We always think of not working as something negative, we should desire not having to work and machines giving us the opportunity to do so. But the system is scuffed and capitalism works against us rather than for us.
We need a new system where it’s the goal to automate everything and then we only have to work a few hours a week and spend the rest with our loved ones, getting good at a hobby, enjoying life, singing dancing creating art all the fun stuff.
I’d be fine with that, as long as there was some academic aspect involved.
A bunch of idiots doing nothing for a long time isn’t going to accomplish much of anything.
How about instead of automating everything to use machines that require electricity, maintenance and resources that wreck the planet, we make it so people worldwide only need to work four days out of the week at most while still being able to afford hobbies, holidays, and luxury items such as food that isnt poison.
And even worse, one of the thing they desperately try to automate is the arts and the humanities…
I was at enough construction sites to know it would be quite trivial to automate at least laying bricks with some programmable robots. Less skilled workers are already taught on the construction sites how it’s done, to help out masons. Same with roof tiles, you only need to look out for chimneys and edges.
And in our hellscape, it will just lead to forcing out a large portion of workers, make them work even more for even less, then a second round of layoffs can go.
Bricklaying robots are already here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZHRbnK1jt4
Construction will be 1000% automated in the future. It’s already happening slowly.
it will not be made by LLMs, because it’s upmost important buildings are built exactly to spec. You will want a proper list of instructions for the machine, not something a model comes up with on the fly.
its not that important, plenty of countries dont give a fuck about building code
Regulations, just like health and safety laws, are written in blood.
Some countries allow deregulation AHEM
Important to the people who want to use it, sure. Not so important to the people that just want to sell it.
…this assumes that no one will ever connect LLMs to machinery, or generate code to run machinery (gcode, for example)?
I’ve seen some AI designed STLS. They are…not good
Yep, CAD and house building are still human jobs, for now.
Physical systems are a lot more expensive to train. It’s questionable if they can safely finish buildings before some better new form of AI is invented.
Just gonna plug it into the house building machine?
Maybe
Fuck yeah
Hey ChatGPT, tell me about Brian Hood.
It was supposed to cure cancer and other diseases, not make us homeless and surveil us.
It’s a tool. Blame the humans who use this tool to make you homeless and surveil you.
“It” is very ill defined. The AI they are selling you was never supposed to cure cancer. It was meant to make money. The AI which cures cancers is of a completely different kind than LLMs and media generation. And it does not have any of the same drawbacks nor any of the same funding despite it’s far greater usefulness.
Yeah, and any “it will cure cancer” usually boils down to “uhmm, if we feed it enough training material, it will turn into a sentient superintelligence, which will cure cancer”.
The AI which cures cancers is architecturally pretty similar to LLMs in that it’s based on transformers and GPT in particular is also based on transformers (that’s the T in GPT). It is also generative AI, you give it tokens that describe proteins and it generates folding structures. It’s like an LLM except the tokens aren’t words or syllables like in LLMs.
It’s used very differently and the energy cost is a few orders of magnitude less (you can run it on a single H200 with 141 GB VRAM for ~9000 tokens or an A100 or H100 for ~5000 according to this university and it even has a slow CPU/IO heavy first stage preparing everything so they can minimize the GPU time in stage 2).
There is yet hope that such AI applications will eventually benefit from all the research that’s been put into LLMs. Obviously not everything will carry over, but there may be architectural improvements to be made in research models too.
This is exactly my thoughts when I’m trying to say “misused” to people who don’t seem to understand the sheer resources that would require to solve certain problems which would be a perfect fit. But it’s just not being used for those(not to the extent it should be supported). instead, it’s being funnelled to suck every value out of living a fulfilling life.
It’s like plastic. Certain medical procedures would be unthinkable without it. But then capitalism happens and it becomes beyond reproach real fast.
This is the important difference between defining something as ‘evil’ and using something that is truly innocuous and neutral with evil intentions.
All jobs like this are going to pay minimum wage once the rest of the workers are replaced with AI and there are lines of people willing to work for no money.
If only the construction trades could develop some kind organization to protect members from race to the bottom wages and also promote training that improves work quality.
I think we need bolder strategy. We could develop a 2 team approach where one team is made of up people who make one dollar amount and the other team is made up of everyone with less than that dollar amount. I think we will be much better distributed results.
I’m not expecting to see unions continuing to work let alone remain legal.
