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Comment by cadamsdotcom | Hacker News Reader

Construction robots can’t happen soon enough!

Eg. if bricklayers could talk to their machine the way we can with coding agents, and say “yep, wall here please, check the blueprints to confirm how high and where the holes for the windows go”, retired & injured tradespeople could choose to come back. Less injuries means cheaper insurance & better margins. People could work in multiple parts of a site by supervising several robots, and not be exhausted at the end of the day. The list of benefits to individuals and the industry is long.

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Machines will need humans, for sure. The question is how many? For instance, there is a company using printing technology to build homes in Austin, Texas. The target number of workers needed to operate the "printer" is 3, down from 10. So on the positive side, the remaining 3 workers will have a better work environment, maybe the costs of building houses will go down a bit, etc. In the other hand, 7 workers are no longer needed. My point is that the gains in efficiency will come with some winners and, in my humble opinion, many losers. And that will only help to downsize the middle class even further. Don't get me wrong, from a scientific/technological point of view, I am looking forward it. But I am concerned with the social impact in the long term.

How many humans and where they are!

Lots of remote jobs (pipelines etc) could be done with robots and satellite internet.

If the maintenance and recovery teams can also be robots, suddenly lots of big projects could get done in very hostile environments.

>if bricklayers

If legit construction robots were a thing they'd be primarily trained on assembling the most automation friendly cladding systems instead of wasting time laying bricks, incidentally why brick fell out of favor.

Ironically a lot of construction robot explorations has been bricklaying / mason bots, but that's because laying bricks is computation and mechanically simple repetitive task not because it's an efficient building system. The benefit is we'll probably be able to build with bricks/masonry cheaper, the caveat being it will probably be relative more expensive relative to automation optimized building systems.

Well said. The company is actually more focused on earth moving, but the same arguments you make apply there, if not even more. Earth moving is a very exhausting job that most would be glad to have automated. A little known fact is that you actually get boiled no matter what machinery you use in there on the black dirt mid day, and it's not totally safe; your machine could roll over if you aren't at the height of your awareness.

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