this something special to Germany? I would've expected that the pandemic shows equal effects elsewhere.

I'm just saying this because every but-actually poster says something like this, but I think homes come with more amenities now than they did in the 70s, so buying a home isn't really any cheaper adjusted for inflation.

Yes, bigger houses for fewer people means costs still go up.

Because people have great skill in exploiting other people as well.

I used to work in a family construction business and now I do machine learning contracting. When I compare the value you get for 300k worth of construction to what 300k of ML specialist time buys you, it's hard to agree with your comment. I understand the reasons, but generally I'm blown away by how cheap most labor intensive things are, compared to how much people will pay for software projects.

I don't agree with your comment. $50,000-$100,000 of well placed funds with the right software consultancy can generate a project that pulls in enough cash flow to pay for itself multiple times over in just the span of months.

Machine learning is not a high return investment on its own. It is only leveraged as a technical piece of an already cash flow healthy larger pie in most organizations.

The division of labor and supply of various workers makes most labor intensive tasks self-explanatory in cost.

$300,000 can buy you a property that takes years to double in value in comparison. They're completely different categories of capital utilization.

FWIW, there are many opportunities for significant ROI in ML / analytics projects.

Low-hanging fruit I've seen in this area has included automating or augmenting labor-intensive manual processes (e.g., classifying insurance claims), replacing human judgement with time-series forecasts within an ordering system, and optimizing email campaigns with RL.

It's all about the things that scale to many people vs things that don't. A feature improvement in some app that makes extra $0.01 / year value for tens of millions of users is simply a larger effect than building a house for one family.

Why do you assume construction costs are the only factor that drives property value?

Cost of lumber, cost of land, cost of equipment, cost of permits, cost of inspections.

It really isn't a box for $300k. You can buy a mobile home for what $60k?

Permit process isn't broken.....this is a view often held by incompetent contractors. I have performed various jobs like building retaining walls, bathrooms, electrical, decks and never had an issue as long as my work was up to code.

Permits can protect a homeowner, when the contractor bails without finish the work.

But back to why a home can be $300k, it is a lot of work and materials. From an article, "According to NAHB, the average material cost to build a house is $296,652, with the average square footage of a house being 2,594. That means your cost per square foot is $114.36 ($296,652 / 2,594)."

You are underestimating how much it costs to get lumber, copper(can use pex), brick, concrete etc.

You sound like someone saying, I can have a wordpress site for $1000, but why does it cost $500k to build an ecommerce platform.

>and never had an issue as long as my work was up to code

Permits cost tens of thousands of dollars, and months of processing in my area. They’re happy to sign off at the end after they’ve extracted the maximum they can from you.

There are likely some valuable skills and services that go into that permit price. I doubt it's pure grift.

It never is. It would've been eliminated otherwise. There's some core of value being delivered, wrapped in a layer of corruption. The question is, what's the relative size of the core to the grift layer?

And that is assuming you can get permits - which in many jurisdictions can take years to figure out, and multiple major changes.

The intent in many jurisdictions is to tarpit change as much as possible and it shows.

It isn't the permits themselves which are usually the problem.

Sounds more like a problem with your area, or maybe you're doing different type of work compared to what I'm doing with my house (residential vs commercial maybe?). I've been applying for various kinds of permits (building, electrical, plumbing, still need to get mechanical) and in all those cases, I applied online and the permit was issued same or the next day (& precon inspections that I went through have all been scheduled for the next business day). Total cost was in the ballpark of $1000. This is in WA. I did not need any structural changes so the process for the building permit was cheaper & quicker than it could've been. I also had some work done that did require structural engineer & submitting drawings - it was a fraction of the remodel cost anyway.

OTOH, insisting on permits potentially saved my ass at least in one case - I had a contractor remodel my bathroom say that "they do everything up to code". Their work did not pass inspections on the first try (had to fix things up both for plumbing and electrical).

Permits are a local government issue. Maybe your local government is extremely reasonable and punctual when it comes to building permits, while my local government is lazy or stupid or corrupt. Maybe you have no problem with building permits because you don't live in a county where the authorities slow-walk anyone who doesn't buy them a case of whisky.

Permit process also protects the community.

I was paying for a house to be built by a contractor who, it turns out, screwed up the permitting process and didn't do a hydrological survey of the erosion pattern on the land. The town yanked his permit to build.

I was grumpy, but when I drove by I could see clearly what the problem was: he hadn't planned for drainage at all, and the new construction and alteration of the terrain had already caused rainwater to start pooling at the base of my future neighbor's foundation. If he'd been allowed to continue unhindered, he would basically have guaranteed my neighbor's property would have been destroyed in 5 years.

The price consumers pay for something has nothing to do with the cost of producing it. Not counting the cost of the land itself, an identical house built in the city costs the same in hours and materials as one in the country. Price is determined by one thing, and one thing only: how much other people are willing to pay for it (i.e. the market sets the prices).

The costs vs sale price are relevant to the builder in making the decision on whether to build and whether to sell, as they wouldn’t do it if they’re going to lose money.

This is only true in the short run by the way. In the long run, in a competitive market, cost is absolutely the driver of price.

How is this true for generally appreciating assets like a house? It makes sense for commodities but until location and style don't matter I'm unconvinced there's a such thing as cost driving price in the housing market on any timeline.

As I get older, I’m increasingly skeptical of the idea that many markets are competitive. There’s so much overhead to so many businesses, plus heavy use of price discrimination — it doesn’t feel like a lot of the stuff I buy comes from a competitive market. (I’m sure less likely to notice the stuff that is.)

> why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000?

Manufactured homes are like $20,000. The plot of land that they go on however, is subject to political rules. Turns out that people don't like cheap housing to be available, because it attracts the underclass.

Its important to remember that housing is mostly a solved problem. The politics of housing are not solved however: too much "progress" (aka: higher prices) and people complain about gentrification.

Bringing down the cost of housing is akin to inviting gangs and thieves into your neighborhood. Everyone wants to support the poor and needy, but just not in their backyard.

Its very difficult to convince a typical city / town / county to support the development of a new trailer park. That's just how politics are today. Politicians are screwed if prices go up. Politicians are screwed if prices go down. Politicians are screwed if prices remain the same.

-------------

Its not very difficult to physically build any kind of "underclass" home. Trailer parks, low-income housing / mixed-income housing (be it a high-rise or low-cost apartment/condo complex), etc. etc. But its very, very difficult to convince local board members to zone an area for that kind of home.

I agree. People pretend that expensive housing is an issue and then when it's their turn to buy and own the house they insist that it should stay expensive.

> If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000?

They're not cheaper than ever. Materials are expensive and in short supply. Labor is expensive because demand is high and few people want to do manual construction work.

But you're not literally buying just a structure. You have to buy a property for the house. In many locations, the valuation of the land a house sits on is higher than the value of the structure itself. My house could burn to the ground and my property would lose less than half its value, and I'm not even in a very high cost of living area.

You can buy a house for $300,000 if you're not picky about where it is. One of my family members had a new construction house built in the 2500 sq. ft. range for under $300,000 recently. The trick was that they live in a small town where property can be purchased for around $10K.

> See also: trying to renovate or buy a home in Arizona.

A quick search on Zillow shows over 1,500 listings for freestanding single family homes (not apartments, condos, townhomes, or other properties) for $300,000 or less. Many of them are even recently renovated, have 2-car garages, and frankly look quite nice.

Usually when someone is talking about starter houses being exorbitantly expensive, they're actually referring to the property being expensive. Loosen your requirements for location and it becomes much easier to find affordable housing. In most states you don't even need to move that far out of city centers. There are hundreds of properties within Phoenix and Tuscon that are $300K or less.

You can buy a box to live in for $50K. A place to put it, on the other hand....

In attempt to turn this teachable: the costs that go into housing aren't just labour, whether skilled or unskilled. It's a number of economic goods and services, each of which has its own price dyanmic.

The chief cost of housing is land, and that follows the laws of economic rents and assets, in two principle ways:

- For goods subject to rents, that is, where supply is nonresponsive to price, any surplus value accrues to the seller rather than the buyer. The marginal price tends toward the marginal value rather than the marginal cost.

- Moreover, as an asset, land is subject to the general behavioural tendency that holders of assets will tend to act such that the value of assets inflates. This is through constraining supply, sale, credentialling, regulation, certification, and other elements. This shows up in zoning, construction, certifiction, lending, insurance, and other obligations or limitations on new construction.

- Unskilled labour is subject to wages, which tend to fall to the level of marginal cost, if not below that. Incidentally, in a simple society of labourers vs. rentiers, surplus value accrues to the rentiers as a case of the law of rent vs. the iron law of wages.