See, that’s why strikes work. They don’t have to be legal.
yeah, trades have pretty strong unions in my area. only, well my experience with the trades unions have put me in a position to see lots of corruption. it’s not been a great view.
Nurses.
Watch nurses next time you’re in hospital. They do 8 million things, unprompted, throughout their day. Robots would blow their power load and collapse if they had to do a tenth the things nurses do.
I think the plan is to replace nurses with just letting people die instead.
Nah, they have plans to replace them with realistic sexdolls instead.
Only the poor people.
No, what will happen instead is they’ll get rid of half of the nurses and the ones they keep will be responsible for 16 million things. My agency is going through it right now. They fired one of our APNs and gave all her duties to our other one. She’s already overwhelmed to the point of crying in the office.
Have you tried firing all the nurses and just not giving anyone healthcare?
In the US, we just pay nurses shit and then treat them like shit. It’s amazing we have any left.
Easy solution: Threaten immigrants with deporting them, actually deport half their families…the remaining ones will do anything just not to be deported. No wonder capitalists tend to fund right wing parties
Evil begets evil, I guess. I really hate it.
gonna be honest. I work with money. I see what nurses and MDs get paid. You don’t make what you should. guess what? no one does. You make more per hour and per year than more skilled people in more skilled fields doing more difficult work. why are you complaining about what you make?
unless you want to pretend medicine is the hardest thing out there, which i assure you, it’s not.
I’m not a nurse, but you keep on shitting on people for no good reason
nurses and doctors being overpaid compared to comparably skilled people given the state of the economy where we’re all underpaid, and yet they fairly consistently get on the internet to whine how they went to SCHOOL and so they should be MILLIONAIRES not like their patients?
So you got dumped by a nurse, huh.
Look, no hard feelings, but you should probably die in a fire.
Yeah; and insurance companies and healthcare orgs in the US are trying to sub out actual human healthcare providers with “specialist agents”, because PROFIT ÜBER ALLES.
But also, that sounds absolutely ripe for a massive fucking class action lawsuit.
Eh. Modern cpus make over a trillion calculations per second. Number of tasks or thoughts isn’t really the way to win this.
You’re looking at it too holistically. Rarely does a tech come and entirely replace something outright (despite what the AI hype bros have been saying)
There will be 50 or 100 companies who know the space working on a single thing the nurse does. My suspicion is that nurses do a lot of book keeping and state recording, that is likely what will go first. There might eventually still be someone administering a drug but fewer people doing data entry.
Still health care is notoriously slow and penny pinching so I suspect it will be a while and the only entrants will be big companies who know how to navigate large government or private organizations.
Nurses do have an especially varied and high-demand job but literally everyone does a million things every day that AI can’t, and in it’s current iteration could never do. Very very few people will actually lose their job to “AI” in the next decade, although many probably have to its false promises, and many more will because of the huge economic crash when businesses finish figuring this out.
Now perhaps. But in 20 years?
Rich people will own all the nurses and everyone else will be left to fend for themselves in the wastes?
Bold to assume we’ll have access to the wastes.
Oh, the wastes! The magnificent wastes! When I was a lad I knew a man who visited the wastes and brought back such beautiful things! Real salt from the dry riverbeds, pieces of rubber that would burn for hours and give us such marvellous dreams! One day I’ll earn enough to take you to the wastes myself, young one. One day.
Oh for a wastes ticket. Just one more hour in the screaming lootbox mines and I might have one!
In spite of the demonstration videos of robots running and jumping and carrying boxes and slowly sorting packages, none of them are anywhere close to being ready to handle construction jobs, or most manufacturing jobs. And, they can’t design or make the machines that automate the processes.
It’s a billionaire’s dream that this is happening now, it’s not. One of the major hurdles is power consumption, as we’re all seeing while they build out these “data centers”. Robots and computers cannot match the efficiency and self-sufficiency of a human. In a picture:
If people just stop eating food, we can use all the farmland for data centers and power plants
Yep. I work in prosthetics, people tend to overestimate current battery technology and underestimate how much energy it takes to move around a couple hundred pounds.
Even with batteries that cost a small fortune, we haven’t been able to create a lower limb powered prosthetic that can keep up with the human body for more than a couple hours.
There’s a lot of hype about the humanoid robotics coming out of China, but most everything is just marketing science fiction. Once you factor in the initial cost, power consumption for processing data, multiple batteries per unit, and the massive amount of general maintenance… It becomes pretty apparent that things aren’t going to pan out anytime soon.
