Where are the robotic bricklayers?

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.

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).

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.

The number of edge cases is simply too high