[HN Gopher] Where are the robotic bricklayers?
___________________________________________________________________
Where are the robotic bricklayers?
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 422 points
Date : 2021-08-03 21:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (constructionphysics.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (constructionphysics.substack.com)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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 defective. The crew
| was using it to dump the asphalt, and they were tamping it down
| manually.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > 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.
| simion314 wrote:
| > a typical SV anti-union response
|
| if we do such low level comments then let me speculate it was
| not the union at fault but the developers, they used node.js
| and 1000 buggy and bad coded libraries.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| To be fair, highway/road construction is notorious for
| being an industry where the .gov and the unions bloat
| things in order to make more easy money for each other.
|
| Tropes about one guy working and four supervising or
| tearing up recent work just to fix something you didn't fix
| while you were at it don't persist because the industry is
| a shining beacon of economic efficiency, they persist
| because they're universal enough to be relatable.
| simion314 wrote:
| Or it could be also that we the web devs have no clue why
| some engineer that needs to know to read plans and maps
| is always needed when some guys need to dig. Mistakes
| happen with this engineers supervising (cables and pipes
| get cut or damaged) I imagine without them there will
| always be more problems.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That seems like a large assumption.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That may be the case. I am not in a position to say.
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| > They had a news crew, in front of my house, showing it off.
|
| Sounds like it did its job - it got some positive publicity for
| the people that bought it and manufactured it, and the fact
| that it doesn't actually work is a problem left with taxpayers
| and town employees.
| cudgy wrote:
| Don't forget the tire and wheel shops: loads of potholes
| boost their sales from repairing the damage done to the cars
| as a result of encountering the deeper potholes.
| tsjq wrote:
| also food for thought: GFRG construction. essentially pre-fab.
| lighter material.
|
| https://www.ijser.org/researchpaper/Rapid-Affordable-Mass-Ho...
|
| https://publications.iitm.ac.in/publication/mass-housing-usi...
| egh wrote:
| 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 ordinary people.
|
| Frank Bardacke in his book, _Trampling out the Vintage_ describes
| the great _skill_ that agriculture workers bring to the job that
| they do, from knowing whether something is ripe enough to pick to
| the dexterity required to pick it without destroying the fragile
| fruit or vegetable. Some jobs have been automated, but many more
| have not and most likely never will be.
|
| Please, learn some humility and try to understand the skills that
| every human possesses and that they bring to their work.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| I can only speak for myself, but I can assure you that on my
| end it's not contempt in the least bit. Rather, it's excitement
| at the hope of an amazing future; one in which people who work
| do so because they choose to, and not because they have to. A
| future in which we can celebrate life, creativity, hobbies,
| friends and family, without having to toil away the majority of
| our waking life to obtain the means of survival.
|
| One can absolutely admire the skill of a bricklayer, while
| celebrating the eventual fact that bricklayers will not be
| forced to perform that labor if they don't want to. Those are
| not mutually exclusive things.
|
| "We haven't automated driving"
|
| One can, today, fly to Phoenix Arizona, download the Waymo app,
| and summon a self-driving vehicle. Although it would be
| disingenuous to claim that self-driving is a completely solved
| problem for ALL use cases, it absolutely is "good enough" for
| very many of them, and will be scaled out faster than you
| expect.
|
| "but many more have not and most likely never will be."
|
| Unless there's some yet-to-be-discovered supernatural process
| at-work inside the human brain, this is just plain false. The
| human brain is an incredibly complicated machine, and nothing
| more. It's only a matter of time until we understand, or in the
| worst case, simulate it with sheer computational power.
| grandmczeb wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I'm confused - based on your Github profile I assume you'd fall
| under the category of "computer people". Are you saying _you_
| feel this way? Because I certainly don 't.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| You must interpret everything people say in the worst possible
| way to have this viewpoint.
|
| Besides that It's not my experience at all that "computer
| people" think that these things will be automated in a short
| time frame. It's the opposite. The "computer people" are highly
| skeptic because they know much better then anyone what a
| computer is capable of. It's almost always the managers and
| marketing people parading automation around.
| spideymans wrote:
| When you have a hammer, everything look like a nail. Technology
| is our hammer.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Technology is a _generalisation_ of a hammer.
|
| Technology is _the domain of means to ends_. It 's literally
| _how things are done_ , and includes such factors as skill,
| training, technique, organisation, and logistics.
|
| As such, your comment is self-negating.
| robomartin wrote:
| I don't think it is contempt. I truly believe most people
| --event technical folks-- who don't work in robotics and AI
| lack an understanding of just how difficult it is to build and
| program a robot that can do what "simple" insects (fly, ant,
| spider, worm, cockroach, etc.) are able to accomplish. Most of
| the "impressive" robotics videos we are treated to on YouTube
| are highly staged, choreographed sequences where one out of N
| attempts is used as some kind of a PR showcase not even
| remotely linked to real-world useful capabilities of the robot
| in display.
|
| I remember how people were amazed when robots like Asimo could
| not be used during the Fukushima disaster. Anyone who works in
| these fields, even peripherally, has a very different
| perspective of reality vs. fantasy and knew the score as it
| pertained to robots like Asimo, their actual utility and
| capabilities.
| pradeep_m wrote:
| I think this is a rather harsh take. Most of the people working
| on automating it understand how hard it is and are striving
| through it. You need some of these irrational believers for
| progress!
| LanceH wrote:
| It looks like he has contempt for the people trying to
| automate something. He doesn't realize how hard they are
| actually working, nor they insight they have into the
| problem. From his perspective he thinks they are wrong for
| thinking they are taking on an easy job.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Robots that can identify and pick up things in the
| environment haven't materially improved since the 60s. What
| has changed is how factories and warehouses are built, so
| that the 'environment' and the 'things' are strictly
| constrained to enable robotic arms to grab and move them. But
| let one thing get a little out of place, or worse, let a
| human get between an industrial robot and the thing it's
| trying to pick up and.. well. RIP.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| That simply isn't true - the machines of the past were
| pretty much blind but safety interlocks are able to detect
| an approach. The reason for the constraints are efficency
| in manufacturing is preferrably reducing the process to
| simple repetitive actions for improved throughput and
| reliability.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > simple repetitive actions
|
| Exactly, and those actions are able to be simple and
| repetitive because the machines don't have to try to
| identify objects in the environment, they just reach X
| meters, open their grappler Y centimeters, close it until
| it reaches Z Pascals of pressure, move, repeat.
|
| No real "AI" required, just programmed to handle expected
| conditions. But get just a little bit outside the pre-
| programmed constraints and...
| https://www.engadget.com/2018-12-06-amazon-workers-
| hospitali...
|
| As a result, the _humans_ are now forced to accommodate
| the failings of the machines.
| https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/8346932/amazon-factory-
| workers...
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| 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.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| 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.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Some Suggestions if I was having this problem:
|
| 1. Get a standing desk, so you can alternate between
| sitting and standing.
|
| 2. Learn to use a mouse with both left and right hand.
| And/or ball wheel mouse.
|
| 3. Try Speech to text software
|
| 4. Try an Ergo keyboard. Logitech makes an ergonomic
| keyboard (Ergo k860)
|
| 5. Get up and Stretch every hour
|
| 6. Go the the bathroom as much as you're allowed to
|
| 7. Go for a Walk during your lunch break
|
| 8. Go for a walk after work
|
| 9. Do some yoga. It's totally free.