- Skilled labour wages deviate from those of unskilled as skill itself is a rent-generating factor, and hence skilled labourers can command somewhat higher wages. (Adam Smith's discussion of the five factors involved in the wages of labour are a fascinating read.)

- Materials follow natural resource pricing, which ... is very poorly understood by modern economic theory, but tends to follow the marginal cost of provision by the marginal supplier. That is, the supplier with the highest viable cost structure sets the market price for the commodity. Perversely, when the market is oversupplied, prices often fall (expected) and production rises as the only way producers have of meeting their own fixed costs is to produce and sell more at the lower price. (This occurs because marginal costs may fall below fixed costs.) The situation is not long-term sustainable, but may persist for a substantial period of time. For purely extractive resources (mining, gas, oil), the replacement cost of the good is not factored in at all, and market prices may be hundreds to millions of times below any rational fully-accounted cost basis.

Net productivity of labour has increased markedly. The land-cost of housing has increased far beyond that. Materials have shifted in several ways, with numerous older materials having been replaced by nominally-cheaper modern equivalents. Restrictions on construction methods, materials, designs, etc., impose additional costs and constraints in design and building as well.

The question largely reveals a large ignorance of the factors involved.

None of this is a mystery. There's nothing to teach to me here. It's just a complaint about the market.

No, it's a complaint about private land ownership.

As far as renovations, I think the simple reality is that renovating requires a lot of very skilled labor, and skilled labor is not cheap. Good contractors where I live are booked months and months out. The weird thing is if you look the salary data, these jobs don't even pay very well. Electricians and plumbers both have average salaries of $56k, compared to ~$100k for software engineers according to BLS data.

If these numbers are representative, it's no wonder it's hard to hire a contractor. The pay sucks and it's hard work that requires a lot of training. Overall I don't understand how the economics of this industry work such that doing anything is expensive as hell, yet the workers are not paid very well.

Sorry, that's just not true. Electricians in Phoenix can break $100k, and they openly tell me about it all the time. The electrician who did my house went from making $40k in his first year to $250k float month-to-month. It makes working in software look like being a peasant out here.

Ask me what HVAC companies make in the hottest city in the nation.

Take it up with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These are nationwide averages.

Reporting on averages is fine but you've made the mistake of thinking that average is representative of anyone. In all likelihood salaries are not normally distributed around that average, and we'd instead find a low hump (rural) and a high hump (urban, suburban).

I doubt it, when I looked at Phoenix salaries they seemed to be in line with the bls averages.

Why renovate someone's bathroom when real estate investors will pay you more and will throw years of work at you?

Also, housing isn't expensive because of labor costs. In many places, the land itself is worth more than the improvements made to it.

I have contempt for the price of devs. They sit in cushy chairs in climate controlled rooms eating cushy meals. Skilled construction people hone their craft over time just as a dev does, only in a not so comfy chair nor comfy climate controlled room in a workplace that has all sorts of situations that might seriously harm/mame/kill the worker or fellow coworkers.

It goes both ways

Trying to grow plants outdoors is a humbling experience for sure

> we haven't automated picking tomatoes

I wouldn’t know whether their claims hold water, but http://www.automatorobotics.com/autonomous-single-tomato-har...:

A robot that can reliably detect ripe tomatoes and harvest them with consistent quality at a rate of 10-12 tomatoes per minute.

[…]

reducing the harvest costs by 50%

(The videos give me the impression that “10-12 tomatoes per minute” is best-case)

I can see an automated tomato picker working well for tomato varieties that are uniform and grow on largely uniform plants. But those tomatoes are bland.

Heirloom tomatoes look like a topology project gone horribly wrong, and the colors aren't found in any Pantone catalog. They are also the most delicious.

There's definitely a place for both. We have to get ketchup ingredients from somewhere, and gourmands will always want the ugly heirlooms.

> I can see an automated tomato picker working well for tomato varieties that are uniform and grow on largely uniform plants. But those tomatoes are bland.

Throughout history, our main trick when solving a problem with technology was to constrain the problem to something that's much easier to solve, by changing the environment.

For example, all-terrain mechanized transport is hard, and to this day, nobody except hobbyists and militaries even bothers to try tackling it. Our solution was to flatten the terrain into roads, so that we could just use wheels. We've been iterating on that idea ever since.

I see this pretty frequently in manufacturing. Oftentimes, larger products will have curves, design changes, layering complexities, and judgment calls that simply can’t be performed via machine, further, the parts will come in at different times and assembly lines themselves will have to be flexible and optimize for the given real estate.

Having respect for the skills of a worker and also believing that they are possible to automate are not mutually exclusive. It's no different from people saying the same thing about chess and chess players, or go and go players, before the problem was solved.

And it's not just blue collar workers that are a target of this idea. We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. GitHub copilot.

Programming will be automated long before brick laying. We can barely print a document with confidence.

Printing is hard primarily because of misaligned business incentives, which form a bubble of suck that's eerily resilient to market optimization.

Automating programming definitely seems like an easier target in comparison.

Printing works really well. It's print drivers (software) that are an utter and complete mess.

I've never had a printer that didn't work: I've had plenty that wanted the correct offering to the HP website to be made and several hundred megs of adware installed before a postscript file made it to the actual hardware.

Programming is the conversion of ambiguous human requirements into machine readable instructions. To automate, computers would need to understand ambiguous human requirements. This is AGI.

By comparison, brick laying is trivial.

This plays exactly into the OP's comment - but if that is your sincerely held belief there are ~4,000 bricklayers~[1] in America today and you could make a whole boatload of money if you could automate their work.

1. According to the BLS link below it's actually closer to 50,000.

No one is even thinking about trying to completely automate coding.

There's tons of "no code" solutions - but these are all just different versions of coding and programming languages - usually with GUIs and pictures instead of words.

There's more than 60,000 SWEs that work in my company. Amazon, Google, Apple, and MSFT could make >$10Bn/year each if they could automate coding.

The fact that none of them are even trying - when it sort of goes with their core businesses - should give you some indication that this is something unlikely to be automated any time soon.

The reason bricklaying ISN'T automated is probably because there's ONLY 59,000 bricklayers in the US (a $3B market), it's not generalizable, and even if it was - the cost to move a machine, set it up, and maintain it - it's hard to imagine massive cost savings - 50% seems generous.

If there were >1M bricklayers - and/or they made >$400k/year on average, the work was generalizable, and automating would bring huge cost-savings that could be captured - there would be a LOT more effort into automating bricklaying.

But none of these are true. How much of brick laying is generalizable (building a new house) vs custom (repairing some old wall with non-standard bricks)? I have no idea - but I'm guessing not a lot more than 50%. That's a $1.5B market. You'd be luck to cut the costs by 50% - that's maybe $750M.

It could easily cost more than than to automate bricklaying! Why even try?? No one is interested in investing in that risk / reward.

On the contrary - most of Radiology could be automated and most of it is generalizable. Since hospitals are monopolies and healthcare is a mess - you might be able to capture all the cost savings - which would be close to 100%!

Since there's ~35k Radiologists, and they're some of the highest paid workers in the world - there are a lot of efforts to actually automate this (and they're doing quite well).

If you think automating radiology is easier than building a hamburger-cooking robot, you're naive. If you think AGI is easier to achieve than building a tomato-harvesting machine, you're clueless.

There's just simply not hundreds of billions to be made automating cooking hamburgers and harvesting tomatoes more efficiently. And it's not easy to generalize and automate cooking or harvesting EVERYTHING. And even if there was, restaurants and groceries are commodities - not monopolies. You couldn't capture all the savings. A race to the bottom on prices would eventually just pass the savings on to the customer - not juice profits. That's not something you want to spend massive, risky R&D on. That's why we haven't automated cooking hamburgers and harvesting tomatoes. Not because it's harder than protein folding, fusion energy, or true AGI...

From another point of view - we've had machines that mop floors for decades - and there's still a lot of people employed to mop floors. Is this because mopping floors is incredibly complex and creative? No - it's because people who mop floors get paid minimum wage, and they do a lot of other things, too.

I imagine this goes for most skilled trades jobs. The lack of generalizability becomes apparent every time I undertake a DIY project that doesn’t go as planned

No code still has a bit to go. It's main focus right now is having a model and can generate a UI and have a method to update a database. When you get into the weeds of what companies want, it's that person in group A is allowed to update, group B can create things, and group C can only view. And on top of that there is private stuff that only the same user can see. It's that shit that makes no-code a non-starter for Google, Amazon, ...

Perhaps a company that wants to display the current Bitcoin price on a screen and let you do currency conversions you can do that in "no code", but then again, a programmer can also do that with code in 15 minutes...

