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Where are the robotic bricklayers?

constructionphysics.substack.com

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Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#211

Post by kragen »

colordrops wrote: post #62
egh wrote: post #28

The 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…

We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. IBM's "FORTRAN Automatic Coding System", whose name is an abbreviation of "FORmula TRANslator". This is an enormous effort. John Backus, a longtime proponent of such "automatic programming" systems who is leading the project, reported in 1955 that in its first edition, in early 1956, "FORTRAN" is expected to include eight to ten thousand instructions. It will be distributed to all lessees of the IBM 704 high-speed electronic digital computer in 1957. Though many programmers are skeptical of the quality of programs produced by the so-called "compiler", experience has shown that it only takes 2-3 days to learn, and the programs output by "FORTRAN" are often better than those written by expert programmers!

One of the great improvements in the second edition of FORTRAN, FORTRAN II, is that an application program can be written not as the output of a single compilation, but of many separate compilations.

[The above is liberally quoted and reorganized from the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 6(1), 01984.]

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#212

Post by noduerme »

ALittleLight wrote: post #189
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code has been getting automated since basically day one of programming. The funny thing about automation in programming - it has always opened up more doors - and led to more employment in programming. We are so far from anything that resembles real automated coding - that coding automation should continue to be celebrated by engineers for a long time. GitHub Co-Pilot and VS Code aren't going to replace you - they're…

Automated tools will lower the difficulty of coding to the point where it'll be easy to pick up and be massively productive. Developers will be replaced by domain experts becoming productive developers easily with automated tools.

There's an assumption that great coders eventually write themselves out of a job. It's only half true. The reality is, they write themselves into a better job. Because the more divorced these "domain experts" become from the underlying processes and scalable systems that back their GUI-based decisions, the more of a technological elite the coders are who can delve into a mess of hardware and software stacks and explain or fix it when something goes wrong. If it used to be the height of corner-suite hubris to believe that code and coders were replaceable in building a simple app, it's now become something like magic to them that it gets done at all. And we can see in realtime how this system breaks down when there aren't enough coders at any price to fix the system. To ever get system A to write system B, someone has to write system A and then know how to fix it. You're imagining a miraculous future where system A diagnoses and repairs itself. If it could do that (although it never will), it would have long ago dispensed with useless business managers, and supposed "domain experts". Every coder is a domain expert by the time she's done writing a serious piece of business software. The execs who sit on the fragile shell of a company to both parasitically raise funds and exploit coders are the only people who hold the fantasy that one day they'll never be at the mercy of investors or coders. It's a neat way of reassuring themselves that they have value, but not much else.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#213

Post by dragonwriter »

colordrops wrote: post #62
egh wrote: post #28

The 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…

> We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm

Every step in programming tooling since programs stopped being input as manual hardware configuration has been automation of programming, and its just made more work, and higher paying work, for programmers.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#214

Post by XorNot »

NoPicklez wrote: post #203
dukeofdoom wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These jobs are usually slow torture for humans to do. Do them long enough, and your body will break under the sun or you will look like a prune, get back pain or a hump and possibly skin cancer. Let the robots do them as soon as possible.

And sitting in an office chair in front of a computer all day doesn't bring its own health problems? Weight gain due to limited daily movement, forward posture due to sitting and looking forward all day, RSI due to typing and mouse movement.

Sitting in an office chair you can do despite numerous problems. But crawling through attics, lifting heavy items - once your injured that's it, you won't be doing anymore, potentially permanently.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#215

Post by ddoolin »

egh wrote: post #28

The 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…

You've got enough replies at this point, but I guess I really am curious who you're talking about? You seem to have a chip on your shoulder so it sounds personal or nearly so. If I had to guess, most attempts to automate things, whether they go poorly or not, are begun by people who have that expertise or skill which you're claiming "computer people" scorn so much (which I also don't think is a very common opinion).