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN2FPlvg9r-LnUyepH9IaQ
| NoPicklez wrote:
| My point being duke is that physically intensive jobs
| such as carpentry, bricklaying and other labor intensive
| jobs also have their own safeguards to prevent these
| injuries you mentioned. Not completely remove but
| prevent, the same way that office jobs still impact
| people's health. They're required to use hats, hard hats,
| safety glasses, long sleeved clothing, sun screen, steel
| capped boots, lifting belts etc.
|
| The things you mention do not particularly happen to
| everyone and even less so since safety standards have
| improved.
| sharkweek wrote:
| A question for the crowd, then: what is the "best" job for
| the human body?
|
| Because sitting at a desk all day for me definitely isn't
| it.
| esailija wrote:
| Well unfortunately it doesn't get better than that,
| except when working as remote you can lie on a sofa or
| bed. After a full day you still have full energy to do
| optimal amount of physical exercise, just enough (which
| is relatively little) to stay in optimal condition
| without destroying your body.
| XorNot wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| gibolt wrote:
| 'Most' and 'never' are strong words. I'd imagine many people
| thought that in the past about modern automation (and it's well
| documented).
|
| Things will become automated. That is the natural human
| progression. We are creative, and their are 7+ billion minds
| with new giants to stand on the shoulder of every day.
|
| AI, soft/compliant robotics, and globalization are strong
| unrelenting factors/motivators.
| caf wrote:
| Yes. For example, see this video of a Continuous Tamping
| Machine in operating, tamping railway ballast:
|
| https://fb.watch/79KwlAt2Fz/
|
| You probably wouldn't have to go too far back to find people
| sceptical about the possibility of automating that.
| Permit wrote:
| > But they are completely convinced that it's just around the
| corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and
| intelligence of ordinary people.
|
| Can you think of any other reasons that people might believe
| something like automated driving is right around the corner?
|
| Or is "contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary
| people" the only reason one might believe this?
| ghaff wrote:
| You can phrase it more nicely. But it boils down to things
| like: "How hard can it be?" "Humans suck at it (though they
| really don't)" "We do great at 90% of the problem" and so
| forth.
|
| Computers can do really well in controlled, specced
| situations. Not so well in a complicated environment where
| humans live and operate.
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| I agree with you in general, but not about the hamburgers.
| https://www.creator.rest/
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| That thing is well-known to break all the time. You can even
| find people on Yelp talking about how the robot is broken.
| It's mostly old technology anyway; it's still a fundamentally
| mechatronic system similar to what AMF made several decades
| ago.
|
| https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE
|
| That one didn't make money either, and it also broke a lot,
| and had all sorts of other problems. Believe it or not, the
| core technology has improved a lot less than you might think.
| They may have put a prettier skin on it but it's still the
| wrong approach.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Reminds me of a $BIGTECH project with a one armed robot on a
| wheeled base they thought could do house cleaning. I mean the
| damn thing couldn't operate a windex bottle. I don't think the
| executives who made this pitch actually clean their own homes.
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| it's not just computer people. it's everyone. we haven't
| automated most jobs which require skill, precisely because they
| aren't easy to- and yet, teachers, agriculture workers, and
| construction crews are some of the lowest paid sectors. and
| then there are complaints about these people being lazy and
| there not being enough people who want to pursue these
| professions. wel guess what? pay them a decent wage for a
| change!
| exporectomy wrote:
| Complaints that there aren't enough workers in the labor
| market are equivalent to complaints that wages are too high.
| Your proposed solution is really just a restatement of the
| problem.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| 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 people handing
| out permits not know what they're doing?
|
| See also: trying to renovate or buy a home in Arizona.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| In attempt to turn this teachable: the costs that go into
| housing aren't just labour, whether skilled or unskilled.
| It's a number of economic goods and services, each of which
| has its own price dyanmic.
|
| The chief cost of housing is _land_ , and _that_ follows the
| laws of economic _rents_ and _assets_ , in two principle
| ways:
|
| - For goods subject to _rents_ , that is, where _supply is
| nonresponsive to price_ , any _surplus value_ accrues to the
| _seller_ rather than the _buyer_. The _marginal price_ tends
| toward the _marginal value_ rather than the _marginal cost_.
|
| - Moreover, as an _asset_ , land is subject to the general
| behavioural tendency that _holders of assets will tend to act
| such that the value of assets inflates_. This is through
| constraining supply, sale, credentialling, regulation,
| certification, and other elements. This shows up in zoning,
| construction, certifiction, lending, insurance, and other
| obligations or limitations on new construction.
|
| - Unskilled labour is subject to _wages_ , which tend to
| _fall_ to the level of _marginal cost_ , _if not below that_.
| Incidentally, in a simple society of _labourers_ vs.
| _rentiers_ , surplus value accrues to the rentiers as a case
| of the _law of rent_ vs. the _iron law of wages_.
|
| - _Skilled labour wages_ deviate from those of unskilled as
| skill itself is a rent-generating factor, and hence skilled
| labourers can command somewhat higher wages. (Adam Smith 's
| discussion of the five factors involved in the wages of
| labour are a fascinating read.)
|
| - Materials follow natural resource pricing, which ... is
| very poorly understood by modern economic theory, but tends
| to follow the marginal cost of provision by the marginal
| supplier. That is, the supplier with the _highest viable cost
| structure_ sets the market price for the commodity.
| Perversely, when the market is _oversupplied_ , prices often
| fall (expected) _and production rises_ as the only way
| producers have of meeting their own fixed costs is to produce
| and sell more _at the lower price_. (This occurs because
| _marginal costs_ may fall below _fixed costs.) The situation
| is not long-term sustainable, but may persist for a
| substantial period of time._ For purely extractive resources
| (mining, gas, oil), the _replacement cost_ of the good is not
| factored in at all, and market prices may be hundreds to
| millions of times below any rational fully-accounted cost
| basis.
|
| Net productivity of labour has increased markedly. The land-
| cost of housing has increased far beyond that. Materials have
| shifted in several ways, with numerous older materials having
| been replaced by nominally-cheaper modern equivalents.
| Restrictions on construction methods, materials, designs,
| etc., impose additional costs and constraints in design and
| building as well.
|
| The question largely reveals a large ignorance of the factors
| involved.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| None of this is a mystery. There's nothing to teach to me
| here. It's just a complaint about the market.
| imtringued wrote:
| No, it's a complaint about private land ownership.
| notJim wrote:
| As far as renovations, I think the simple reality is that
| renovating requires a lot of very skilled labor, and skilled
| labor is not cheap. Good contractors where I live are booked
| months and months out. The weird thing is if you look the
| salary data, these jobs don't even pay very well.
| Electricians and plumbers both have average salaries of $56k,
| compared to ~$100k for software engineers according to BLS
| data.
|
| If these numbers are representative, it's no wonder it's hard
| to hire a contractor. The pay sucks and it's hard work that
| requires a lot of training. Overall I don't understand how
| the economics of this industry work such that doing anything
| is expensive as hell, yet the workers are not paid very well.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Sorry, that's just not true. Electricians in Phoenix can
| break $100k, and they openly tell me about it all the time.
| The electrician who did my house went from making $40k in
| his first year to $250k float month-to-month. It makes
| working in software look like being a peasant out here.
|
| Ask me what HVAC companies make in the hottest city in the
| nation.
| notJim wrote:
| Take it up with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These are
| nationwide averages.
| d0gbread wrote:
| Reporting on averages is fine but you've made the mistake
| of thinking that average is representative of anyone. In
| all likelihood salaries are not normally distributed
| around that average, and we'd instead find a low hump
| (rural) and a high hump (urban, suburban).
| [deleted]
| notJim wrote:
| I doubt it, when I looked at Phoenix salaries they seemed
| to be in line with the bls averages.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000?
|
| Manufactured homes are like $20,000. The plot of land that
| they go on however, is subject to political rules. Turns out
| that people don't like cheap housing to be available, because
| it attracts the underclass.
|
| Its important to remember that housing is mostly a solved
| problem. The politics of housing are not solved however: too
| much "progress" (aka: higher prices) and people complain
| about gentrification.
|
| Bringing down the cost of housing is akin to inviting gangs
| and thieves into your neighborhood. Everyone wants to support
| the poor and needy, but just not in their backyard.
|
| Its very difficult to convince a typical city / town / county
| to support the development of a new trailer park. That's just
| how politics are today. Politicians are screwed if prices go
| up. Politicians are screwed if prices go down. Politicians
| are screwed if prices remain the same.
|
| -------------
|
| Its not very difficult to physically build any kind of
| "underclass" home. Trailer parks, low-income housing / mixed-
| income housing (be it a high-rise or low-cost apartment/condo
| complex), etc. etc. But its very, very difficult to convince
| local board members to zone an area for that kind of home.
| imtringued wrote:
| I agree. People pretend that expensive housing is an issue
| and then when it's their turn to buy and own the house they
| insist that it should stay expensive.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they
| really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending
| $300,000?
|
| They're not cheaper than ever. Materials are expensive and in
| short supply. Labor is expensive because demand is high and
| few people want to do manual construction work.
|
| But you're not literally buying just a structure. You have to
| buy a property for the house. In many locations, the
| valuation of the land a house sits on is higher than the
| value of the structure itself. My house could burn to the
| ground and my property would lose less than half its value,
| and I'm not even in a very high cost of living area.
