161–170 of 564 posts
There'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.
The only problem is they seem to attract tornados.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, almost no houses at all are 3D printed. People are very good at bricklaying, and are paid a reasonable rate by the hour. No one has made a machine that can beat that feature set. edit: more great features of human brickies that robots are terrible at: very small working volume; very small and agile footprint; safe for other humans to work near; half-day built-in power supply.
Most people don’t buy brick houses. They buy vinyl siding which is 1/5 the cost of bricks and bricklaying.
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 d…
In other words, the problem was that the machine worked perfectly, and would have resulted in a bunch of union job losses.
Hence, it was "no good" and had to go.
The 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…
Creating new designs millions of times over seems like an obvious inefficiency.
The 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 w…
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…
And yet the list of jobs that have been successfully automated over the decades is considerably longer. Everything you mentioned will eventually be conquered as well (driving, farming and cooking are probably the worst examples you could have used – we are well on our way to automating all of them).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming is the conversion of ambiguous human requirements into machine readable instructions. To automate, computers would need to understand ambiguous human requirements. This is AGI. By comparison, brick laying is trivial.
Mix mortar to the consistency of mashed potatoes and apply gently but thoroughly to two faces of a heavy, but brittle object, then place that brick into a corner with both faces with applied mortar of even thickness touching receiving faces at the same time, no lateral sliding. Press the brick gently into the corner and tap, making sure that it lines up perfectly vertically with a string line and horizontally with th…
Brick laying robots already exist. This isn't a problem that can't be solved, it's a question of making it economically viable.
But the future is pretty obviously going to be skilled machinery operators overseeing the automation.
Even more interesting its once you automate like this the constraints start changing: i.e. it's easier to have a robot lay bricks with epoxy then cement, whereas a non automated work flow would struggle.
There's a Perth based company which has a prototype which basically will layout an entire house on a concrete slab via a boom arm that uses this approach: pallets go in, structured bricks come out.
As for contemptuous automation, consider that it frees up humans to do more emotionally, mentally, or physically challenging work. We do need to provide for those immediately displaced by automation though, since despite economists' wishes, humans don't instantly retrain and self-allocate to new jobs and industries.
In the post-scarcity world that I hope we are working toward, people will have more time to pursue their interests, which may include hobbyist bricklaying, while machines labor to make living safe, affordable, and pleasant.
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 d…
> tamping it down manually. In other words, the problem was that the machine worked perfectly, and would have resulted in a bunch of union job losses. Hence, it was "no good" and had to go.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've never had a printer that didn't work: I've had plenty that wanted the correct offering to the HP website to be made and several hundred megs of adware installed before a postscript file made it to the actual hardware.