> there are 4,000 bricklayers in America today

There are over 50,000 bricklayers in the US according to the BLS[1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472021.htm

Oh sorry - google apparently failed me - thanks for the correction!

ONet claims nearly 82k brick masons

https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/47-2021.00

A little bit of tongue in cheek:

As a tradesperson myself, working in a highly automated part of the metal fabrication process, I feel an urge to say something like:

The only thing standing between a programmer and unemployment is a sufficiently advanced compiler

But only because I great contempt for the hubris on display in these sorts of threads.

At the end of the day though, it's a-little-bit-form-column-A-and-a-little-bit-from-column-B.

We went from not-flying to landing robots on another planet in a handful of decades, who knows what a little bit more processing power and a few more layers of abstraction could bring.

Mix mortar to the consistency of mashed potatoes and apply gently but thoroughly to two faces of a heavy, but brittle object, then place that brick into a corner with both faces with applied mortar of even thickness touching receiving faces at the same time, no lateral sliding. Press the brick gently into the corner and tap, making sure that it lines up perfectly vertically with a string line and horizontally with the other bricks, then wipe off excess mortar, creating a visually appealing groove, all while standing on a muddy slope. Best of luck, robots.

https://www.fbr.com.au/view/hadrian-x

Brick laying robots already exist. This isn't a problem that can't be solved, it's a question of making it economically viable.

But the future is pretty obviously going to be skilled machinery operators overseeing the automation.

Even more interesting its once you automate like this the constraints start changing: i.e. it's easier to have a robot lay bricks with epoxy then cement, whereas a non automated work flow would struggle.

There's a Perth based company which has a prototype which basically will layout an entire house on a concrete slab via a boom arm that uses this approach: pallets go in, structured bricks come out.

Yes, that system is discussed in the article, and it looks like it doesn't work very well. I doubt it can keep up with human labor.

I agree. It will happen eventually, but the bigger point here that is more related to to discussions on HN is that despite a lot of enthusiasm, machine learning and AI are still in the amino acid phase of evolution, and everything still sucks.

It doesn't have to keep up with human labor, it just has to reduce the total amount of human labor. And slow today doesn't mean slow tomorrow. The residential dishwasher is a great example of this.

I mean once the boston dynamics stuff gets good enough… it will. To be frank, I want my Jetsons robot maid.

> Yes, that system is discussed in the article, and it looks like it doesn't work very well. I doubt it can keep up with human labor.

It works poorly, therefore bricklaying has been automated. The programmers won. The bricklayers won too. It's only Grakel with his weird bet that lost.

You can mention these same difficulty of tasks for soda can manufacture or a dozen other how its made videos. And yet, a lot of those processes that are just as complicated as brick laying, have been automated by robots.

Key difference: you deploy a soda can robot in a factory. You have an enclosed environment with all of your inputs nicely set up.

For robot bricklaying, you can depend on the electrical supply. Everything else is a toss-up. I do think it's possible, but you don't choose your working environment or the weather conditions so everything is gonna be a lot more hassle.

And then it starts to rain.

Nonsense. If you could automate programming, it would be the last thing to truly be automated before the singularity. After all, if programming was truly automated, the program for creating a brick laying robot would write itself.

It's no different from people saying the same thing about chess and chess players, or go and go players...

Well, car assembling plants are older than Deep Blue, IIRC and they are very complex and "very robotic" in a physical sense.

I think it is different from people saying we couldn't automate chess or go. The difference is between a purely data domain, chess or go, where it can both be translated 1-1 into a computer simulation of the game AND the inputs are data.

I realise that you could define everything as data - laying a brick, you take the inputs of where to position the brick, etc. However I think we can make the distinction between chess where the data is "Pawn is on e4" and the much greater complexity of the real world where we are dealing with billions of atoms. Perhaps not everyone agrees with me.

A big part of ML in robotics is actually making nearly 1:1 simulations of the world and the actuators.

It's fairly sucessful. We can simulate for example driving a car really well.

Simulating human behaviour is harder, but simulating brick laying is not that hard, we have the technology to do so already.

>We can simulate for example driving a car really well.

Can you qualify this more specifically? In many domains (particularly safety critical ones) “reasonably well” may not be sufficient

Self driving hours having a lower incident rate than human drivers. That’s the minimum. Having a 99.9x% success rate (put as many 9s as you desire) is your qualifier and that’s a standard measure in operational uptime.

I've heard the opposite of this in that self driving cars underperform compared to human drivers across the board. The sample size of self driving cars doing everything a driver does is also miniscule. Do you have a source?

So far Google's self-driving cars have vastly fewer accidents than humans have per mile. Or what kind of performance are you interested in? I am sure, they could also be made to drive faster than humans and still be safer on average thanks to superior reflexes and foresight.

But what do you mean by 'across the board'?

As far sources, a web search gives many articles about safety of self driving cars. See eg https://www.wsj.com/articles/self-driving-cars-could-save-ma...

You are probably comparing accidents of self-driving cars in optimal conditions (since they cannot even drive in any other conditions lol) to all accidents in all conditions in human drivers.

Humans get into plenty of accidents under clear skies, too.

See https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/30/waymo-... which tries somewhat to correct for conditions.

I think there are some potential flaws with the “per mile” or “disengagement” metrics.[1] It feels very much like using LOC as a measure of software quality. Sure, it’s a metric but probably not a very good proxy for what we’re after.

[1] https://www.automotivetestingtechnologyinternational.com/ind...

Sorry for the delay. I don't get notifications. Not sure how people are so active on here with communication. Maybe you or someone could recommend a way?

Anyways:

> But what do you mean by 'across the board'?

By that I mean across all of the people driving in the US and their rate of incidence. For example, average miles driven, the amount of drivers and the rate of accidents. I think the most intriguing detail could be drawn from the rate of fatal accidents, since that's the most concerning, ignoring accidents that cause a casualty as I don't know the method for gathering that data off hand. One could glean a lot of info from that. Here's some rough numbers I gathered, and please forgive the naive approach to my data gathering to express a point:

Average miles driven/person[0]: 13,000 Average fatalities/year[1]: 37,000 Approximate number of licensed drivers[2]: 231,652,000

I don't have numbers for self-driving cars and the number of accidents, but regardless, would it perform the same with the same number of miles driven per car. Keep in mind that self-driving cars currently aren't navigating in all circumstances and will beep to make the human take control again. At least with Tesla.

[0] In 2019, there were almost 229 million licensed drivers in the United States. (Source: https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/) [1] Over 37,000 Americans die in automobile crashes per year. More than 90 people die in accidents every day. (Source: https://www.thewanderingrv.com/car-accident-statistics/) [2] https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/10/number-of-licensed-dr...

Just to be clear: when I say self-driving, I mean whatever Waymo is doing. Tesla has assisted driving at best at the moment. Waymo is aiming for true self-driving.

Looking at fatalities would make the analysis easier, but when I last checked, Waymo hadn't driven enough miles to make a good comparison possible on that metric.

(They haven't killed anyone yet, but neither would the average human driver have done so, yet.)

So we would need to look at less dramatic accidents.

Yes I think what you're saying is accurate. My apprehension is the lack of concrete data we have for comparison at the time to whole heartedly put my life in the hands of engineers, for this particular thing. I do, however, look forward to a well vetted, tested and regulated, automated driving future.

Car simulators are accurate enough that F1 drivers drive more in simulators than in practice laps. They are very accurate. More than well enough to train a model to drive, for example, reasonably fast. Of course the real world is always different even if simply because the conditions are different, so you keep some headroom.

I think this has more to do with cost and convenience more than being a better representation of what it's actually like driving on the extremely varied state of a track. You can see this with the practice laps being extremely important because of the way the tire compositions, weather and car set ups change the dynamic of the cars drastically. The simulators can't replicate this effectively.

I suppose it all depends on the abstractions you make and how well those abstractions hold in the real world. Humans of course make abstractions but many of these are done subconsciously.

Simulating brick laying might be able to be done in a controlled environment, is it possible to make it low cost enough and accurate enough for all general purpose brick laying situations? Probably, given enough investment we could get closer. Is ironing out all the nuances cost effective? I don't know.

We can definitely simulate a driving environment but I given the recent struggles of self driving cars I don't think I would say that we are at the point where we've solved the problem of actually driving them in everyday situations.

The biggest issue with self driving car isn't actually getting the car where we want it to go, it's predicting human behaviour and dealing with unseen conditions. But the actual physics of driving cars, yeah we've gotten them down beyond everyday situations.

GP doesn't seem to be saying that chess and brick-laying are equally difficult to automate. GP is saying that a belief in brick-laying AI represents no more contempt towards brick-layers than a belief in chess AI represents towards chess players.

Where's the robot that can actually pick up and move pieces on standard chessboard, with no special guidelines or restrictions on pieces?