|
| You _can_ buy a house for $300,000 if you 're not picky about
| where it is. One of my family members had a new construction
| house built in the 2500 sq. ft. range for under $300,000
| recently. The trick was that they live in a small town where
| property can be purchased for around $10K.
|
| > See also: trying to renovate or buy a home in Arizona.
|
| A quick search on Zillow shows over 1,500 listings for
| freestanding single family homes (not apartments, condos,
| townhomes, or other properties) for $300,000 or less. Many of
| them are even recently renovated, have 2-car garages, and
| frankly look quite nice.
|
| Usually when someone is talking about starter houses being
| exorbitantly expensive, they're actually referring to the
| property being expensive. Loosen your requirements for
| location and it becomes much easier to find affordable
| housing. In most states you don't even need to move that far
| out of city centers. There are hundreds of properties within
| Phoenix and Tuscon that are $300K or less.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Why renovate someone's bathroom when real estate investors
| will pay you more and will throw years of work at you?
|
| Also, housing isn't expensive because of labor costs. In many
| places, the land itself is worth more than the improvements
| made to it.
| pvorb wrote:
| Construction costs are cheaper than ever? The prices have
| skyrocketed in the past year. Is this something special to
| Germany? I would've expected that the pandemic shows equal
| effects elsewhere.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I'm just saying this because every but-actually poster says
| something like this, but I think homes come with more
| amenities now than they did in the 70s, so buying a home
| isn't really any cheaper adjusted for inflation.
| imtringued wrote:
| Yes, bigger houses for fewer people means costs still go
| up.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Because people have great skill in exploiting other people as
| well.
| version_five wrote:
| 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.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I don't agree with your comment. $50,000-$100,000 of well
| placed funds with the right software consultancy can
| generate a project that pulls in enough cash flow to pay
| for itself multiple times over in just the span of
| _months_.
|
| Machine learning is not a high return investment on its
| own. It is only leveraged as a technical piece of an
| already cash flow healthy larger pie in most organizations.
|
| The division of labor and supply of various workers makes
| most labor intensive tasks self-explanatory in cost.
|
| $300,000 can buy you a property that takes years to double
| in value in comparison. They're completely different
| categories of capital utilization.
| Plough_Jogger wrote:
| FWIW, there are many opportunities for significant ROI in
| ML / analytics projects.
|
| Low-hanging fruit I've seen in this area has included
| automating or augmenting labor-intensive manual processes
| (e.g., classifying insurance claims), replacing human
| judgement with time-series forecasts within an ordering
| system, and optimizing email campaigns with RL.
| cratermoon wrote:
| You can buy a box to live in for $50K. A place to _put it_ ,
| on the other hand....
| dylan604 wrote:
| I have contempt for the price of devs. They sit in cushy
| chairs in climate controlled rooms eating cushy meals.
| Skilled construction people hone their craft over time just
| as a dev does, only in a not so comfy chair nor comfy climate
| controlled room in a workplace that has all sorts of
| situations that might seriously harm/mame/kill the worker or
| fellow coworkers.
|
| It goes both ways
| elhesuu wrote:
| Why do you assume construction costs are the only factor that
| drives property value?
| avgDev wrote:
| Cost of lumber, cost of land, cost of equipment, cost of
| permits, cost of inspections.
|
| It really isn't a box for $300k. You can buy a mobile home
| for what $60k?
|
| Permit process isn't broken.....this is a view often held by
| incompetent contractors. I have performed various jobs like
| building retaining walls, bathrooms, electrical, decks and
| never had an issue as long as my work was up to code.
|
| Permits can protect a homeowner, when the contractor bails
| without finish the work.
|
| But back to why a home can be $300k, it is a lot of work and
| materials. From an article, "According to NAHB, the average
| material cost to build a house is $296,652, with the average
| square footage of a house being 2,594. That means your cost
| per square foot is $114.36 ($296,652 / 2,594)."
|
| You are underestimating how much it costs to get lumber,
| copper(can use pex), brick, concrete etc.
|
| You sound like someone saying, I can have a wordpress site
| for $1000, but why does it cost $500k to build an ecommerce
| platform.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| >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.
| Kye wrote:
| There are likely some valuable skills and services that
| go into that permit price. I doubt it's pure grift.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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?
| lazide wrote:
| And that is assuming you can get permits - which in many
| jurisdictions can take years to figure out, and multiple
| major changes.
|
| The intent in many jurisdictions is to tarpit change as
| much as possible and it shows.
|
| It isn't the permits themselves which are usually the
| problem.
| bialpio wrote:
| Sounds more like a problem with your area, or maybe
| you're doing different type of work compared to what I'm
| doing with my house (residential vs commercial maybe?).
| I've been applying for various kinds of permits
| (building, electrical, plumbing, still need to get
| mechanical) and in all those cases, I applied online and
| the permit was issued same or the next day (& precon
| inspections that I went through have all been scheduled
| for the next business day). Total cost was in the
| ballpark of $1000. This is in WA. I did not need any
| structural changes so the process for the building permit
| was cheaper & quicker than it could've been. I also had
| some work done that did require structural engineer &
| submitting drawings - it was a fraction of the remodel
| cost anyway.
|
| OTOH, insisting on permits potentially saved my ass at
| least in one case - I had a contractor remodel my
| bathroom say that "they do everything up to code". Their
| work did not pass inspections on the first try (had to
| fix things up both for plumbing and electrical).
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Permit process also protects the community.
|
| I was paying for a house to be built by a contractor who,
| it turns out, screwed up the permitting process and didn't
| do a hydrological survey of the erosion pattern on the
| land. The town yanked his permit to build.
|
| I was grumpy, but when I drove by I could see clearly what
| the problem was: he hadn't planned for drainage at all, and
| the new construction and alteration of the terrain had
| already caused rainwater to start pooling at the base of my
| future neighbor's foundation. If he'd been allowed to
| continue unhindered, he would basically have guaranteed my
| neighbor's property would have been destroyed in 5 years.
| philwelch wrote:
| Permits are a local government issue. Maybe your local
| government is extremely reasonable and punctual when it
| comes to building permits, while my local government is
| lazy or stupid or corrupt. Maybe you have no problem with
| building permits because you don't live in a county where
| the authorities slow-walk anyone who doesn't buy them a
| case of whisky.
| orev wrote:
| The price consumers pay for something has nothing to do with
| the cost of producing it. Not counting the cost of the land
| itself, an identical house built in the city costs the same
| in hours and materials as one in the country. Price is
| determined by one thing, and one thing only: how much other
| people are willing to pay for it (i.e. the market sets the
| prices).
|
| The costs vs sale price are relevant to the _builder_ in
| making the decision on whether to build and whether to sell,
| as they wouldn't do it if they're going to lose money.
| savanaly wrote:
| This is only true in the short run by the way. In the long
| run, in a competitive market, cost is absolutely the driver
| of price.
| d0gbread wrote:
| How is this true for generally appreciating assets like a
| house? It makes sense for commodities but until location
| and style don't matter I'm unconvinced there's a such
| thing as cost driving price in the housing market on any
| timeline.
| dap wrote:
| As I get older, I'm increasingly skeptical of the idea
| that many markets are competitive. There's so much
| overhead to so many businesses, plus heavy use of price
| discrimination -- it doesn't feel like a lot of the stuff
| I buy comes from a competitive market. (I'm sure less
| likely to notice the stuff that is.)
| canadianfella wrote:
| Do you understand what market competition is?
| cgrealy wrote:
| > 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 end product.
|
| But the vast majority of grapes are harvested by very simple
| machines, because scale and profit, and most people just want a
| $10 bottle of decent-ish wine.
|
| 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.
|
| Will it be as good as a "hand made" burger? Maybe.. maybe not?
|
| Will the people paying a few bucks for a burger care? Nope.
|
| This isn't an issue with "computer people"... this is an issue
| with economics.
| mbesto wrote:
| > 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?
| cgrealy wrote:
| And how many accidents are there in Wisconsin in January
| with 8 inches of snow on the ground?
|
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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 assembly
| required.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Which I actually consider to be a good thing.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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 disappears.
|
| Once upon a time I'm sure some dude had to constantly
| monitor the temperature of the cellar that holds the wine
| casks and occasionally call into town for a block of ice to
| keep things cool. Now we have refrigeration - and that
| mind-numbingly tedious portion of running a winery can now
| be conveniently avoided (except for the occasional
| maintenance) so you can concentrate on more important
| things.