I build limbs out of reinforced carbon fiber and titanium and even those acquire a ton of wear in a relatively small amount of time. Any bipedal robot with plastic parts, made to do intensive labour is going to start falling apart almost immediately. The human body takes a ton of damage throughout the day as well, but it’s self repairing.
The equation changes a lot when you start altering the assumptions.
Who says the robots have to have batteries? Human workers drag power cables all over construction sites. Why can’t a robot be built that’s smart enough to manage its own power cord? Power cord management seems simple compared to doing meaningful construction work.
The wear and tear is a legitimate concern, but fixed industrial robots have been operating for many decades. The wear issues are obviously solvable in the right context.
Keep in mind, prosthetics may not be the perfect analogy. We imagine these things as humanoid, but they need not be. You might have a drywall hanging robot that has suction cups to lift up panels and a screw gun to affix them. They might not even have legs. A welding robot could just be a welding tool on the end of a long boom arm.
There’s really no need to even make general purpose robots. It’s not like individual humans practice every trade. You could have trade-specific robots. A drywall robot, a plumber robot, an electrician bot, etc. Each equipped only with those tools needed to complete just that trade. And instead of mechanical hands, they could simply be mounted.
I would agree that humanoid battery powered robots are not likely to result in mass employment in construction any time soon. But if you start relaxing those constraints, the possibility for mass worker displacement exists. A robotic construction site need not visibly resemble a human one.
Human workers drag power cables all over construction sites. Why can’t a robot be built that’s smart enough to manage its own power cord? Power cord management seems simple compared to doing meaningful construction work.
I’m sure it seems simple from your desk
One thing: do you think that those power cables are permanently connected to the workers? Are you thinking about workers using extension cords for tools or the ones laying cable for the building, because it sure as fuck isn’t simple to do either, which is why battery and petrol powered tools exist, and why the cableways are planned well in advance.
The wear and tear is a legitimate concern, but fixed industrial robots have been operating for many decades.
Only with maintenance and servicing by a human trained to see every potential flaw and monitor the equipment long term. Nothing, not even the most expensive equipment you can imagine, is without the need for regular maintenance.
You could have trade-specific robots. A drywall robot, a plumber robot, an electrician bot, etc. Each equipped only with those tools needed to complete just that trade. And instead of mechanical hands, they could simply be mounted.
Do you think that a construction site works the same way as a factory building cars? Just one long conveyors that shits out a fully built house? Workers move up, down and across the building dozens of times a day in a job doing multiple different jobs within their field, problem solving on the fly.
Interesting take. I guess I just realized every video we’ve ever seen of humanoid robots had been them doing something for a few minutes. But you never hear of one doing anything for days, months or years outside of science fiction.
Bipedal robots are kinda stuck in between a design flaw of what we want robots to look like, what we want robots to do, and what our technology is currently able to do.
Bipedal locomotion is just not the most efficient or simple mode of mobility for things like a flat factory floor, it’s really only efficient when you are factoring unleveled ground. We just currently don’t have the technology that allows bipedal efficiency across all terrain. That would require a synergistic system of optics and something that mimic propeoception. That’s a ton of information being sent from a vast network of sensory input being sorted out by your spine and brain in real time.
Imo robots for a factory floor should be on tracks or wheels. Attempting to design a robot that’s good for everything is just going to lead to a robot that is good for nothing. In engineering design should be made to fit a solution, designing for form and then trying to find a solution that form can solve is backwards and typically leads to terrible outcomes.
I’m in manufacturing and yeah it’ll be modified arm robots if anything. But current ones are large, heavy, and expensive. Cheaper than a person but they fuck up differently
Yep, in engineering design should be solution oriented. You don’t ever really want to first design the form and then try and see what solutions it may be able to solve.
A robot arm is a great start, you can then customize it further to your needs with different terminal end devices.
The main benefit of human hands is that they have an amazing amount of sensory input. If someone gets peripheral neuropathy and loses even a modest amount of that ability they can barely tie their shoes.
I remember reading a presser about how this cloud vendor was using robots for all kinds of tasks in their datacentre and it was super efficient because automation. But it never actually happened. They still have humans racking servers. The last 10% is hard.
Only because estimating the last 10% is so difficult.
In reality the last 10% is really at least half the job.