Seriously?

There's lots of them on YouTube. Here's one with two different robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YDAXfSAWw

Nope. Those are pre-programmed to know "the board is here", "the pieces start here". Give them a random (but still legal) position, ask them to make the best legal move. See if they can even find a piece

Quick test: replace any pawn with a queen. See if the bot notices.

There are plenty of other videos that demonstrate computer vision detecting chess pieces.

> We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. GitHub copilot.

As soon as GitHub was acquired by Microsoft I knew their intentions were for automated coding tools. I wasn't concerned about this affecting my livelihood in the short to medium term, because state-of-the-art ANNs won't be able to grasp the context of business requirements without developing adult human level intelligence. Thus, even a full program built by such a system would need to be verified by a human to be sure it will behave as desired, obviating any gain in terms of automation. Even the rudimentary boilerplate that copilot spits out suffers from this problem.

I started thinking about how you might automate game development, and I think it's a pretty good thought excercise on the topic.

I feel like the end result is just what we already have, game engines with visual programming and drag and drop editors. You don't add much value by automating the programming since you still have to define the input and outcome.

The real win was building the complex logic and state editor into a good UX.

This video really amazed me in terms of automated game development. My fantasies are something like this and GPT-3 plus a couple decades of progress.

I think we'll get to genuinely open ended sand box games.

https://youtu.be/udPY5rQVoW0

Predicting the next frame from previous frames and learnt sequences is a neat trick, but I think automated game development is already very possible with simple techniques like genetic algorithms, or even a PRNG. I mean Rogue and it's descendants are very much automated game development, but GPT-3 could be useful for something like dynamic quest generation, world-building, narrative, adaptive NPCs (including dialogue) etc.

I'm not sure classic procedural content generation like in rogue-likes is all that comparable to using a GAN to run the whole game?

Have a look at the video, it's quite impressive.

I've seen it before, and I've a basic understanding of GANs, I just don't see it being overly useful. This technique can make a really blurry simulacrum of an actual game, and that's really cool, but I'm not sure how it could be used to make a something both truly novel and coherent. There's plenty of low hanging fruit for AI within an engine, whereas using AI to be the entire engine is somewhat infeasible

You are right about the technique not being very useful as of today. My fascination stems from my assumption that more resources poured into this approach would yield vastly better results.

Even just watching the video, I came up with several possible improvements to try out. Eg adversarial training, that would really hone in on the situations and aspects where the model is weak so far, like edge conditions; instead of just using normal gameplay as input.

It's definitely an interesting area of research, but for that example you still had to make the whole game in the first place in order to have something to train the model on. Say you have a novel game idea, how could you use that approach to make it a reality? I'm not sure you could, but like you mention it's a really early example and who knows where it ends up.

The other part about that GAN Theft Auto example is that it doesn't actually know what's going on, like there's no game state. All it knows is that "When I have a frame that looks like this, and they press that button, I think the next frame would usually look like this". So it's got no internal game logic, it's just really good at painting what games look like.

About the first one:

Even going about this very naively, you could at least use it to train a model against a supercomputer running the game, and then run the inference on much more modest end-user machines.

But you can be much more ambitious: have you seen eg style transfer? So you could probably do a bit of ML black magic to train your model on GTA, and then point it at the Google Earth data to get a GTA-like set in real-life London.

Or you could use something like style transfer to go for a cartoony look, or add ray-tracing like effects, even if you didn't have these effects in your original engine.

Or you can use a pre-trained model (eg on GTA), and then spend a relatively modest amount of extra training to get a different kind of game, eg one that has magic or so.

About the latter part: I do think their model is already running with some state. But even if it ain't, that's a relatively small thing to add with already known standard techniques (or you can come up with new techniques.)

And this is where I think of the game-side of games programming to be more an art form (I say this as an ex-professional game developer). GPT-3 could be used for narrative generation, environment generation, and adaptive AI, and these are all exciting areas for research and experimentation. But as you say, underneath is a solid engine, and one day an AI could feasibly build an engine from scratch, but I think that day is decades away. The AI that we have today are just toys.

Code has been getting automated since basically day one of programming.

The funny thing about automation in programming - it has always opened up more doors - and led to more employment in programming.

We are so far from anything that resembles real automated coding - that coding automation should continue to be celebrated by engineers for a long time.

GitHub Co-Pilot and VS Code aren't going to replace you - they're just going to let your company offer a better product, release a new version sooner, test different versions, etc.

Automated tools will lower the difficulty of coding to the point where it'll be easy to pick up and be massively productive. Developers will be replaced by domain experts becoming productive developers easily with automated tools.

Ha ha. I remember people making those claims about 4GLs and visual programming tools 30 years ago. It wasn't true then and won't be true in our lifetimes. Domain experts typically lack the mindset to think through edge cases and failure modes.

There's an assumption that great coders eventually write themselves out of a job. It's only half true. The reality is, they write themselves into a better job. Because the more divorced these "domain experts" become from the underlying processes and scalable systems that back their GUI-based decisions, the more of a technological elite the coders are who can delve into a mess of hardware and software stacks and explain or fix it when something goes wrong. If it used to be the height of corner-suite hubris to believe that code and coders were replaceable in building a simple app, it's now become something like magic to them that it gets done at all. And we can see in realtime how this system breaks down when there aren't enough coders at any price to fix the system. To ever get system A to write system B, someone has to write system A and then know how to fix it. You're imagining a miraculous future where system A diagnoses and repairs itself. If it could do that (although it never will), it would have long ago dispensed with useless business managers, and supposed "domain experts". Every coder is a domain expert by the time she's done writing a serious piece of business software. The execs who sit on the fragile shell of a company to both parasitically raise funds and exploit coders are the only people who hold the fantasy that one day they'll never be at the mercy of investors or coders. It's a neat way of reassuring themselves that they have value, but not much else.

"If I had a nickle for every time..."

The closest a product that ever did this was Excel.

Didn't happen with Visual Basic, has not happened with JavaScript.

Domain experts are all using Excel, not any other automated tool.

And, honestly, Excel is a pretty good tool for that.

I just hope we could improve on it.

See eg https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/podcast/advancing-e...

Haskell automates a lot of programming but it sure isn't easy

Haskell is fun, but it isn't special in this regard.

Any language any human would touch these days automates lots and lots of things for you.

(Even Assemblers do a lot for you nowadays.)

Lowering difficulty of lifting boxes doesn't eliminate warehouse personnel: it means that now every worker can lift hundred of heavy boxes a day and the company can deliver 100x more stuff. Businesses don't want to get rid of personnel; they want to increase profit-per-employee and automation does just that.

Right. A working automated bricklaying machine would be like a C compiler for brickmasons.

It doesn't perfectly translate IMHO. A bricklayer contractor that has a mostly automated machine doing 80% of the job would probably hire maybe 1 guy to get shit off the truck and clean dropped mortar. Normally he might have 2 or 3 extra guys to do some stretches or turns or something like that.

Look at houses now vs houses from 200 years ago. Modern house are much more advanced and complex. Automation such as a bricklaying machine would allow these 2 or 3 other guys to do something else that would support further complexity and advancement in house building, or anything else for that matter, just as automation doesn't cause loss of jobs in programming.

I'd rather live in a house without undefined behavior.

Do you suppose handwritten assembly had a lesser rate of unexpected or unintended behaviour?

Is a computer iterating through every possible chess move "skill" or just being able to compute the best odds?

Is this any different from what a human is doing?

I would also say that the approaches taken by something like AlphaGo are more interesting, too. Because unlike chess the solution space for Go is too large to simply look at all possible moves.

a computer iterating through things isn't skill per se, TO ME, because it's just what it was built to do. No more skill involved than a machine cutting wood. A human doing this is a skill as they have honed that ability with hours upon hours of studying and reading and playing etc. A computer can do this from the first time the devs get the bugs worked out.

Is that the same?

We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. IBM's "FORTRAN Automatic Coding System", whose name is an abbreviation of "FORmula TRANslator". This is an enormous effort. John Backus, a longtime proponent of such "automatic programming" systems who is leading the project, reported in 1955 that in its first edition, in early 1956, "FORTRAN" is expected to include eight to ten thousand instructions. It will be distributed to all lessees of the IBM 704 high-speed electronic digital computer in 1957. Though many programmers are skeptical of the quality of programs produced by the so-called "compiler", experience has shown that it only takes 2-3 days to learn, and the programs output by "FORTRAN" are often better than those written by expert programmers!

One of the great improvements in the second edition of FORTRAN, FORTRAN II, is that an application program can be written not as the output of a single compilation, but of many separate compilations.

[The above is liberally quoted and reorganized from the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 6(1), 01984.]