|
| Eventually it might be that McDonalds automates it's POS
| and menu to such a degree that for every ten franchises
| there's just one dude in a car that drives around
| responding to error codes and, ideally, the people who
| worked there will find something more creative and
| fulfilling to do with their lives. I don't hold those
| people with contempt - I feel like their skills (and
| everybody has skills) are being underutilized.
| XorNot wrote:
| 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.
| LanceH wrote:
| I would expect to see it done at places like stadiums or
| other events where you have a crowd of 100k who all want to
| eat at the same time and the expected quality if near zero.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| I would be interested to know if there is feedback in the
| McD process chemistry loop.
|
| A fun part of cooking by hand is dealing with the quirks of
| fresh produce. These once-living plants and meats are
| inconsistent enough to require decisions on the fly, mid
| cook. One cut is 50g thicker at one end than the other, one
| parsnip is 10% more dense at the top, this cod retained
| more salt than yesterday and requires less seasoning, etc.
|
| Of course this kind of cooking is miles from what happens
| in fast food, but there's a reason the burger station is
| the most senior position. Cooking patties properly requires
| skill to get them crispy, fully cooked, but still juicy.
| Hot damn I'm hungry now.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I would be interested to know if there is feedback in
| the McD process chemistry loop._
|
| There must be, running an open-loop process is rather
| tricky. If it's like any other process in food
| manufacturing, there are likely both continuous automated
| checks of trivially measurable properties and regular
| (every hour or less) manual lab tests[0].
|
| > _These once-living plants and meats are inconsistent
| enough to require decisions on the fly, mid cook._
|
| As I understand their process (from what little I read
| and watched about it in the past), the keystone of it is
| minimizing input variance at every stage. They stick to
| specific varieties of potatoes, they keep bun production
| centralized, they place specific requirements on
| slaughterhouses for the meat they then blend into
| standardized pulp, etc. This makes it possible to
| constrain variance downstream - e.g. the meat pulp has
| roughly uniform properties, so it can be shaped and
| processed in tightly controlled fashion.
|
| At the end come pre-processed food pieces that are then
| shipped to restaurants for assembly. McDonald's venues
| don't really _cook_ this food, they put it through the
| last stage of processing pipeline - heating it in
| programmable ovens /fryers. Restaurant workers aren't
| making any cooking decisions. That's how McDonald's
| ensures its product consistency - there's no place left
| for a human to screw things up.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Industrial food processing plants have labs on-
| site, which receive samples from the production line on
| an ongoing basis. This is used to check the batches for
| contamination / pathogens, verify measurements from
| automated sensors, and to provide ground-truth data for
| models used in model predictive controllers, if such are
| used in the process.
| slacktide wrote:
| As a mechanical engineering intern in the early '90s, I
| worked for a company that among other things, designed food
| handling equipment for McD. For them a lot of automation is
| about safety - young/inexperienced employees around
| potentially dangerous equipment = workers comp claims. I
| helped develop a fully automated pushbutton system to
| change fryer oil out from a bulk storage/disposal system.
| They had a lot of burn claims from teenagers changing it
| manually back then.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| 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%.
| adamdusty wrote:
| We have not automated driving. Phoenix is step one but there
| are parts of the world that get weather other than sunshine.
| Yeah those cars are cool, but the roads in Phoenix are better
| than any other major city in the US, the weather is binary,
| sun or rain, the city is modern, and the stop lights
| communicate with audi (I think its audi) cars and you can see
| when it's going to turn green on the instrument display.
| Phoenix is the absolute ideal place for self-driving cars.
| Again, its a great achievement. They are doing great work,
| but I think it's a stretch to make the general statement that
| we've automated driving.
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| _We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and
| as soon as it 's cheaper than the cheapest labour_
|
| It's time to link to the AMFare video again.[1]
|
| This was done 50 years ago, but wasn't cost-effective.
|
| Country Garden in Beijing has several automated restaurants.
| They have 6 restaurants on this system now, one of which
| seats 600 people. So at scale, this is starting to work.
| Maybe. Looking at the videos, it looks hard to clean.
| Commercial food processing equipment has a look of "can be
| blasted with boiling soapy water daily", and not seeing that
| here.[2]
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1GipbISX54
| paxys wrote:
| 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).
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| Driving and farming I can agree with having automation
| potential. But the issue I have with cooking is that
| automation for the culinary area is limited to McDonalds'
| type assembly of uniform pre-made food items that require the
| absolute minimum in terms of culinary ability. I can
| comprehend robotic prep machines, slicing, dicing, maybe even
| butchery. But it is a significant step from there to a robot
| following even a well written recipe for demi-glace or for a
| custard, let alone being able to tell when potatoes are
| roasted to the right fineness and have a sufficiently browned
| appearance. Maybe my kids won't work at Burger King in high
| school, but I can't see line cooks at any real restaurant
| being replaced any time soon.
| [deleted]
| richardw wrote:
| > because they are full of contempt for the skill and
| intelligence of ordinary people
|
| No. They just don't know what makes it hard. I don't know where
| the robot train drivers are. We're doing cars and planes but it
| seems trains have fewer things to worry about. I don't feel
| contempt for train drivers, the limitation is mine. I don't
| understand. I still think I deserve to live.
|
| I love this guy's videos. He's a fantastic insight into a world
| I barely know: https://youtu.be/qP1AmDRhoas
| [deleted]
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| 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 the front of the house. Then
| there is intricate stonemasonry that requires a lot of careful
| planning, know-how, and knowledge of historical techniques.
|
| There is machining a piece of metal in a simple way. Then there
| is intricate hand-finishing of that metal at the other extreme.
|
| I suspect that over time we will see the less artisan, less
| "skillful" aspects of manual work be replaced but that fine
| craftsmanship won't really disappear. The more you learn about
| what goes into making certain things by hand the more you
| appreciate how foolish it is to claim that it can all be
| automated easily.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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.
| soheil wrote:
| Why not both? You make it sound like only as long as we don't
| have an automated hamburger maker we should respect the people
| who cook our hamburgers, but not afterwards. Progress in any
| field is usually a function of amount of money poured into it,
| if the margins for hamburgers were large enough, ie. no cheap
| labor or higher food prices we would have invested more
| engineering effort into making smart enough robots that make
| hamburgers and probably by now have them being made
| automatically.
| chias wrote:
| Laying brick is _hard_. I bricked up a small gap in a two-foot-
| tall brick wall in my back yard recently. It took me literally
| all day, and looks exactly as messy as someone who lays bricks
| might expect from someone who uses a computer for a living.
|
| Watching those people on youtube who make tutorial videos that
| go super fast and make it look really easy... You can record
| yourself writing a python script and make it look easy. Those
| people are pros, and have skills and experience to back it up.
| It isn't easy.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Trying to grow plants outdoors is a humbling experience for
| sure
| 8note wrote:
| My dad automated cooking meatballs ages ago. I can't imagine a
| hamburger would be too much harder.
|
| There's folks on YouTube already who can automate the assembly
| of a hamburger using Lego. It's just slower than having a
| person do it in a semi automated manner.
|
| Per the article, we have automated some of bricklaying (for
| roads), and I've definitely had ads show up for tools that
| reduce the skills needed to do bricklaying.
|
| We've also automated parts of driving - staying the same speed,
| parking, etc. The automation all changes which skills are
| important, and steadily makes high skilled jobs into less
| skilled jobs.
| rendall wrote:
| > _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._
|
| Kind of an unfair generalization, I think. I see far more
| comments in defense of the skill of masonry and masons,
| insisting that automation may be too difficult, and almost none
| that "display contempt" as I see it. But I could be missing
| something. Would you be willing to expand on what you see here?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| It's not contempt computer people have for manual labor; it's
| the contempt that bosses have for paying wages.
| Someone wrote:
| > we haven't automated picking tomatoes
|
| I wouldn't know whether their claims hold water, but
| http://www.automatorobotics.com/autonomous-single-tomato-
| har...:
|
| _A robot that can reliably detect ripe tomatoes and harvest
| them with consistent quality at a rate of 10-12 tomatoes per
| minute.
|
| [...]
|
| reducing the harvest costs by 50%_
|
| (The videos give me the impression that "10-12 tomatoes per
| minute" is best-case)
| deltarholamda wrote:
| I can see an automated tomato picker working well for tomato
| varieties that are uniform and grow on largely uniform
| plants. But those tomatoes are bland.
|
| Heirloom tomatoes look like a topology project gone horribly
| wrong, and the colors aren't found in any Pantone catalog.
| They are also the most delicious.
|
| There's definitely a place for both. We have to get ketchup
| ingredients from somewhere, and gourmands will always want
| the ugly heirlooms.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I can see an automated tomato picker working well for
| tomato varieties that are uniform and grow on largely
| uniform plants. But those tomatoes are bland._
|
| Throughout history, our main trick when solving a problem
| with technology was to constrain the problem to something
| that's much easier to solve, by changing _the environment_.
|
| For example, all-terrain mechanized transport is hard, and
| to this day, nobody except hobbyists and militaries even
| bothers to try tackling it. Our solution was to _flatten
| the terrain into roads_ , so that we could just use wheels.
| We've been iterating on that idea ever since.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| 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.