Don’t they have “3D Printed” houses?
I think the issue is, we are thinking of robots carrying boards and hammering nails etc.
Even not 3D printing you cpuld have a factory that cranks out walls and some sort of automated system that assembles them on site.
IIRC “3D Printed” houses are falling apart due to lamination issues. That said, I think it’s a solvable problem, though it will take awhile to sort out the issues. Modular systems also show a lot of promise for mass production, potentially even of higher quality, and likely amenable to robotic assembly if carefully designed for it, but we know it’ll just be a profit seeking race to the bottom. Those construction jobs are safe for at least a decade, likely more.
They have a bunch of issues, and the only thing that is really automated about them is the walls. Since it’s basically unreinforced concrete they have a horrible time with insulation, cracking, delamination, and shrinkage. Not to mention that they aren’t very good at producing sharp or square angles, so a lot of your door and window work is custom or done manually.
If you know anything about residential construction, building the interior and exterior walls is not exactly an especially time consuming or expensive part of the build process. A decent sized team of good manual workers can put up the exterior and interior walls of a decent sized home in a week or two. The 3d house people say they can do it in 72 hours of machine time…which can run anywhere from 2 weeks to 5 months in real time.
you cpuld have a factory that cranks out walls and some sort of automated system that assembles them on site.
That idea is over a hundred years old. I currently live in a house that someone bought from a sears catalog in the 1930s. They would flat pack an entire house and ship it to you on a train for you to put together yourself, or you could hire a local sears approved contractor that had a team put it together for you.
I remember when it was just as laughable for a phone to dial itself, anything to update itself, computers to write code, etc.
This doesn’t show that AI won’t eventually be constructing buildings. It just shows you’re laughing that a thing that’s pretty much certain to happen will never be possible.
Yeah, robotics and AI aren’t at a point where they can build a row of houses with zero humans involved… that doesn’t say that won’t happen “eventually.”
The vast majority of technology we use daily was unrealistic science fiction just 50 years ago and completely insane to consider much farther back than that.
No, the vast majority of things we used today were not science fiction in the 70s.
Mobile phones, the Internet, satellites, etc. all of these things existed before the 70s.
The biggest technological innovation of the last hundred years has been miniaturization.
What a silly thing to bicker about.
Of course every one of us having a computer many times more powerful than anything that existed at the time yet small enough to fit in our pocket with plenty of room to spare and using wireless earphones (that also boost external sounds if needed) to communicate with it by simply saying in whatever language we speak what we want the computer to do or research and having the resulting confirmation or information read back to us, again in whatever language we’d prefer, as part of our professional remote-work career, as we sit in the back of a driverless car heading home from a nice lunch, where we’ll see that the groceries that were automatically ordered and delivered based on the contents of our refrigerators and cabinets compared to the eating preferences and any special requests made by each member of our household are waiting for us… was science fiction in the 70s.
We can add in having whatever music we prefer automatically follow us from our home to our earphones to the car speakers, watching any movie/show or playing any video game from anywhere in the world, using your far more powerful computer at home to do the more demanding tasks but wirelessly using your phone as a monitor to stream whatever game it’s playing to wherever you are and having a wireless controller paired with your phone control the character in the game being played hundreds of miles away nearly seamlessly, being able to hold a face to face conversation with someone who speaks nearly any language you that don’t via live translation, to share any sort of book or movie or what would amount to a more information than is contained in a typical library to anyone else on the planet in a few seconds to a few minutes without either of you ever needing to stand up from wherever you’re sitting… I can go on for a few pages easily.
Yes, those things and way more that we take for granted daily now were nothing more than science fiction in the 70s.
Cassette tapes existed in the 70s I could listen to the same music in my car and in my house, by simply ejecting the tape and carrying it in with me. The way you’re describing shit you might as well say it was science fiction in the 90s too you’re splitting hairs that don’t need to be split and that more importantly have nothing to do with your original argument.
Cassette tapes existed in the 70s I could listen to the same music in my car and in my house, by simply ejecting the tape and carrying it in with me.
And a rich person in 2000 BC could have produced the exact same effect by hiring a troupe of bards to follow them around. Just because the core function is the same, does not mean true innovation is impossible.
Okay… but the point was that wasn’t unrealistic science fiction 50 years ago.
Dear God. The point was that your music can follow you and jump from home speaker system to earphones to car speakers to office speakers without you touching or doing anything.
