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 bricklayers?
91–100 of 564 posts
Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?
#92The 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…
> 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 en…
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%.
Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?
#93With 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.
Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?
#94My 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)
Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 in…
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.
Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?
#96The 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…
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.
Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?
#97The 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…
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 in…
Where's the robot that can actually pick up and move pieces on standard chessboard, with no special guidelines or restrictions on pieces?
Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?
#98The 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 som…
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.
Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?
#99There'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?
Why don't we use (something like) Legos?
Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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?