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| I think many programmers do _assume_ that their job could be
| automated. I showed GPT-3 to coworkers and they immediately
| took that into consideration.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Automation of a field:
|
| (1) increases the value produced per unit of labor input _in
| the field_ at the low end of quantity, but potentially
| resulting in reaching the point of rapidly diminishing
| returns faster.
|
| (2) and, increases the domain in which creating/maintaining
| automation has value, increasing the value of automation work
| and _pushing out_ the point where automation work reaches
| diminishing returns.
|
| Which is why programming (viewed broadly)--itself part of
| automating any field--keeps being resilient against adverse
| impacts from automation. Because as long as we are increasing
| the scope of automation generally, we're pushing out the
| diminishing returns point for programming, and automation of
| programming isn't pulling that point down fast enough to
| offset that effect. And automation--both of programming and
| of _everything else_ --keeps pushing up the starting value of
| programming work. (It also makes it more abstract and about
| providing input to higher-level automation tools.)
| zamalek wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Agreed. My mother was involved in my local city theatre, and
| always told us kids that "there would be no show without
| someone to lift the curtains." These people had their cameo in
| every finale. That has always stuck with me.
|
| Ever wondered what would happen if there wasn't someone
| flipping burgers to satisfy your 2AM craving? You, no matter
| your riches or power or fame, would have to do it yourself.
|
| The most innovative thing you could do is shut the fuck up and
| start listening. Instead of trying to replace the bricklayer
| with robotics, how about asking them how robotics could help
| them? They are the SMEs, they do a job considered easy to
| automate daily (and that job isn't easy to automate). They can
| tell you how they are wasting time on inefficiencies.
|
| The job of technology is to allow the human to stop worrying
| about the rote. It is not to replace the human, or to solve
| imaginary problems. That's when problems arise: Facebook,
| racist/sexist AI, etc.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Actually it really reflects poorly on their intelligence when
| they fail to conceptualise the complexity of the real world.
| lumost wrote:
| Alternately, The problem may be that human labor is "cheap" for
| the activities which still require brick laying and in cases
| where it's "expensive" alternate materials can be used.
|
| In order to make automation economically viable there would
| need to be a niche for "cheap" brick powered by automation.
| It's unclear to me that this niche exists and can't be
| similarly achieved by scaling up the blocks or switching to
| more labor efficient building materials.
| Meandering wrote:
| People also tend to ignore that automation minimizes
| craftsmanship and art to a MVP. I know a few masons and they
| are literally artists. Sure, you can lay bricks and have a wall
| but it's not the same as a mortar-less stone wall crafted with
| artistic skill. They are completely different objectives and
| render completely different impressions. Automation eliminates
| the humanity of a task by existence. We will lose those
| unspoken qualities when automation breaks into the mainstream
| and no one will know everything they have lost in the process.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I totally see/hear your position, and mostly feel the same way.
|
| Devil's advocate asks, what about the skill of the devs that
| can automate that kind of stuff? The types of things that might
| be learned in building articulating robotically controlled
| apendages to pick tomatoes without crushing them or the entire
| plants, the skill of a robot to cook the perfect burger to the
| perfect temp, etc. It would be impressive.
|
| Sending people to the moon and building atomic weapons brought
| us some very cool and useful unintended things. So who knows
| what could come from some other boondoggle type of projects?
| philwelch wrote:
| I don't think this is it.
|
| Computer people tend to work in office settings. The reason the
| old joke about threatening to replace people with shell scripts
| works is because a lot of office jobs _can_ be replaced with
| shell scripts. This is because, rather than physically working
| in the real world, most office jobs entail manipulating
| symbols, which is easy for computers but hard for humans. (That
| 's why we invented computers).
|
| A lot of work in the real world entails some decision-making
| component that can be expressed in terms of symbol
| manipulation. This overlaps with the part that many people find
| difficult, because people are naturally good at physically
| manipulating the real world. So when we talk about automating
| driving or picking tomatoes or bricklaying, we are only
| accounting for the difficulty of automating the symbol-
| manipulation abstraction _of_ that task.
|
| (This is basically the conceit of "Manna", a science fiction
| story where a ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that
| just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a
| poorly paid human being.)
|
| If you're measuring the skills of manual workers against the
| standard of how hard it is to build a robot that replaces them,
| they are surprisingly hard. The same is true for the skills of
| trained animals. Maybe we should start worrying about replacing
| human beings with robots after we've managed to figure out how
| to replace dogs with robots. Once we have enough bomb-sniffing
| robots, drug-sniffing robots, livestock guardian robots, police
| pursuit robots, search and rescue robots, and so forth, to the
| point where we don't need dogs, then maybe we can start to
| worry about the human jobs. (Or maybe not--dogs have a _really_
| good sense of smell that might be harder to replicate than some
| human capacities.)
| danhor wrote:
| > ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a
| continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid
| human being.
|
| Isn't that basically amazon warehouses today? (though text
| based)
| Guest42 wrote:
| I see this pretty frequently in manufacturing. Oftentimes,
| larger products will have curves, design changes, layering
| complexities, and judgment calls that simply can't be performed
| via machine, further, the parts will come in at different times
| and assembly lines themselves will have to be flexible and
| optimize for the given real estate.
| nsonha wrote:
| > they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of
| ordinary people.
|
| Where do you get that? While you focus on the "skill" and
| "intelligence", automation is about productivity and freedom
| (from labor)
|
| > learn some humility and try to understand the skills
|
| What do you think automation is, if not to try to understand
| the skills, then turn it into the program?
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| How much does a bricklaying system cost vs the cost of a human?
| Seems to me that humans are just way cheaper and lower
| maintenance.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It isn't the cost of one human vs one machine - that is a
| harder point to get to. Instead it is about the number of
| humans and their cost vs the machine adjusted equivalent.
| Scale is where industry takes its crown.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Please stop. The only 'skill' human beings bring to picking
| fruit or vegetables is their willingness to work for minimum
| wages because we as a society have failed to keep up with tech
| even as our population's food needs exploded.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There is great contempt for "computer people" in this post.
| munk-a wrote:
| I have done some workplace automation (building support tools
| to automate away stupid paperwork) and I've never ever felt
| contempt for the people I'm building tools for. These people do
| extremely intelligent work and make evaluations on complex
| scenarios - my tools only help them minimize the silly BS that
| slows them down, building layered tools on top of poorly
| designed assistive tools or breaking out greenfield solutions
| to help tackle problems that need to be done entirely manually.
|
| I really disagree that almost anyone who has built tool
| assistance into someone's workflow will view their workflow as
| simple and view the employee with contempt - actually getting
| to know the BS they have to put up with on a daily basis
| actually deepens my appreciation for what they're doing. Sure I
| can cherry-pick examples that make folks look bad - employees
| today, even millennials, are for some reason allergic to
| learning keyboard shortcuts and will use right-click to paste.
| That's somewhat on them, but more on the company for not
| providing training time to teach better data entry habits.
|
| If one of these highly skilled agricultural workers was given a
| robot that used scent to determine which fruit trees likely had
| ripe fruit that needed to be harvested - I'm sure they'd
| appreciate it for what it is, a tool that lets them concentrate
| on more important things. And, if we as a society are moving
| into a era where automation becomes so widespread that jobs are
| much fewer and far between 1) we'll waste a lot more time
| building freemium games or whatever BS labour sink society
| comes up with next and 2) we should realize that taxes need to
| go way up on the people still employed and UBI or other social
| services are needed to keep us functional as a society. Having
| too much productivity is such an easy problem to solve - you
| just don't do what America is doing and let it all coagulate
| into the pockets of a few hundred billionaires... and then
| everyone gets to live a good life.
| coding123 wrote:
| I don't understand UBI personally. In general it will have
| the net effect of dropping even more people out of the labor
| pool. Even with increasing population over the last 50 years
| the number of people participating is going down. Not as a
| percentage, but a number.
|
| With that, things like getting a plumber will skyrocket in
| price.
|
| I mean why should I fix your toilet if I can be at home
| playing video games right now? I'm going to have a roof over
| my head and food in my mouth either way.
|
| Current UBI experiments don't have the experience of going
| 100% of the population, so there's no way to know what will
| happen.
| correcthorse123 wrote:
| I dont know the answer, but I think people will pursue
| sections of the labour market which cannot (yet?) be
| automated. Why play video games that you're frankly sick of
| after a few months, if you could help someone out for both
| a social and comparatively large financial reward?
|
| It would also depend on the specifics of how UBI would be
| implemented. Where I live I could stop working and live off
| welfare, providing a minimal standard of living. Yet almost
| nobody chooses this way of life as people strive for higher
| living standards, and for many work plays a part in giving
| meaning to life.
|
| If more and more jobs get automated this might become a
| problem though, assuming no new non-automatable jobs are
| created.