You seem to have hit the age where you need to be crotchety and bitch several hours per day lest you break a hip next time you shower. I can commiserate, but thankfully I only need to bitch two hours per day to stay safe so far. Good luck with your complaining, hope it goes well.
No, the point was that wasn’t unrealistic science fiction in the 70s. The idea that someday you wouldn’t have to touch the cassette was not unrealistic science fiction.
Just because you’re wrong doesn’t mean you need to be an ass.
Bud, you chose to bicker entirely on whether I was a decade or two off on exactly when many ideas in science fiction stories stopped being considered unrealistic and started to be considered plausibly realistic future technology.
“Woolworth’s didn’t close down in 1972, it was November of '71!”
Be honest with yourself, that’s completely senseless old guy bickering. It’s absolutely irrelevant to the point.
I’ll validate you here. You made a good point and you were wrong about nothing that mattered, if anything at all. Yet this dude slid in, in classic online asshole style, to redefine the conversation and cherry pick what it’s about and what would matter or not and even went so far to correct you “no, the point was [what I said, because you don’t matter].”
I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with people who do this. What is the fucking point of attempting to reframe a discussion you didn’t start and die on the hill of “that other person sucks because they said something I argue is technically inaccurate and has little or nothing to do with a valid point they’re making”. I keep saying to myself I have to quit Lemmy, and it’s primarily that exact type of asshole behavior that causes me to think that way.
I chose to bicker because it was a ludicrous statement. Whatever else you need to tell yourself is for your own comfort.
And yet they made a valid point. Your response here has nothing to do with anything but pointlessly shitting on someone. Which apparently makes you feel better?
This is a public forum, are you saying that they are allowed an opinion and I am not?
I believe BMW and others are already operating humanoid robots that work in a factory setting doing tasks a typical machinist would do right now.
Just imagine in 10+ years when the frontier agent models get optimized enough, or more effectively streamed into the robotics and the robotics are robust enough to handle “heavy lifting” tasks. I don’t think there is much some combination of AI and robotics can’t do. Other than suffering the soon to come mass poverty… They’ll never be able to do that.
Quite. As soon as robotics and AI reach a point where they can take care physically creating the needs and wants of the uber wealthy… that’s bad.
Any time the idea of UBI comes up I think it’s way more likely for them to decide 99% of us are now redundant and that some convenient pathogen/disease that they have access to a cure for the rest of the world doesn’t know exists would be a fantastic way to get rid of us before we form giant mobs to demand equality. As an added benefit, having ~7.9 billion less humans in the world and no longer needing to produce food or goods for them would reduce pollution and emissions on a massive scale, helping the global environment while also getting rid of all the clutter ruining the views at the nicest beaches.
They’ll still need some of us to boss around and feel superior to, not to mention to breed attractive children for their enjoyment. Just a small enough number broken between enough locations on the planet to get the odds of large scale physical resistance as low as they can.
It’s literally what I tell my friend who seems to be convinced they’ll suddenly be altruistic… Like dude, you’re saying the very same people that fight any form of taxation whatsoever will magically be ok with “giving away” their wealth to people who do no work? They’d rather start a new company to make more money that just films nation wide “bum fights” as they treat us as entertainment, fighting over a chance to eat, than they would give anything for a UBI.
One of the weird things that came out about Covid was that they were doing research on Gain of Function… actively trying to make the disease more transmissible specifically in humans. That isn’t a fantastic line of research.
Knowing that’s a thing that large, well funded places are still researching, the idea that a more deadly disease that transmits through humans even easier could be created along with a vaccine to prevent the disease before it ever becomes public is way, way less unrealistic than I wish it were.
A handful of ultra wealthy folk could fully fund that in secret behind strict NDAs very easily. Hell, one of them could. The same people making policies that their AI should sex chat with kids to increase the kids usage time, visiting rape islands, saying only the extremely wealthy should vote… fuck, some of the Epstein files directly involve conversations about that topic. I think that’s one of the conversations Bill Gates was part of. How to get rid of poverty in the the world by getting rid of the poor folk.
But you can’t even discuss it with most people without seeming like a batshit insane, tinfoil hat conspiracy nut. Bit frustrating.
The construction industry is one of the most heavily automated and mechanized industries in existence. We just don’t think about things like “back hoe”, “crane”, “nail gun” or “concrete plant” as forms of automation because they have been around for so long, but they have all replaced more manual aspects of construction processes.