> We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm

Every step in programming tooling since programs stopped being input as manual hardware configuration has been automation of programming, and its just made more work, and higher paying work, for programmers.

The main reason there's more programming work, is because machines are capable to do more(connectivity, mobility, ux, marketing, etc).

What do you think enabled these things?

Advances in hardware and software.

Not the same programmers though nor the same job though. The job of programmer-by-plugging-in-wires was still eliminated.

> Not the same programmers though nor the same job though.

The details of job changed, as more low level pieces of it were automated leaving the higher-level, more abstract bits, but for most of the changes, while some either bailed for other work or rode the dying embers of the old way to retirement, programmers generally adapted.

Actually it is realy different since games like chess or go are closed problems, i.e. they are deterministic. The number of parameters necessary to integrate to turn an ostensibly open real world problem like "driving" into a deterministic game like computer chess or go is far greater.

Are we sure that the ML experts that wanted to beat real human chess players actually respected them? Wouldn't they know that at some point the enjoyment of chess itself might fade if the best in the world is a computer? Maybe chess is having a moment right now due to Netflix, perhaps maybe it's a permanent upswing. But long term, I don't know if it will remain interesting to people.

I personally doubt chess will fade. As far as I can tell, the enjoyment of high-level chess is less to do with reaching objective perfection, rather it's more the "thrill" of seeing a _human_ who has poured their life into the pursuit of improving their game. It doesn't really matter that a computer can beat them, we care about them because people like seeing other people's talents.

And on a casual level, nothing changes if the best in the world is a human or computer, so the casual player isn't particularly affected.

Chess is now more popular than ever before.

Not sure how important Netflix is here? There are lots of chess players on YouTube, too.

Go also get much more popular in the West for a while when Alphago came along.

Dunno, but people are still into competitive weightlifting even though the forklift has been around for over a hundred years.

It's always a little weird the jobs that are easy to automate vs the jobs that are hard to automate.

Jobs that require interaction with the physical world and people will almost always be a hard to automate thing. There are simply too many variables.

The real problem is when we make the results of a job worse to aid in automation. The prime example here is tomatoes being breed with thick skin, picked before ripened, and then squirted with some chemicals to make them red so people will buy them. All while sacrificing taste.

Your observation is closely related to Moravec’s paradox of artificial intelligence: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

People also seem to always miss that we always engineer the product in order to be able to automate it.

The most automated things have been designed by engineers with robotic assembly in mind.

> [mortor] it’s a non-newtonian fluid, and it’s viscosity increases when it’s moved or shaken.

Which is why the points about non-Newtonian fluids like mortor changing viscosity seems right on the money. Anyone trying automation with normal mortor gives me zero confidence. I like the robot truck idea, seems like a winner compared to others.

Exo suits / better humans in the meantime, purpose built machines later.

Bogus reason. Plastic melt is also a non-Newtonian fluid and yet plastic parts production is thoroughly automated.

I’m not sure that tracks exactly. I think the issue is the stacking of very heavy things on top of a nnf goop.

The issue is that "buildings have been engineered to be built by humans".

So, the building tasks are set to be a compromise of materials and human skill.

If we want machines to build them, then we need different systems and materials.

> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here.

I'm confused - based on your Github profile I assume you'd fall under the category of "computer people". Are you saying you feel this way? Because I certainly don't.

When you have a hammer, everything look like a nail. Technology is our hammer.

Technology is a generalisation of a hammer.

Technology is the domain of means to ends. It's literally how things are done, and includes such factors as skill, training, technique, organisation, and logistics.

As such, your comment is self-negating.

> We haven't automated driving

Yeah, we pretty much have... it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI

And honestly, from a business perspective, most people really don't care about the skills ordinary people have.

Look at the wine industry for example. Top shelf wine is hand-picked, for exactly the reasons you outline, and some people are willing to pay top dollar for that end product.

But the vast majority of grapes are harvested by very simple machines, because scale and profit, and most people just want a $10 bottle of decent-ish wine.

We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger.

Will it be as good as a "hand made" burger? Maybe.. maybe not?

Will the people paying a few bucks for a burger care? Nope.

This isn't an issue with "computer people"... this is an issue with economics.

> We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger.

Curiously, McDonald's is probably as close as you can get to automating burgers and fries without crossing that final step of removing human labor entirely. It's not really cooking anymore, it's process chemistry[0], with some final assembly required.

[0] - Which I actually consider to be a good thing.

This is the pattern you'll see repeated if you go looking for jobs that have been "automated away" - they get the dumb bits removed. No longer does the mail room call your desk to inform you that a package has arrived - scanning a barcode does that. The jobs in those sectors slowly shrink down (until eventually they just get rolled into the gigantic umbrella of responsibility that is IT) but the work never completely disappears.

Once upon a time I'm sure some dude had to constantly monitor the temperature of the cellar that holds the wine casks and occasionally call into town for a block of ice to keep things cool. Now we have refrigeration - and that mind-numbingly tedious portion of running a winery can now be conveniently avoided (except for the occasional maintenance) so you can concentrate on more important things.

Eventually it might be that McDonalds automates it's POS and menu to such a degree that for every ten franchises there's just one dude in a car that drives around responding to error codes and, ideally, the people who worked there will find something more creative and fulfilling to do with their lives. I don't hold those people with contempt - I feel like their skills (and everybody has skills) are being underutilized.

Keeping the humans honest is generally the biggest problem with automation. Left unsupervised, people will trash everything. Add one overseer and that goes down a lot.

I would expect to see it done at places like stadiums or other events where you have a crowd of 100k who all want to eat at the same time and the expected quality if near zero.

As a mechanical engineering intern in the early ‘90s, I worked for a company that among other things, designed food handling equipment for McD. For them a lot of automation is about safety - young/inexperienced employees around potentially dangerous equipment = workers comp claims. I helped develop a fully automated pushbutton system to change fryer oil out from a bulk storage/disposal system. They had a lot of burn claims from teenagers changing it manually back then.

I would be interested to know if there is feedback in the McD process chemistry loop.

A fun part of cooking by hand is dealing with the quirks of fresh produce. These once-living plants and meats are inconsistent enough to require decisions on the fly, mid cook. One cut is 50g thicker at one end than the other, one parsnip is 10% more dense at the top, this cod retained more salt than yesterday and requires less seasoning, etc.

Of course this kind of cooking is miles from what happens in fast food, but there’s a reason the burger station is the most senior position. Cooking patties properly requires skill to get them crispy, fully cooked, but still juicy. Hot damn I’m hungry now.

> I would be interested to know if there is feedback in the McD process chemistry loop.

There must be, running an open-loop process is rather tricky. If it's like any other process in food manufacturing, there are likely both continuous automated checks of trivially measurable properties and regular (every hour or less) manual lab tests[0].

> These once-living plants and meats are inconsistent enough to require decisions on the fly, mid cook.

As I understand their process (from what little I read and watched about it in the past), the keystone of it is minimizing input variance at every stage. They stick to specific varieties of potatoes, they keep bun production centralized, they place specific requirements on slaughterhouses for the meat they then blend into standardized pulp, etc. This makes it possible to constrain variance downstream - e.g. the meat pulp has roughly uniform properties, so it can be shaped and processed in tightly controlled fashion.

At the end come pre-processed food pieces that are then shipped to restaurants for assembly. McDonald's venues don't really cook this food, they put it through the last stage of processing pipeline - heating it in programmable ovens/fryers. Restaurant workers aren't making any cooking decisions. That's how McDonald's ensures its product consistency - there's no place left for a human to screw things up.

[0] - Industrial food processing plants have labs on-site, which receive samples from the production line on an ongoing basis. This is used to check the batches for contamination / pathogens, verify measurements from automated sensors, and to provide ground-truth data for models used in model predictive controllers, if such are used in the process.

McDonalds effectively did automate making a hamburger through supply chain and on-site process. It's cleaning that those professionals say is difficult, which seems to be why machines don't handle the very last portion itself 100%.

We have not automated driving. Phoenix is step one but there are parts of the world that get weather other than sunshine. Yeah those cars are cool, but the roads in Phoenix are better than any other major city in the US, the weather is binary, sun or rain, the city is modern, and the stop lights communicate with audi (I think its audi) cars and you can see when it's going to turn green on the instrument display. Phoenix is the absolute ideal place for self-driving cars. Again, its a great achievement. They are doing great work, but I think it's a stretch to make the general statement that we've automated driving.

We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour

It's time to link to the AMFare video again.[1]

This was done 50 years ago, but wasn't cost-effective.