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| I have absolutely no contempt for the skill. Why would I? But I
| do recognize that building costs are expensive and that
| building stuff could be faster and safer and thus think that
| automation would be good. Same goes for my job, really.
| Automation has so far been a net good for humanity and if we
| ever transition to a true post-scarcity society, it will be
| through automation.
|
| Also, if you speak with people in ML/AI, they will not tell you
| it's around the corner. They _know_ that physical stuff and
| robotics in general is _hard_.
|
| Also, builders and the like often have a great amount of
| contempt towards any desk job - is that OK? Why?
| ddoolin wrote:
| 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).
| colordrops wrote:
| 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 into the commercial realm,
| e.g. GitHub copilot.
| coding123 wrote:
| Are we sure that the ML experts that wanted to beat real
| human chess players actually respected them? Wouldn't they
| know that at some point the enjoyment of chess itself might
| fade if the best in the world is a computer? Maybe chess is
| having a moment right now due to Netflix, perhaps maybe it's
| a permanent upswing. But long term, I don't know if it will
| remain interesting to people.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Dunno, but people are still into competitive weightlifting
| even though the forklift has been around for over a hundred
| years.
| EthanHarv wrote:
| I personally doubt chess will fade. As far as I can tell,
| the enjoyment of high-level chess is less to do with
| reaching objective perfection, rather it's more the
| "thrill" of seeing a _human_ who has poured their life into
| the pursuit of improving their game. It doesn't really
| matter that a computer can beat them, we care about them
| because people like seeing other people's talents.
|
| And on a casual level, nothing changes if the best in the
| world is a human or computer, so the casual player isn't
| particularly affected.
| eru wrote:
| Chess is now more popular than ever before.
|
| Not sure how important Netflix is here? There are lots of
| chess players on YouTube, too.
|
| Go also get much more popular in the West for a while when
| Alphago came along.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > We are already starting to see automated programming moving
| out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g.
| GitHub copilot.
|
| As soon as GitHub was acquired by Microsoft I knew their
| intentions were for automated coding tools. I wasn't
| concerned about this affecting my livelihood in the short to
| medium term, because state-of-the-art ANNs won't be able to
| grasp the context of business requirements without developing
| adult human level intelligence. Thus, even a full program
| built by such a system would need to be verified by a human
| to be sure it will behave as desired, obviating any gain in
| terms of automation. Even the rudimentary boilerplate that
| copilot spits out suffers from this problem.
| ehnto wrote:
| I started thinking about how you might automate game
| development, and I think it's a pretty good thought
| excercise on the topic.
|
| I feel like the end result is just what we already have,
| game engines with visual programming and drag and drop
| editors. You don't add much value by automating the
| programming since you still have to define the input and
| outcome.
|
| The real win was building the complex logic and state
| editor into a good UX.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| This video really amazed me in terms of automated game
| development. My fantasies are something like this and
| GPT-3 plus a couple decades of progress.
|
| I think we'll get to genuinely open ended sand box games.
|
| https://youtu.be/udPY5rQVoW0
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Predicting the next frame from previous frames and learnt
| sequences is a neat trick, but I think automated game
| development is already very possible with simple
| techniques like genetic algorithms, or even a PRNG. I
| mean Rogue and it's descendants are very much automated
| game development, but GPT-3 could be useful for something
| like dynamic quest generation, world-building, narrative,
| adaptive NPCs (including dialogue) etc.
| eru wrote:
| I'm not sure classic procedural content generation like
| in rogue-likes is all that comparable to using a GAN to
| run the whole game?
|
| Have a look at the video, it's quite impressive.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| I've seen it before, and I've a basic understanding of
| GANs, I just don't see it being overly useful. This
| technique can make a really blurry simulacrum of an
| actual game, and that's really cool, but I'm not sure how
| it could be used to make a something both truly novel and
| coherent. There's plenty of low hanging fruit for AI
| within an engine, whereas using AI to be the entire
| engine is somewhat infeasible
| eru wrote:
| You are right about the technique not being very useful
| as of today. My fascination stems from my assumption that
| more resources poured into this approach would yield
| vastly better results.
|
| Even just watching the video, I came up with several
| possible improvements to try out. Eg adversarial
| training, that would really hone in on the situations and
| aspects where the model is weak so far, like edge
| conditions; instead of just using normal gameplay as
| input.
| ehnto wrote:
| It's definitely an interesting area of research, but for
| that example you still had to make the whole game in the
| first place in order to have something to train the model
| on. Say you have a novel game idea, how could you use
| that approach to make it a reality? I'm not sure you
| could, but like you mention it's a really early example
| and who knows where it ends up.
|
| The other part about that GAN Theft Auto example is that
| it doesn't actually know what's going on, like there's no
| game state. All it knows is that "When I have a frame
| that looks like this, and they press that button, I think
| the next frame would usually look like this". So it's got
| no internal game logic, it's just really good at painting
| what games look like.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| And this is where I think of the game-side of games
| programming to be more an art form (I say this as an ex-
| professional game developer). GPT-3 could be used for
| narrative generation, environment generation, and
| adaptive AI, and these are all exciting areas for
| research and experimentation. But as you say, underneath
| is a solid engine, and one day an AI could feasibly build
| an engine from scratch, but I think that day is decades
| away. The AI that we have today are just toys.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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 just going to let your company offer a better
| product, release a new version sooner, test different
| versions, etc.
| caf wrote:
| Right. A working automated bricklaying machine would be
| like a C compiler for brickmasons.
| coding123 wrote:
| It doesn't perfectly translate IMHO. A bricklayer
| contractor that has a mostly automated machine doing 80%
| of the job would probably hire maybe 1 guy to get shit
| off the truck and clean dropped mortar. Normally he might
| have 2 or 3 extra guys to do some stretches or turns or
| something like that.
| colordrops wrote:
| Look at houses now vs houses from 200 years ago. Modern
| house are much more advanced and complex. Automation such
| as a bricklaying machine would allow these 2 or 3 other
| guys to do something else that would support further
| complexity and advancement in house building, or anything
| else for that matter, just as automation doesn't cause
| loss of jobs in programming.
| oriolid wrote:
| I'd rather live in a house without undefined behavior.
| gilbetron wrote:
| > Code has been getting automated since basically day one
| of programming.
|
| Comments like these make me wonder if you actually code.
| Code is automation, that's what it does. You don't write
| the same code twice. Ever.
| tclancy wrote:
| As long as you never learn a second language.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Frameworks like react are a type of automation of coding.
| Any framework. Or any higher level language. Anything
| that isn't just entering ones and zeroes is already a
| level of automation in coding.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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.
| akomtu wrote:
| Lowering difficulty of lifting boxes doesn't eliminate
| warehouse personnel: it means that now every worker can
| lift hundred of heavy boxes a day and the company can
| deliver 100x more stuff. Businesses don't want to get rid
| of personnel; they want to increase profit-per-employee
| and automation does just that.
| nradov wrote:
| Ha ha. I remember people making those claims about 4GLs
| and visual programming tools 30 years ago. It wasn't true
| then and won't be true in our lifetimes. Domain experts
| typically lack the mindset to think through edge cases
| and failure modes.
| Shorel wrote:
| Didn't happen with Visual Basic, has not happened with
| JavaScript.
|
| Domain experts are all using Excel, not any other
| automated tool.
| eru wrote:
| And, honestly, Excel is a pretty good tool for that.
|
| I just hope we could improve on it.
|
| See eg https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/research/podcast/advancing-e...
| whateveracct wrote:
| Haskell automates a lot of programming but it sure isn't
| easy
| eru wrote:
| Haskell is fun, but it isn't special in this regard.
|
| Any language any human would touch these days automates
| lots and lots of things for you.
|
| (Even Assemblers do a lot for you nowadays.)