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#216

Post by gorgoiler »

Falsehoods that computer programmers believe about bricklaying:

\ bricks are all the same shape and density

\ bricks have flat sides

\ mortar batches are mixed to the same consistency

\ a batch of mortar has the same consistency over time

\ bricks are laid in a climate controlled environment without changes in sunlight, precipitation, or humidity

\ mortar solidifies immediately and bricks do not move once laid

…I’m stretching* it a bit, but you get the point. The linked article gets to these points* towards the end, too.

We don’t have robot brickies for the same reason we don’t have robot chefs. Kitchens are all different and a general purpose cooking robot can’t adapt the same way a human can to either a dynamic environment or dynamic raw materials. Robots win when you change the playing field: cake factories producing one thing in bulk in an environment designed from the ground up for machines. Robobricky will happily churn out 6x4 prefab panels in a factory, but it’s much harder to make that process portable enough to bring to a building site.

*Puns not intended: stretchers are lengthways bricks and pointing is the process of smoothing the mortar in rhe gaps.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#217

Post by lr4444lr »

ALittleLight wrote: post #189
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code has been getting automated since basically day one of programming. The funny thing about automation in programming - it has always opened up more doors - and led to more employment in programming. We are so far from anything that resembles real automated coding - that coding automation should continue to be celebrated by engineers for a long time. GitHub Co-Pilot and VS Code aren't going to replace you - they're…

Automated tools will lower the difficulty of coding to the point where it'll be easy to pick up and be massively productive. Developers will be replaced by domain experts becoming productive developers easily with automated tools.

"If I had a nickle for every time..."

The closest a product that ever did this was Excel.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#218

Post by wlesieutre »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #201
egh wrote: post #28

The 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…

It's funny that the other comments here prove your point, egh. They miss that the contempt is not directed at those doing the work but instead directed at the skills-- this is evidenced by how they tend to trivialize the skills that are trying to be automated. This is especially true when looking at the spectrum of quality of human work for a given field. Take, for example, masonry. There is simple bricklaying for th…

There's also machining a piece of metal in an incredibly complex way, but with the right automation can be turned into a comparatively simple process. If you showed someone 100 years ago what we could do with a block of metal and a 5-axis CNC machine it would blow their mind. That's the type of area where automation can do great things. Look for places where "simple for a machine" and "simple for a human" diverge.

I could do the job of every logic gate in my computer, but I wouldn't want to try and boot a copy of Windows with a pad of paper and a pencil.

As an example, not something you'd want to make on a hand operated milling machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIvhlKT7SY

But to look at something that's easy to do for people and think "That's easy, a machine could do it!" It's always going to depend on why it's easy. Handling situations that differ from one job to the next is a pretty strong point for humans, especially when those differences are handled by grabbing and moving things.

But then, five years ago we would've put "playing Go" on there with grabbing and moving things, so you never know.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#219

Post by XorNot »

munk-a wrote: post #126
TeMPOraL wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger. Curiously, McDonald's is probably as close as you can get to automating burgers and fries without crossing that final step of removing human labor entirely. It's not really cooking anymore, it's process chemistry[0], with some final as…

This is the pattern you'll see repeated if you go looking for jobs that have been "automated away" - they get the dumb bits removed. No longer does the mail room call your desk to inform you that a package has arrived - scanning a barcode does that. The jobs in those sectors slowly shrink down (until eventually they just get rolled into the gigantic umbrella of responsibility that is IT) but the work never completely…

Keeping the humans honest is generally the biggest problem with automation. Left unsupervised, people will trash everything. Add one overseer and that goes down a lot.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#220

Post by caf »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #175
colordrops wrote: post #62

Earlier 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…

Code has been getting automated since basically day one of programming. The funny thing about automation in programming - it has always opened up more doors - and led to more employment in programming. We are so far from anything that resembles real automated coding - that coding automation should continue to be celebrated by engineers for a long time. GitHub Co-Pilot and VS Code aren't going to replace you - they're…

Right. A working automated bricklaying machine would be like a C compiler for brickmasons.
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