Country Garden in Beijing has several automated restaurants. They have 6 restaurants on this system now, one of which seats 600 people. So at scale, this is starting to work. Maybe. Looking at the videos, it looks hard to clean. Commercial food processing equipment has a look of "can be blasted with boiling soapy water daily", and not seeing that here.[2]

[1] https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1GipbISX54

> Yeah, we pretty much have...

"Pretty much". heh, there are 6 distinct levels of car automation for a reason.

> it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI

Now try this in Wisconsin in January with 8 inches of snow on the ground. I consider Wisconsin wide adoption, do you?

And how many accidents are there in Wisconsin in January with 8 inches of snow on the ground?

We don’t have to perfect automated driving; we just have to get it better than the average human… and that’s a pretty low bar.

And we don’t even have to automate driving everywhere. Who cares if we can’t automate it for 5%? Can we automate it for 95%? Hell, if we can automate it for 30-40% with a lower accident rate… that’s already a win.

And yet the list of jobs that have been successfully automated over the decades is considerably longer. Everything you mentioned will eventually be conquered as well (driving, farming and cooking are probably the worst examples you could have used – we are well on our way to automating all of them).

Driving and farming I can agree with having automation potential. But the issue I have with cooking is that automation for the culinary area is limited to McDonalds’ type assembly of uniform pre-made food items that require the absolute minimum in terms of culinary ability. I can comprehend robotic prep machines, slicing, dicing, maybe even butchery. But it is a significant step from there to a robot following even a well written recipe for demi-glacé or for a custard, let alone being able to tell when potatoes are roasted to the right fineness and have a sufficiently browned appearance. Maybe my kids won’t work at Burger King in high school, but I can’t see line cooks at any real restaurant being replaced any time soon.

Why not both? You make it sound like only as long as we don't have an automated hamburger maker we should respect the people who cook our hamburgers, but not afterwards. Progress in any field is usually a function of amount of money poured into it, if the margins for hamburgers were large enough, ie. no cheap labor or higher food prices we would have invested more engineering effort into making smart enough robots that make hamburgers and probably by now have them being made automatically.

Laying brick is hard. I bricked up a small gap in a two-foot-tall brick wall in my back yard recently. It took me literally all day, and looks exactly as messy as someone who lays bricks might expect from someone who uses a computer for a living.

Watching those people on youtube who make tutorial videos that go super fast and make it look really easy... You can record yourself writing a python script and make it look easy. Those people are pros, and have skills and experience to back it up. It isn't easy.

the best part is programming has been getting automated since it began. the assumption that since that process of automation hasn't cut into programmers' salaries and job prospects yet that it won't ever, like making software is something special.

I think many programmers do assume that their job could be automated. I showed GPT-3 to coworkers and they immediately took that into consideration.

Automation of a field:

(1) increases the value produced per unit of labor input in the field at the low end of quantity, but potentially resulting in reaching the point of rapidly diminishing returns faster.

(2) and, increases the domain in which creating/maintaining automation has value, increasing the value of automation work and pushing out the point where automation work reaches diminishing returns.

Which is why programming (viewed broadly)—itself part of automating any field—keeps being resilient against adverse impacts from automation. Because as long as we are increasing the scope of automation generally, we’re pushing out the diminishing returns point for programming, and automation of programming isn't pulling that point down fast enough to offset that effect. And automation—both of programming and of everything else—keeps pushing up the starting value of programming work. (It also makes it more abstract and about providing input to higher-level automation tools.)

I don't think this is it.

Computer people tend to work in office settings. The reason the old joke about threatening to replace people with shell scripts works is because a lot of office jobs can be replaced with shell scripts. This is because, rather than physically working in the real world, most office jobs entail manipulating symbols, which is easy for computers but hard for humans. (That's why we invented computers).

A lot of work in the real world entails some decision-making component that can be expressed in terms of symbol manipulation. This overlaps with the part that many people find difficult, because people are naturally good at physically manipulating the real world. So when we talk about automating driving or picking tomatoes or bricklaying, we are only accounting for the difficulty of automating the symbol-manipulation abstraction of that task.

(This is basically the conceit of "Manna", a science fiction story where a ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being.)

If you're measuring the skills of manual workers against the standard of how hard it is to build a robot that replaces them, they are surprisingly hard. The same is true for the skills of trained animals. Maybe we should start worrying about replacing human beings with robots after we've managed to figure out how to replace dogs with robots. Once we have enough bomb-sniffing robots, drug-sniffing robots, livestock guardian robots, police pursuit robots, search and rescue robots, and so forth, to the point where we don't need dogs, then maybe we can start to worry about the human jobs. (Or maybe not--dogs have a really good sense of smell that might be harder to replicate than some human capacities.)

> ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being.

Isn't that basically amazon warehouses today? (though text based)

Please stop. The only ‘skill’ human beings bring to picking fruit or vegetables is their willingness to work for minimum wages because we as a society have failed to keep up with tech even as our population’s food needs exploded.

I have done some workplace automation (building support tools to automate away stupid paperwork) and I've never ever felt contempt for the people I'm building tools for. These people do extremely intelligent work and make evaluations on complex scenarios - my tools only help them minimize the silly BS that slows them down, building layered tools on top of poorly designed assistive tools or breaking out greenfield solutions to help tackle problems that need to be done entirely manually.

I really disagree that almost anyone who has built tool assistance into someone's workflow will view their workflow as simple and view the employee with contempt - actually getting to know the BS they have to put up with on a daily basis actually deepens my appreciation for what they're doing. Sure I can cherry-pick examples that make folks look bad - employees today, even millennials, are for some reason allergic to learning keyboard shortcuts and will use right-click to paste. That's somewhat on them, but more on the company for not providing training time to teach better data entry habits.

If one of these highly skilled agricultural workers was given a robot that used scent to determine which fruit trees likely had ripe fruit that needed to be harvested - I'm sure they'd appreciate it for what it is, a tool that lets them concentrate on more important things. And, if we as a society are moving into a era where automation becomes so widespread that jobs are much fewer and far between 1) we'll waste a lot more time building freemium games or whatever BS labour sink society comes up with next and 2) we should realize that taxes need to go way up on the people still employed and UBI or other social services are needed to keep us functional as a society. Having too much productivity is such an easy problem to solve - you just don't do what America is doing and let it all coagulate into the pockets of a few hundred billionaires... and then everyone gets to live a good life.

I don't understand UBI personally. In general it will have the net effect of dropping even more people out of the labor pool. Even with increasing population over the last 50 years the number of people participating is going down. Not as a percentage, but a number.

With that, things like getting a plumber will skyrocket in price.

I mean why should I fix your toilet if I can be at home playing video games right now? I'm going to have a roof over my head and food in my mouth either way.

Current UBI experiments don't have the experience of going 100% of the population, so there's no way to know what will happen.

I dont know the answer, but I think people will pursue sections of the labour market which cannot (yet?) be automated. Why play video games that you're frankly sick of after a few months, if you could help someone out for both a social and comparatively large financial reward?

It would also depend on the specifics of how UBI would be implemented. Where I live I could stop working and live off welfare, providing a minimal standard of living. Yet almost nobody chooses this way of life as people strive for higher living standards, and for many work plays a part in giving meaning to life.

If more and more jobs get automated this might become a problem though, assuming no new non-automatable jobs are created.

I have absolutely no contempt for the skill. Why would I? But I do recognize that building costs are expensive and that building stuff could be faster and safer and thus think that automation would be good. Same goes for my job, really. Automation has so far been a net good for humanity and if we ever transition to a true post-scarcity society, it will be through automation.

Also, if you speak with people in ML/AI, they will not tell you it's around the corner. They know that physical stuff and robotics in general is hard.

Also, builders and the like often have a great amount of contempt towards any desk job - is that OK? Why?

My dad automated cooking meatballs ages ago. I can't imagine a hamburger would be too much harder.

There's folks on YouTube already who can automate the assembly of a hamburger using Lego. It's just slower than having a person do it in a semi automated manner.

Per the article, we have automated some of bricklaying (for roads), and I've definitely had ads show up for tools that reduce the skills needed to do bricklaying.

We've also automated parts of driving - staying the same speed, parking, etc. The automation all changes which skills are important, and steadily makes high skilled jobs into less skilled jobs.

It’s not contempt computer people have for manual labor; it’s the contempt that bosses have for paying wages.

People also tend to ignore that automation minimizes craftsmanship and art to a MVP. I know a few masons and they are literally artists. Sure, you can lay bricks and have a wall but it's not the same as a mortar-less stone wall crafted with artistic skill. They are completely different objectives and render completely different impressions. Automation eliminates the humanity of a task by existence. We will lose those unspoken qualities when automation breaks into the mainstream and no one will know everything they have lost in the process.

> they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.