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| "If I had a nickle for every time..."
|
| The closest a product that ever did this was Excel.
| Grakel wrote:
| Programming will be automated long before brick laying. We
| can barely print a document with confidence.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Nonsense. If you could automate programming, it would be
| the last thing to truly be automated before the
| singularity. After all, if programming was truly automated,
| the program for creating a brick laying robot would write
| itself.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| Printing works really well. It's print drivers (software)
| that are an utter and complete mess.
|
| 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.
| Overton-Window wrote:
| 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.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| A little bit of tongue in cheek:
|
| As a tradesperson myself, working in a highly automated
| part of the metal fabrication process, I feel an urge to
| say something like:
|
| _The only thing standing between a programmer and
| unemployment is a sufficiently advanced compiler_
|
| But only because I _great contempt_ for the _hubris_ on
| display in these sorts of threads.
|
| At the end of the day though, it's a-little-bit-form-
| column-A-and-a-little-bit-from-column-B.
|
| We went from not-flying to landing robots on another
| planet in a handful of decades, who knows what a little
| bit more processing power and a few more layers of
| abstraction could bring.
| Grakel wrote:
| 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 the other bricks, then wipe
| off excess mortar, creating a visually appealing groove,
| all while standing on a muddy slope. Best of luck,
| robots.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| You can mention these same difficulty of tasks for soda
| can manufacture or a dozen other how its made videos. And
| yet, a lot of those processes that are just as
| complicated as brick laying, have been automated by
| robots.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Key difference: you deploy a soda can robot in a factory.
| You have an enclosed environment with all of your inputs
| nicely set up.
|
| For robot bricklaying, you can depend on the electrical
| supply. Everything else is a toss-up. I do think it's
| possible, but you don't choose your working environment
| or the weather conditions so everything is gonna be a lot
| more hassle.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| And then it starts to rain.
| XorNot wrote:
| https://www.fbr.com.au/view/hadrian-x
|
| 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.
| Grakel wrote:
| Yes, that system is discussed in the article, and it
| looks like it doesn't work very well. I doubt it can keep
| up with human labor.
|
| I agree. It will happen eventually, but the bigger point
| here that is more related to to discussions on HN is that
| despite a lot of enthusiasm, machine learning and AI are
| still in the amino acid phase of evolution, and
| everything still sucks.
| novok wrote:
| It doesn't have to keep up with human labor, it just has
| to reduce the total amount of human labor. And slow today
| doesn't mean slow tomorrow. The residential dishwasher is
| a great example of this.
| arcanon wrote:
| I mean once the boston dynamics stuff gets good enough...
| it will. To be frank, I want my Jetsons robot maid.
| imtringued wrote:
| > Yes, that system is discussed in the article, and it
| looks like it doesn't work very well. I doubt it can keep
| up with human labor.
|
| It works poorly, therefore bricklaying has been
| automated. The programmers won. The bricklayers won too.
| It's only Grakel with his weird bet that lost.
| munk-a wrote:
| This plays exactly into the OP's comment - but if that is
| your sincerely held belief there are ~4,000
| bricklayers~[1] in America today and you could make a
| whole boatload of money if you could automate their work.
|
| 1. According to the BLS link below it's actually closer
| to 50,000.
| bumby wrote:
| ONet claims nearly 82k brick masons
|
| https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/47-2021.00
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| No one is even thinking about trying to completely
| automate coding.
|
| There's tons of "no code" solutions - but these are all
| just different versions of coding and programming
| languages - usually with GUIs and pictures instead of
| words.
|
| There's more than 60,000 SWEs that work in my company.
| Amazon, Google, Apple, and MSFT could make >$10Bn/year
| each if they could automate coding.
|
| The fact that none of them are even trying - when it sort
| of goes with their core businesses - should give you some
| indication that this is something unlikely to be
| automated any time soon.
|
| The reason bricklaying ISN'T automated is probably
| because there's ONLY 59,000 bricklayers in the US (a $3B
| market), it's not generalizable, and even if it was - the
| cost to move a machine, set it up, and maintain it - it's
| hard to imagine massive cost savings - 50% seems
| generous.
|
| If there were >1M bricklayers - and/or they made
| >$400k/year on average, the work was generalizable, and
| automating would bring huge cost-savings that could be
| captured - there would be a LOT more effort into
| automating bricklaying.
|
| But none of these are true. How much of brick laying is
| generalizable (building a new house) vs custom (repairing
| some old wall with non-standard bricks)? I have no idea -
| but I'm guessing not a lot more than 50%. That's a $1.5B
| market. You'd be luck to cut the costs by 50% - that's
| maybe $750M.
|
| It could easily cost more than than to automate
| bricklaying! Why even try?? No one is interested in
| investing in that risk / reward.
|
| On the contrary - most of Radiology could be automated
| and most of it is generalizable. Since hospitals are
| monopolies and healthcare is a mess - you might be able
| to capture all the cost savings - which would be close to
| 100%!
|
| Since there's ~35k Radiologists, and they're some of the
| highest paid workers in the world - there are a lot of
| efforts to actually automate this (and they're doing
| quite well).
|
| If you think automating radiology is easier than building
| a hamburger-cooking robot, you're naive. If you think AGI
| is easier to achieve than building a tomato-harvesting
| machine, you're clueless.
|
| There's just simply not hundreds of billions to be made
| automating cooking hamburgers and harvesting tomatoes
| more efficiently. And it's not easy to generalize and
| automate cooking or harvesting EVERYTHING. And even if
| there was, restaurants and groceries are commodities -
| not monopolies. You couldn't capture all the savings. A
| race to the bottom on prices would eventually just pass
| the savings on to the customer - not juice profits.
| That's not something you want to spend massive, risky R&D
| on. That's why we haven't automated cooking hamburgers
| and harvesting tomatoes. Not because it's harder than
| protein folding, fusion energy, or true AGI...
|
| From another point of view - we've had machines that mop
| floors for decades - and there's still a lot of people
| employed to mop floors. Is this because mopping floors is
| incredibly complex and creative? No - it's because people
| who mop floors get paid minimum wage, and they do a lot
| of other things, too.
| bumby wrote:
| I imagine this goes for most skilled trades jobs. The
| lack of generalizability becomes apparent every time I
| undertake a DIY project that doesn't go as planned
| coding123 wrote:
| No code still has a bit to go. It's main focus right now
| is having a model and can generate a UI and have a method
| to update a database. When you get into the weeds of what
| companies want, it's that person in group A is allowed to
| update, group B can create things, and group C can only
| view. And on top of that there is private stuff that only
| the same user can see. It's that shit that makes no-code
| a non-starter for Google, Amazon, ...
|
| Perhaps a company that wants to display the current
| Bitcoin price on a screen and let you do currency
| conversions you can do that in "no code", but then again,
| a programmer can also do that with code in 15 minutes...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _there are 4,000 bricklayers in America today_
|
| There are over 50,000 bricklayers in the US according to
| the BLS[1].
|
| [1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472021.htm
| [deleted]
| munk-a wrote:
| Oh sorry - google apparently failed me - thanks for the
| correction!
| narag wrote:
| _It 's no different from people saying the same thing about
| chess and chess players, or go and go players..._
|
| Well, car assembling plants are older than Deep Blue, IIRC
| and they are very complex and "very robotic" in a physical
| sense.
| willbw wrote:
| I think it _is_ different from people saying we couldn 't
| automate chess or go. The difference is between a purely data
| domain, chess or go, where it can both be translated 1-1 into
| a computer simulation of the game AND the inputs are data.
|
| I realise that you could define everything as data - laying a
| brick, you take the inputs of where to position the brick,
| etc. However I think we can make the distinction between
| chess where the data is "Pawn is on e4" and the much greater
| complexity of the real world where we are dealing with
| billions of atoms. Perhaps not everyone agrees with me.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| A big part of ML in robotics is actually making nearly 1:1
| simulations of the world and the actuators.
