Great read. This kind of reminds me of auto manufacturing. It's almost unintuitive how difficult, expensive & error prone paneling is. Also painting. Stamping out panels, painting and installing them is a very hard job to do with robotics. Most of the space, treasure and expertise invested into an auto factory is panel related. The "possible, but perpetually difficult" space can be a deep valley for robotics, it seem…
I think Tesla had a lot off issues when trying to automate as much as possible, possibly trying to push the envelope too much at the beginning.
Last year they've started installing "Giga Presses" - the largest high-pressure die casting machines in the world, in order to reduce parts and increase automaton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Press#Tesla
I don't have contempt for the skills; I have great respect for the skills. I have contempt for the prices of things. If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000? Why is the permits process nationally broken? And despite being skilled, that doesn't mean they're informed: why do contractors not know what they're supposed to do? Why do the peo…
I used to work in a family construction business and now I do machine learning contracting. When I compare the value you get for 300k worth of construction to what 300k of ML specialist time buys you, it's hard to agree with your comment. I understand the reasons, but generally I'm blown away by how cheap most labor intensive things are, compared to how much people will pay for software projects.
It's all about the things that scale to many people vs things that don't. A feature improvement in some app that makes extra $0.01 / year value for tens of millions of users is simply a larger effect than building a house for one family.
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…
Wait until you discover how well made old clothes were. It's this x100.
Seriously? There's lots of them on YouTube. Here's one with two different robots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YDAXfSAWw
Nope. Those are pre-programmed to know "the board is here", "the pieces start here". Give them a random (but still legal) position, ask them to make the best legal move. See if they can even find a piece Quick test: replace any pawn with a queen. See if the bot notices.
There are plenty of other videos that demonstrate computer vision detecting chess pieces.
The point is that it's easy to, from a distance, think that something is just like another thing. Without experience in a particular domain, you really don't know how things work. No two walls are alike.
The change is already there, prefab build techniques lead to construction companies keeping everything in-house - from crane operators to plumbers. The building is split into parts that can be built in-house and then assembled on-site - the aim is to have the structure with a roof on it as quickly as possible, since that makes you more independent of weather for finishing it. Especially for warehouses and facotries i…
> the aim is to have the structure with a roof on it as quickly as possible Couldn't you just build a tent-like scaffolding for this purpose? Maybe one that can be extended as the internal build progresses?
You would need to build a tent like scaffolding that you can still work in, e.g. with a crane. That would be a non-trivial thing to design, put up and maintain, especially if it has to withstand stroms without damaging the building etc.
It is simpler to just put the house there quickly.
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…
Have you seen the concrete 3D printers? They printed weird looking houses with them. Very nifty. There are even people living in them.
Yes I have seen concrete 3D printers. Does it also print rebar into the concrete?
I build robotic cells, specifically industrial manufacturing automation. They are definitely designed for the main workflow; they handle the most common exceptions gracefully but when something rare happens they just throw a fault back to the operator. The response from users (operators, engineers, customers) is overwhelmingly positive. Quality of parts increases, quantity of parts increases, cost of operations decre…
I didn't expect this comment to get this much discussion, I should have been clearer. In the context of automation, the "robotic revolution" has already happened between the 4 industrial revolutions - basically, robots exist en masse already, we just don't call them robots. The majority of manufacturing and processing is already hyper optimized to only needing a few overseers to make sure the machines are running smo…
An example I know of that resembles the bricklayer problem is synthesis of human singing vocals into MIDI sequence data. There is now a history of products around that check off the boxes - one (Vochlea Dubler) debuted just last year - and every time, it demos well but the potential audience ends up rejecting it, because it does not really add what they thought it would add to their workflow. Even if the results themselves come out usable(already a wicked problem since the DSP has to deal with a multitude of recording scenarios while achieving low latency), users discover that they need to be talented at "singing like an instrument" if they want to play instruments by singing, which is a technical barrier, not an assistance to spontaneous creation. Practically speaking, they're better served creatively by button input tools that work top-down(e.g. pick a scale, then the keyboard only plays notes within that scale) since those define down the medium and therefore perform a creatively assistive function with a legible design paradigm(different scale = different sound).
Why? Isn’t most of the West one of the the least densely populated areas in the United States? Seems there would be lots of land to build single family homes.
Wow that is an incredibly US-centric view even by HN standards. They meant the western world, not the West in the USA. Try Googling "the west" and look at the top results.
I don’t base my definitions on the most popular search results. Referring to the west as you reference makes little sense in the context of what I was addressing. HN is not only largely US focused, but I would say it is hyper-focused from the Silicon Valley FAANG perspective. Basically, a few companies in a single metro area.
Nice story. Tech is not always an improvement. In fact, the more years I live, the less enamored with tech I’ve become due to many examples like this.
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…
Cheaper stuff that lasts 1/10th as long is not necessarily a better deal. Just had a 2 year old Samsung tv lose an lcd strip yesterday for example.