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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Great technical post, however:

> At Monumental we’ve building robots to automate construction, starting with masonry.

If you thought running to construction jobs was safe, well thanks to Monumental, it soon won't be.

The end goal is to achieve a 10% increase of global unemployment by the latest 2035 and 40% of employers anticipate reducing their workforce where AI can automate tasks by the 2030 deadline according to the WEF 2025 Future of Jobs report. [0]

Worse if earlier.

[0] https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-repo...

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And according to OSHA, construction jobs account for more fatal injuries than any other job, so in a sense they're saving lives by reducing the number of dangerous jobs.

We've already managed to handle the desire to keep the sham of "jobs are a necessary part of life for everyone who isn't ultra-wealthy" going via Bullshit Jobs, we can keep inventing more Bullshit Jobs.

Heck, we probably both work Bullshit Jobs. Do we really need 20 different companies, all with thousands of employees, optimizing ad-impressions to make teenagers want to drink coke and buy nike shoes?

Do we really need 10 different "uber for pet-sitting your turtle" apps?

Each failed startup was, in reality, a large bag of bullshit jobs that transferred money from the VCs to bullshit-job workers, who's to say those people couldn't be ex construction workers?

Given the author's name, he's Dutch which does use a lot of brick in their houses... for decoration, it's concrete blocks with prefab brick facades for at least two decades now, built by robots. See for example https://www.bouwtotaal.nl/2021/10/prefab-gevelelementen-voor...

The demand for housing and thus construction workers isn't going down any time soon; the Netherlands alone needs to build a million homes in the next decade and are running behind on that. Brick walls is just one task of many in a construction project, just like your JIRA or Github ticket is just one task of many in a software project.

Prefab stone strips are used here and there but most brick facades are still built by hand on-site.

There's a huge shortage of workers, which is why we're working on this.

Cooking and serving at tables also won't be an excape route, given that there are already kitchen and waitresses robots.

We are really going into a dystopian world, unless there is some event that disrupts the roadmap to drive everyone into unemployment, besides a few elite folks that get to profit from the robots.

The generations to come will have much more to worry about than climate, also note how all the ongoing wars, geopolitcs change back to cold war days, and AI race has made everyone forget about the planet.

Forcing us to use paper straws and wood cuttlery won't save us.

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