Where do you get that? While you focus on the "skill" and "intelligence", automation is about productivity and freedom (from labor)

> learn some humility and try to understand the skills

What do you think automation is, if not to try to understand the skills, then turn it into the program?

How much does a bricklaying system cost vs the cost of a human? Seems to me that humans are just way cheaper and lower maintenance.

It isn't the cost of one human vs one machine - that is a harder point to get to. Instead it is about the number of humans and their cost vs the machine adjusted equivalent. Scale is where industry takes its crown.

You must interpret everything people say in the worst possible way to have this viewpoint.

Besides that It's not my experience at all that "computer people" think that these things will be automated in a short time frame. It's the opposite. The "computer people" are highly skeptic because they know much better then anyone what a computer is capable of. It's almost always the managers and marketing people parading automation around.

> computer people

The article suggests efforts go back over 100 years, so it seems bizarre to suggest this has something to do with "computer people".

There is a commercial burger cooking machine north of me in SF (https://www.creator.rest/), and there are similar machines for pizzas and other fast food. That isn't an unsolved problem.

Automated hamburgers at https://theroboburger.com/ and https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/16/business/white-castle-flippy-... and https://sf.eater.com/2018/6/21/17489084/creator-robot-burger...

Automated cement-pouring in place of brick laying at https://www.nbc12.com/2021/06/24/virginias-first-3-d-printed...

The robots have arrived. Unskilled labour needs to be concerned.

We'll see if / when they hit scale. From what I recall your 2018 example was a flop and the machine did not produce burgers any cheaper and needed a lot of maintenance from the staff in order to operate.

EDIT: Yes, they didn't last long: https://hackaday.com/2018/10/11/i-ate-a-robot-hamburger-befo...

Alternately, The problem may be that human labor is "cheap" for the activities which still require brick laying and in cases where it's "expensive" alternate materials can be used.

In order to make automation economically viable there would need to be a niche for "cheap" brick powered by automation. It's unclear to me that this niche exists and can't be similarly achieved by scaling up the blocks or switching to more labor efficient building materials.

I totally see/hear your position, and mostly feel the same way.

Devil's advocate asks, what about the skill of the devs that can automate that kind of stuff? The types of things that might be learned in building articulating robotically controlled apendages to pick tomatoes without crushing them or the entire plants, the skill of a robot to cook the perfect burger to the perfect temp, etc. It would be impressive.

Sending people to the moon and building atomic weapons brought us some very cool and useful unintended things. So who knows what could come from some other boondoggle type of projects?

I can only speak for myself, but I can assure you that on my end it's not contempt in the least bit. Rather, it's excitement at the hope of an amazing future; one in which people who work do so because they choose to, and not because they have to. A future in which we can celebrate life, creativity, hobbies, friends and family, without having to toil away the majority of our waking life to obtain the means of survival.

One can absolutely admire the skill of a bricklayer, while celebrating the eventual fact that bricklayers will not be forced to perform that labor if they don't want to. Those are not mutually exclusive things.

"We haven't automated driving"

One can, today, fly to Phoenix Arizona, download the Waymo app, and summon a self-driving vehicle. Although it would be disingenuous to claim that self-driving is a completely solved problem for ALL use cases, it absolutely is "good enough" for very many of them, and will be scaled out faster than you expect.

"but many more have not and most likely never will be."

Unless there's some yet-to-be-discovered supernatural process at-work inside the human brain, this is just plain false. The human brain is an incredibly complicated machine, and nothing more. It's only a matter of time until we understand, or in the worst case, simulate it with sheer computational power.

I don't think it is contempt. I truly believe most people --event technical folks-- who don't work in robotics and AI lack an understanding of just how difficult it is to build and program a robot that can do what "simple" insects (fly, ant, spider, worm, cockroach, etc.) are able to accomplish. Most of the "impressive" robotics videos we are treated to on YouTube are highly staged, choreographed sequences where one out of N attempts is used as some kind of a PR showcase not even remotely linked to real-world useful capabilities of the robot in display.

I remember how people were amazed when robots like Asimo could not be used during the Fukushima disaster. Anyone who works in these fields, even peripherally, has a very different perspective of reality vs. fantasy and knew the score as it pertained to robots like Asimo, their actual utility and capabilities.

These jobs are usually slow torture for humans to do. Do them long enough, and your body will break under the sun or you will look like a prune, get back pain or a hump and possibly skin cancer. Let the robots do them as soon as possible.

And sitting in an office chair in front of a computer all day doesn't bring its own health problems? Weight gain due to limited daily movement, forward posture due to sitting and looking forward all day, RSI due to typing and mouse movement.

A question for the crowd, then: what is the “best” job for the human body?

Because sitting at a desk all day for me definitely isn’t it.

Well unfortunately it doesn't get better than that, except when working as remote you can lie on a sofa or bed. After a full day you still have full energy to do optimal amount of physical exercise, just enough (which is relatively little) to stay in optimal condition without destroying your body.

Sitting in an office chair you can do despite numerous problems. But crawling through attics, lifting heavy items - once your injured that's it, you won't be doing anymore, potentially permanently.

Some Suggestions if I was having this problem:

1. Get a standing desk, so you can alternate between sitting and standing.

2. Learn to use a mouse with both left and right hand. And/or ball wheel mouse.

3. Try Speech to text software

4. Try an Ergo keyboard. Logitech makes an ergonomic keyboard (Ergo k860)

5. Get up and Stretch every hour

6. Go the the bathroom as much as you're allowed to

7. Go for a Walk during your lunch break

8. Go for a walk after work

9. Do some yoga. It's totally free.

   https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN2FPlvg9r-LnUyepH9IaQ

My point being duke is that physically intensive jobs such as carpentry, bricklaying and other labor intensive jobs also have their own safeguards to prevent these injuries you mentioned. Not completely remove but prevent, the same way that office jobs still impact people's health. They're required to use hats, hard hats, safety glasses, long sleeved clothing, sun screen, steel capped boots, lifting belts etc.

The things you mention do not particularly happen to everyone and even less so since safety standards have improved.

'Most' and 'never' are strong words. I'd imagine many people thought that in the past about modern automation (and it's well documented).

Things will become automated. That is the natural human progression. We are creative, and their are 7+ billion minds with new giants to stand on the shoulder of every day.

AI, soft/compliant robotics, and globalization are strong unrelenting factors/motivators.

Yes. For example, see this video of a Continuous Tamping Machine in operating, tamping railway ballast:

https://fb.watch/79KwlAt2Fz/

You probably wouldn't have to go too far back to find people sceptical about the possibility of automating that.

Reminds me of a $BIGTECH project with a one armed robot on a wheeled base they thought could do house cleaning. I mean the damn thing couldn’t operate a windex bottle. I don’t think the executives who made this pitch actually clean their own homes.

It's funny that the other comments here prove your point, egh.

They miss that the contempt is not directed at those doing the work but instead directed at the skills-- this is evidenced by how they tend to trivialize the skills that are trying to be automated.

This is especially true when looking at the spectrum of quality of human work for a given field. Take, for example, masonry. There is simple bricklaying for the front of the house. Then there is intricate stonemasonry that requires a lot of careful planning, know-how, and knowledge of historical techniques.

There is machining a piece of metal in a simple way. Then there is intricate hand-finishing of that metal at the other extreme.

I suspect that over time we will see the less artisan, less "skillful" aspects of manual work be replaced but that fine craftsmanship won't really disappear. The more you learn about what goes into making certain things by hand the more you appreciate how foolish it is to claim that it can all be automated easily.

There's also machining a piece of metal in an incredibly complex way, but with the right automation can be turned into a comparatively simple process. If you showed someone 100 years ago what we could do with a block of metal and a 5-axis CNC machine it would blow their mind. That's the type of area where automation can do great things. Look for places where "simple for a machine" and "simple for a human" diverge.

I could do the job of every logic gate in my computer, but I wouldn't want to try and boot a copy of Windows with a pad of paper and a pencil.

As an example, not something you'd want to make on a hand operated milling machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIvhlKT7SY

But to look at something that's easy to do for people and think "That's easy, a machine could do it!" It's always going to depend on why it's easy. Handling situations that differ from one job to the next is a pretty strong point for humans, especially when those differences are handled by grabbing and moving things.

But then, five years ago we would've put "playing Go" on there with grabbing and moving things, so you never know.

> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here.

Agreed. My mother was involved in my local city theatre, and always told us kids that "there would be no show without someone to lift the curtains." These people had their cameo in every finale. That has always stuck with me.

Ever wondered what would happen if there wasn't someone flipping burgers to satisfy your 2AM craving? You, no matter your riches or power or fame, would have to do it yourself.