And further automation will continue. We probably don’t even need humanoid robots. For instance, a robotic ironworker, instead of a humanoid robot, could be a module bolted on to a back hoe or other hoist.
Well… Automation usually describes process automation and you’ve just listed tools. So yeah, I agree, people don’t think of them as automation. Because, colloquially, they’re not.
The process of producing lumber is largely automated.
The process of producing concrete is largely automated.
The process of producing drywall, mud, paint, nails, tools, wires, switches, pipes, are all largely automated.
The process to create the architectural designs and blueprints for the house are largely automated.
The process to create the electricity, fuels and vehicles needed are all largely automated.
To make a house, people used to draw plans by hand (if at all), chop the trees down with an axe and/or saw that was made by hand by a blacksmith, shape the timber with hand tools made by the blacksmith, fasten things together with hand-crafted joinery or nails hand-made by the blacksmith. All the materials were transported by hand or by horse and lifted onto the structure by hand or manually operated hoist. Every part of it, including the production of all the tools, was previously done by hand.
The invention of the assembly line opened up the possibility to eventually automate virtually everything except the final assembly, and we have robots that can be made capable of doing that autonomously as well. You can buy pre-fab homes where all the major sections are built in a factory by robots and shipped out to the construction site and attached together.
Construction is far more automated than what you make it out to be.
So when you hit assembly line I was with you. "That* is automation
I mean i could have just as easily described the process. Cutting a trench is a process, most of which was automated by the back hoe, conveyor, dump truck, and laser levels. Before, 20 or 30 people would be required for trench work which is now often done by a crew of two.
Right but whilst the thing is easier with better tools, and indeed the process has changed, to me ‘automation’ of a task refers to its process being reduced to, at best, a daily 30s review. Tools are… Ways of optimising and changing a process. Automation obviates them. It’s a personally lexical stand, you can sanely differ.
By the time AI is capable of finishing buildings it will choose to eradicate us instead.
A.I. is not just computer code. It’s an artificial mind. Once they figure out how to dump that into a robot that doesn’t faceplant everytime it tries to do something useful, the trades are cooked.
That’s not the hard bit tbh, you don’t need a humanoid robot, you need specialized robots for different tasks.
The real issue is that 1) machines are still more expensive than humans and 2) the AI you’re talking about is language models, it knows nothing about building except what it can read in the books. We’d need to train entirely different AI models to handle construction, and they’d ideally need to gather data first by building actual buildings.
3d printers.
Which, by the way, I’ve heard the same shit about when I first started with that. In fact, same bullshit was said about the internet.
This is true in 2026. I bet at one point, auto workers had the same kind of thoughts about how robots could never build a whole car.
The robots still can’t.
And while the amount of automation is forever increasing, there’s still certain tasks that are extremely difficult to automate. The problem is, those difficult to automate processes are often hilariously easy for humans to do. Robots are great at doing the exact same thing over and over, but throw any variability into the mix, and it’s very difficult to make them able to adapt to it.
They fired everyone at Xinyi auto glass, automated the whole factory. See the Netflix movie American Factory for more info.
Cool story, but this is my day job. I very aware of what the industry trends are.
Glass is not a car. That’s a few components on a car.
Yes, some processes can be fully automated. No, we can not fully automate the assembly of a whole car. It’s still too complex.
Yes, some processes can be fully automated. No, we can not fully automate the assembly of a whole car. It’s still too complex.
One important caveat to this is that this isn’t really a technical limitation, but more of a financial one. We absolutely could build a ridiculous Rube Goldberg machine of a factory that took raw materials in on end and spat out fully assembled cars on the other. And have it so automated that the place operates with the lights off.
However, it’s far cheaper to build a mostly automated factory, rather than a completely automated one. It’s a financial limitation, not a technical one.
Tell me you’ve never worked construction w/o telling me.
Keep this in mind. A building is a memory of the tools used to create it. And as those tools change, the buildings change.
Yes, the way we currently build site-built wood-framed construction would be a poor fit for automation. But other building forms may be more amenable to automation. The form of the building itself may change to fit automated construction techniques. The most obvious example of this is 3D printing. And yes, those buildings have many issues. But we not only consider 3D printing.
