441–450 of 564 posts
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All of those are super low risk compared to having your hand chopped off by something or a ton of bricks falling on your head.
In addition, office workers have the option of engaging in exercise during their off time to compensate for the sedentary aspect of desk work.
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> Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car. But aren't many of them? May be country specific, but in the one I currently reside there are tons of neighbourhoods that were built at once, 1000 homes+. In the US I've seen areas like that too. I can easily imagine a robot puts down the basics, and the individual tweaking is done later by hand.
For me this feels like robotics operating at the wrong layer of abstraction. It's like those old tomorrow's world programs where they show the robotic helper diligently sweeping the floor with a grass broom. In car manufacturing robots are used to bolt and weld together stamped metal panels, this feels more like someone designing a robot which would be given a flat sheet of metal and using hammer and dollies forming…
It's the difference between trying to take the factory to the site and just taking the parts to the site.
Also, as far as I understand, 3D-printing concrete does not give you any way to construct larger buildings, where you need pretensioned and reinforced parts...
If you think bricklaying is a simple task, you've probably never laid bricks, or likely ever worked a construction job. There is _a lot_ that goes into laying a brick wall. From excavation, base compaction, material choice, mortar composition and viscosity, wall type, overlap patterns, leveling, overhang patterns, set time, and much more. Using an incorrect overhang pattern for instance can allow water drops to fall…
there's another comment to this effect and it's spot-on. I suspect a lot of the people quick to work on these automation projects don't fully understand the complexity behind it. Just reading the descriptions of the early and later machines shows the comical oversimplification of laying bricks.
The thing is, designing a machine may be really complex, but it only has to be done once. After that, the machine will repeat the process with extreme precision. A machine can position bricks within microns and mix mortar to the milligram, doing things level and with the correct overhang is jokingly easy for a machine.
What machines are not good at is dealing with variation they can't control. Bricks are not perfectly sized, mortar behaves in unpredictable ways, the ground is not flat, not even solid. We humans have no problem with that, and anyone can do a wall shaped construction, but the machine, with its microns and milligrams may fail catastrophically at the smallest bump.
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Tech is not always an improvement, but not due to the reason described in the comment above. His negative presentation obscures an obvious fact: lower prices create the miracle of accessibility - people who could have never afforded the previous generation can now afford the new one, and in some cases their lives are changed for the better. I know most of us here are snobs, but let's not forget that only the King of…
It may not spotlight the fact that lower prices facilitate accessibility, but I'm not oblivious to it. I definitely don't want to exchange cheap cotton knit t-shirts with hand-woven garments that cost me a month's labor or something. However, only considering the consumer-side satisfaction is characteristic of our culture's obsession with consumerism and economy at the cost of everything else. We all have to work, ev…
And regarding consumerism, it's not only consumerism. Washing machines and fridges and freezers and microwaves changed the way we lived. Especially washing machines and fridges made our lives much easier and better.
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I've heard the opposite of this in that self driving cars underperform compared to human drivers across the board. The sample size of self driving cars doing everything a driver does is also miniscule. Do you have a source?
So far Google's self-driving cars have vastly fewer accidents than humans have per mile. Or what kind of performance are you interested in? I am sure, they could also be made to drive faster than humans and still be safer on average thanks to superior reflexes and foresight. But what do you mean by 'across the board'? As far sources, a web search gives many articles about safety of self driving cars. See eg https://w…
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Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car. Sometimes you have to lay down every row of bricks differently with a ton of unplanned (or unplannable) things to account for, because the electrician might work while you lay your brick etc. Not that you cannot automate whole houses and sell them off the shelve for cheap (see prefabs), it just isn't something that could be done at a site where your brickbot…
In my country houses are build in factories and then assembled on site. You rarely build a single house you build an entire neighbourhood in one go.
Eventually you end up with a dense city when you need to upgrade or replace a building in a constrained environment (think NYC or London or Tokyo), you have very different limitations and technology.
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So, I don't understand how this can be cheaper. I just saw a neighbor put together a house out of large bricks with six guys in two days. Doing the same using this method seems like it would have been more expensive. Is this an economies-of-scale thing or what? Edit: Here's a second video [1] where they use concrete. It says that factory can makes enough for 60 houses per year. It also says, at the end, that it's not…
From what I've heard from friends who build, it's less about having six guys show up and two days later there's a house, it's about what happens when they're busy and don't show up for three months while the cost of materials goes through the roof and you're stuck renting and/or paying two mortgages. If you can engineer out some of the potential delays that can take a huge amount off the overall cost.
This sounds like a problem with the process and contracts, not something that cries for a technological solution.
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> 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…
> Yeah, we pretty much have... "Pretty much". heh, there are 6 distinct levels of car automation for a reason. > it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI Now try this in Wisconsin in January with 8 inches of snow on the ground. I consider Wisconsin wide adoption, do you?
We don’t have to perfect automated driving; we just have to get it better than the average human… and that’s a pretty low bar.
And we don’t even have to automate driving everywhere. Who cares if we can’t automate it for 5%? Can we automate it for 95%? Hell, if we can automate it for 30-40% with a lower accident rate… that’s already a win.
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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 w…
My dad was a stair builder his whole career until finally becoming a freelance carpenter after getting laid off. Stairs, like bricks, are probably another implement that us techies use daily with absolutely no appreciation for complexity and skill involved. Spiral staircases are an incredible work of craftsmanship, or at least they were. I used to go to the shop with my dad when I was a kid. They would rig up these b…
Sure. Now put the build cost of the mcmansion of say $200k (plus land), vs your hand crafted mansion at $500k (plus land), and see what people really want.
In my country cookie cutter housing goes back over 100 years. The massive post-ww2 housing boom had the same design of houses springing up across the country, it allowed slum clearence and gave people cheap housing.
The main housing problem in the UK is the land cost/availability rather than construction cost thanks to every house not being bespoke. When land is allowed to be built on, half a dozen standard styles are dropped down on an estate of 500 new houses over a few years (dribbling out at the right level to maximise sale price and maintain the illusion of high demand low supply), but that was the same in the 00s, and the 80s, and even before then.
Now sure you can craft your own bespoke house with lovely hand-crafted artisinal features, but you're going to be paying a hell of a lot of money for it, and most people just want somewhere to live.