The most innovative thing you could do is shut the fuck up and start listening. Instead of trying to replace the bricklayer with robotics, how about asking them how robotics could help them? They are the SMEs, they do a job considered easy to automate daily (and that job isn't easy to automate). They can tell you how they are wasting time on inefficiencies.

The job of technology is to allow the human to stop worrying about the rote. It is not to replace the human, or to solve imaginary problems. That's when problems arise: Facebook, racist/sexist AI, etc.

You've got enough replies at this point, but I guess I really am curious who you're talking about? You seem to have a chip on your shoulder so it sounds personal or nearly so. If I had to guess, most attempts to automate things, whether they go poorly or not, are begun by people who have that expertise or skill which you're claiming "computer people" scorn so much (which I also don't think is a very common opinion).

it's not just computer people. it's everyone. we haven't automated most jobs which require skill, precisely because they aren't easy to- and yet, teachers, agriculture workers, and construction crews are some of the lowest paid sectors. and then there are complaints about these people being lazy and there not being enough people who want to pursue these professions. wel guess what? pay them a decent wage for a change!

Complaints that there aren't enough workers in the labor market are equivalent to complaints that wages are too high. Your proposed solution is really just a restatement of the problem.

Actually it really reflects poorly on their intelligence when they fail to conceptualise the complexity of the real world.

There is great contempt for "computer people" in this post.

I find this comment so out of touch with the history of the world. Would you have us stuck back at the art of knocking rocks together to create fire since the people who created matches and lighters had so much contempt for the rock knockers? If anyone has contempt, it's this line of thought.

What are we if we aren't trying to move forward--solve problems, invent, and improve lives? A few weeks back I came across Hadrian, one of the machines profiled in this piece. The idea of building with higher accuracy, lower cost, greater speed, all while allowing people doing backbreaking labor to do something else, excited me. There was no contempt for anyone.

I like woodworking. I'm currently thinking of purchasing an industrial-grade CNC router. I think it's analogous to robotic bricklayers in many ways. I have to design a piece before I make it whether I cut it with a hand saw, use a table saw, or have the CNC router do it. The reason I use a table saw instead of a hand saw is the same for using a CNC router instead of a table saw--it's faster and provides me with a more consistent and accurate outcome.

If that's not a good enough justification, you should look into how much skill is required to operate a CNC router. You can use different bits, rpms of the router, speed the machine is moving at, entry speeds, depth of cuts, etc. There is a lot of skill involved. And when a lot of that is taken away so I can focus on what matters most--creating beautiful furniture--I'll be so very happy and won't feel the least bit bad about it.

Had OP removed the last part of this sentence:

> Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely never will be.

To read:

> Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not.

> Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely will take a while.

You would have nothing to complain about.

As often with AI / automation, the things that seem simplest to humans are the hardest to automate and vice versa.

As another example, look at translation: take an average English speaker and ask them to translate Japanese texts. They will take lots and lots of training to get good.

But provide them with a literal word-for-word translation of the Japanese text into English as cheat sheet, and after a few hours of practice, she will become pretty good at rewriting those into fine English translations. Given long enough text snippets, she'll mostly be able to figure out from context how to resolve ambiguities.

(She won't be perfect, of course, and professional translators bring additional skills to the game. But she'll become pretty proficient pretty quickly.)

Try to do a machine to translate between human language, and you'll notice that doing the literal translation part is what's really easy for the computer, but all the context is hard.

(Incidentally, that's why in the stone age of AI, people thought translation would be easy, but playing chess well would be hard.)

Why not build the CNC router? It's a surprisingly simple machine, you could build one of any size yourself. There's even open source firmware and designs around. Bonus points for making it double as a laser etcher/cutter :D

>It's a surprisingly simple machine

Yes, there is nothing dumber than a robot that doesn't know what it is doing. It is merely following a preprogrammed sequence of steps hoping nothing goes wrong.

Well, yeah, the thinking is left to you and the software.

I absolutely would if I had both more time and experience with some of the skills involved. It would take me forever to do it myself.

My grandfather spent his entire working life after the war in the cement and brick factory, and built 3 houses and various sub-buildings out of brick. Since very young age my brother and I were tasked with helping, starting with just sieving sand via mesh to remove rocks, and then once we got just a bit older and stronger, actually mixing mortar out of cement and sand and carrying the mixture to the job site.

I think I laid my first brick before the age of 9, but first just a couple here and there. Bricks are heavy! I think was 12 when I was given a straight stretch of the wall close to foundation to, and after review of my work I had to take everything apart, it was saggy, uneven and ugly. Eventually I learned to do straight walls, but the corners eluded me until at least a year doing it with very qualified masons coaching. I don't think my joints were ever pretty enough with that lovely groove that some people do, and avoiding mortar onto the brick is devilishly hard.

Where I live there is little brick construction but I love seeing what is there, it is always so pretty.

Based on my experience of the changing by the minute mortar, heavy bricks, continuous looping feedback, I don't believe it is something that will get automated.

> because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people

No. They just don’t know what makes it hard. I don’t know where the robot train drivers are. We’re doing cars and planes but it seems trains have fewer things to worry about. I don’t feel contempt for train drivers, the limitation is mine. I don’t understand. I still think I deserve to live.

I love this guy’s videos. He’s a fantastic insight into a world I barely know: https://youtu.be/qP1AmDRhoas

> The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here.

Kind of an unfair generalization, I think. I see far more comments in defense of the skill of masonry and masons, insisting that automation may be too difficult, and almost none that "display contempt" as I see it. But I could be missing something. Would you be willing to expand on what you see here?

I don’t think programmers have contempt for the skills of the workers

What they have is edge case blindness

They literally don’t know what they don’t know

Do prefabricated brick wall elements count.

Cheaper to hire a human for $20 an hour.

I'm not sure bricklaying makes a lot of sense as a construction method, when you can 3D print a house.

Laying the bricks is only a tiny proportion of building a brick house.

A good brick layer can do all the work in a few days.

My grandfather was a brickie and has seen the transition from hand-laid brick to precast slabs and facades.

It seems at least in homes, brick has become a luxury reserved for pizza ovens and fences in fancy suburbs. Given that, the automation doesn't really make sense. We already have a cheap commodity product, and nobody wants a luxury good than bogans can afford (not even bogans)

The article claims the difficulty is with the non-newtonian mortar, but this doesn't pass the sniff test. Non-newtonian fluids are easy to model and position feedback is common in virtually all modern automation systems. I say this as someone who used to do masonry work, worked in a rheology lab in college and is now an industrial automation engineer. The fact that numerous attempts to make bricklaying systems that didn't involve mortar but still did not succeed would certainly seem to indicate that mortar is not the dealbreaker. Indeed, the fact masonry assistant machines haven't seen wide adoption suggests that the problem has nothing to do with software.

Nature has optimized the design of muscles and skeletons over tbe course of hundreds of millions of years. People tend not to appreciate just how good of an actuator muscle is. You can certainly beat it in power, speed, precision, duty cycle, or form factor, but not all at once. Bricks and blocks are specifically optimized for being handled by a human laborer: they are small enough that a human arm can precisely manipulate them but big enough that you don't need to place an absurd number of them. Anything that's optimized for human manipulation will be difficult for a robot to manipulate.

A typical block weighs about 35 lbs. A robot arm capable of even lifting a payload that heavy will cost you somewhere on the order of 80k not including end of arm tooling, weigh hundreds of pounds, and draw several kilowatts of electricity. Then you need to take this arm and put it on some platform capable of moving around a job site such that it can reach any place a human could. At scale, you're probably looking at a quarter million dollar machine just to get a brick near where it needs to go. Combined with maintenance costs, it's likely such a system would never pay for itself over its useful life. Maybe you could do a little better with bricks but 5 lbs is still a lot for a precision robot. All the artificial intelligence in the world is useless if the actuators just aren't up to the task.

For better or worse, human muscle is cheap, it can be leased with no money down, and you typically don't need to pay for maintenance. That it comes equipped with an extremely powerful computing system for no additional charge is just icing on the cake. People tend to have the mistaken belief that things which are conceptually simple must be easy to automate and that things which are hard to automate must be secretly complex, but that's not really it at all. Tasks appear simple to us because we are good at doing them, and they appear complicated when we're not. Picking ripe fruit seems like such a simple task to us because that is exactly what we evolved to do. Simulating quantum chemistry, not so much. Picking fruit isn't secretly more complicated than quantum chemistry, but it's much easier to automate the latter because it's not hard to be better than a human at a task humans perform poorly to begin with.

the will come over time, just not yet as its still to expensive and there is still too much generational baggage to force the change.

They've probably gone to the pub

It looks to me that masonry is a technique that has evolved to the human form for 1000's of years. Duplicating people is hard.

Matching the building technique and materials to what is automatable seems a better bet.

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