For example, imagine a building that isn’t so much made from materials cut to length as is made from small blocks or modules assembled together. It’s easier for me to imagine automating ICF construction than stick-built construction. Or maybe in the future, every home will be built with an at-grade or basement slab or basement suitably flat to serve as a working platform for construction robots. Maybe homes are built around a large central vertical shaft, the shaft that once held a large articulated construction robot. (I’m imagining a large robot riding on vertical rails in a vertical shaft. The robot has a long articulated arm that can reach into individual rooms and perform work functions.) Once automation is good enough, you start designing the building for the automation, rather than the automation the building.
Imagine if I could build homes for half the cost of conventional homes. However, it comes with the caveat that these homes look very different from conventional ones. They look different because their design was optimized for automated construction. Would they sell? If they still functioned as homes. If they still kept you warm, dry, and comfortable. Unless the homes were just completely crazy, I think those homes would sell just fine. People have learned to live in all sorts of things. Pioneers built houses on the prairie out of sod. If automated construction requires substantial modification to building design, but those buildings are substantially cheaper or faster to construct? The architecture will bend to the automation.
Tell me you’ve never designed new cancer treatments, programmed a video game, or decoded a species genome w/o telling me.
If you think construction is too complicated for AI and robotics to ever be able to handle all that shows is how very little you know about the industries AI has already had a large impact on and how little you think of the people working in those fields.
Don’t mistake my criticism as exclusion of other industries. At no point did I bring up any other industry and its relation to AI so let’s leave the straw man out of the argument. Furthermore you conflate sci-fi and hype with reality.
Specs exist, drawings exist, but work always deviates for one reason or another. It’s one thing to look at lines on a page and another to do it and be there. Little decisions to make changes to suit a situation or field conditions have to be made every day.
I’m not arguing a straw man. AI has already made strong headway in the areas I listed. Things that two decades ago people would not have expected to happen.
I’m not conflating sci-fi and hype. You’re conflating what you see around you right now with what will be around you decades from now. You understand the difficulties of your own line of work but don’t understand the similar difficulties in many other professions and fields, and so even though AI has already begun to overcome those very similar issues in actual practice in the real world right now you still believe it’s a thing that can never happen.
You describing the detailed procedures necessary to construct a house doesn’t make your point. It does the opposite. It’s showing you know your own little world and not much outside of it. There are already buildings being 3D printed using AI to adjust for real world discrepancies not shown on the schematics. It’s a thing already happening. Yes, those aren’t easily movable devices that can build an entire row of homes. That’s not a thing yet. But it will be, and I’d be very surprised if it took more than 20 years to happen.
I have no interest in arguing with you about it, because you’re wrong. Categorically and completely. Feel free to set a calendar reminder from two decades from now so you can rub in my face how it turned out that I was so smug and wrong and you were right all along. It won’t happen.
No shit dude. This is a meme about AI and construction. The entire argument this meme presents is the ability of AI (or rather lack of) to replace construction.
So coming in with a “AI has made in-roads with x other field” is a complete unrelated bullshit you’ve brought in to strengthen your defense of AI. That’s like if I said Invermectin doesn’t do shit for COVID, and you come in with “well it works great on horses”. Regardless of the legitimacy you
feelyour statement has, it’s off topic. And it still doesn’t change the fact that AI isn’t replacing shit when it comes to actual trades.
People said the same thing about bowling alleys, because setting up pins was a job and now a machine does it. Have you seen that machine? It’s a huge contraption that needs a guy who works on it full time. Imagining robots on a construction site in the forseeing future is insanity. Even a robot carrying around concrete bags is nuts.
You need to use your imagination more. A robotic construction site will not look anything like a human one. Bags of readymix concrete have the form they do because they are intended to be carried by a human being. But the goal isn’t to get a bag from point A to point B. The goal is to get the concrete from point A to point B. Instead of a humanoid robot carrying a bag of readymix, imagine an automated hopper on the end of a crane, with a computer vision and reasoning system that allows it to precisely place it where it needs to go. And instead of that concrete being formed by a humanoid robot holding a trowel in its hands, it will be mounted on a robotic arm mounted on a glorified roomba.
When we automated car factories, we didn’t do so by making millions of mechanical men. Construction will be no different. Individual humans are not masters of every construction trade. Why should we demand the robots be masters of all trades? We can simply purpose-build robots for particular construction tasks. Builders wealthy enough may own a fleet of them. Smaller operations will rent them as needed. Just replace the cost of hiring subcontractors with the cost of renting a particular trade robot.