|
| It's fairly sucessful. We can simulate for example driving
| a car really well.
|
| Simulating human behaviour is harder, but simulating brick
| laying is not that hard, we have the technology to do so
| already.
| willbw wrote:
| I suppose it all depends on the abstractions you make and
| how well those abstractions hold in the real world.
| Humans of course make abstractions but many of these are
| done subconsciously.
|
| Simulating brick laying might be able to be done in a
| controlled environment, is it possible to make it low
| cost enough and accurate enough for all general purpose
| brick laying situations? Probably, given enough
| investment we could get closer. Is ironing out all the
| nuances cost effective? I don't know.
|
| We can definitely simulate a driving environment but I
| given the recent struggles of self driving cars I don't
| think I would say that we are at the point where we've
| solved the problem of actually driving them in everyday
| situations.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The biggest issue with self driving car isn't actually
| getting the car where we want it to go, it's predicting
| human behaviour and dealing with unseen conditions. But
| the actual physics of driving cars, yeah we've gotten
| them down beyond everyday situations.
| bumby wrote:
| > _We can simulate for example driving a car really
| well._
|
| Can you qualify this more specifically? In many domains
| (particularly safety critical ones) "reasonably well" may
| not be sufficient
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Car simulators are accurate enough that F1 drivers drive
| more in simulators than in practice laps. They are _very_
| accurate. More than well enough to train a model to
| drive, for example, reasonably fast. Of course the real
| world is always different even if simply because the
| conditions are different, so you keep some headroom.
| afrodc_ wrote:
| I think this has more to do with cost and convenience
| more than being a better representation of what it's
| actually like driving on the extremely varied state of a
| track. You can see this with the practice laps being
| extremely important because of the way the tire
| compositions, weather and car set ups change the dynamic
| of the cars drastically. The simulators can't replicate
| this effectively.
| meowkit wrote:
| Self driving hours having a lower incident rate than
| human drivers. That's the minimum. Having a 99.9x%
| success rate (put as many 9s as you desire) is your
| qualifier and that's a standard measure in operational
| uptime.
| afrodc_ wrote:
| 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?
| eru wrote:
| 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://www.wsj.com/articles/self-driving-cars-could-
| save-ma...
| bumby wrote:
| I think there are some potential flaws with the "per
| mile" or "disengagement" metrics.[1] It feels very much
| like using LOC as a measure of software quality. Sure,
| it's a metric but probably not a very good proxy for what
| we're after.
|
| [1] https://www.automotivetestingtechnologyinternational.
| com/ind...
| esailija wrote:
| You are probably comparing accidents of self-driving cars
| in optimal conditions (since they cannot even drive in
| any other conditions lol) to all accidents in all
| conditions in human drivers.
| eru wrote:
| Humans get into plenty of accidents under clear skies,
| too.
|
| See https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/30
| /waymo-... which tries somewhat to correct for
| conditions.
| hakuseki wrote:
| GP doesn't seem to be saying that chess and brick-laying
| are equally difficult to automate. GP is saying that a
| belief in brick-laying AI represents no more _contempt_
| towards brick-layers than a belief in chess AI represents
| towards chess players.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Where's the robot that can actually pick up and move pieces
| on standard chessboard, with no special guidelines or
| restrictions on pieces?
| jpindar wrote:
| Seriously?
|
| There's lots of them on YouTube. Here's one with two
| different robots.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YDAXfSAWw
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Is a computer iterating through every possible chess move
| "skill" or just being able to compute the best odds?
| throwaways885 wrote:
| Is this any different from what a human is doing?
|
| I would also say that the approaches taken by something
| like AlphaGo are more interesting, too. Because unlike
| chess the solution space for Go is too large to simply look
| at all possible moves.
| dylan604 wrote:
| a computer iterating through things isn't skill per se,
| TO ME, because it's just what it was built to do. No more
| skill involved than a machine cutting wood. A human doing
| this is a skill as they have honed that ability with
| hours upon hours of studying and reading and playing etc.
| A computer can do this from the first time the devs get
| the bugs worked out.
|
| Is that the same?
| kragen wrote:
| 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.]
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Actually it is realy different since games like chess or go
| are closed problems, i.e. they are deterministic. The number
| of parameters necessary to integrate to turn an ostensibly
| open real world problem like "driving" into a deterministic
| game like computer chess or go is far greater.
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| petra wrote:
| The main reason there's more programming work, is because
| machines are capable to do more(connectivity, mobility, ux,
| marketing, etc).
| mdtusz wrote:
| What do you think enabled these things?
| eru wrote:
| Advances in hardware and software.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Not the same programmers though nor the same job though.
| The job of programmer-by-plugging-in-wires was still
| eliminated.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Not the same programmers though nor the same job
| though.
|
| The details of job changed, as more low level pieces of
| it were automated leaving the higher-level, more abstract
| bits, but for most of the changes, while some either
| bailed for other work or rode the dying embers of the old
| way to retirement, programmers generally adapted.
| danielodievich wrote:
| My grandfather spent his entire working life after the war in
| the cement and brick factory, and built 3 houses and various
| sub-buildings out of brick. Since very young age my brother and
| I were tasked with helping, starting with just sieving sand via
| mesh to remove rocks, and then once we got just a bit older and
| stronger, actually mixing mortar out of cement and sand and
| carrying the mixture to the job site.
|
| I think I laid my first brick before the age of 9, but first
| just a couple here and there. Bricks are heavy! I think was 12
| when I was given a straight stretch of the wall close to
| foundation to, and after review of my work I had to take
| everything apart, it was saggy, uneven and ugly. Eventually I
| learned to do straight walls, but the corners eluded me until
| at least a year doing it with very qualified masons coaching. I
| don't think my joints were ever pretty enough with that lovely
| groove that some people do, and avoiding mortar onto the brick
| is devilishly hard.
|
| Where I live there is little brick construction but I love
| seeing what is there, it is always so pretty.
|
| Based on my experience of the changing by the minute mortar,
| heavy bricks, continuous looping feedback, I don't believe it
| is something that will get automated.
| cogman10 wrote:
| It's always a little weird the jobs that are easy to automate
| vs the jobs that are hard to automate.
|
| Jobs that require interaction with the physical world and
| people will almost always be a hard to automate thing. There
| are simply too many variables.
|
| The real problem is when we make the results of a job worse to
| aid in automation. The prime example here is tomatoes being
| breed with thick skin, picked before ripened, and then squirted
| with some chemicals to make them red so people will buy them.
| All while sacrificing taste.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Your observation is closely related to Moravec's paradox of
| artificial intelligence: "It is comparatively easy to make
| computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence
| tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to
| give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to
| perception and mobility."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
| bsder wrote:
| People also seem to always miss that we always engineer the
| product in order to be able to automate it.
|
| The most automated things have been designed by engineers _with
| robotic assembly in mind_.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > [mortor] it's a non-newtonian fluid, and it's viscosity
| increases when it's moved or shaken.
|
| Which is why the points about non-Newtonian fluids like
| mortor changing viscosity seems right on the money. Anyone
| trying automation with normal mortor gives me zero
| confidence. I like the robot truck idea, seems like a winner
| compared to others.
|
| Exo suits / better humans in the meantime, purpose built
| machines later.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Bogus reason. Plastic melt is also a non-Newtonian fluid
| and yet plastic parts production is thoroughly automated.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I'm not sure that tracks exactly. I think the issue is
| the stacking of very heavy things on top of a nnf goop.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > computer people
|
| The article suggests efforts go back over 100 years, so it
| seems bizarre to suggest this has something to do with
| "computer people".
|
| There is a commercial burger cooking machine north of me in SF
| (https://www.creator.rest/), and there are similar machines for
| pizzas and other fast food. That isn't an unsolved problem.
| coderjames wrote:
| Automated hamburgers at https://theroboburger.com/ and
| https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/16/business/white-castle-flippy-...
| and https://sf.eater.com/2018/6/21/17489084/creator-robot-
| burger...
|
| Automated cement-pouring in place of brick laying at
| https://www.nbc12.com/2021/06/24/virginias-first-3-d-printed...
|
| The robots have arrived. Unskilled labour needs to be
| concerned.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| We'll see if / when they hit scale. From what I recall your
| 2018 example was a flop and the machine did not produce
| burgers any cheaper and needed a lot of maintenance from the
| staff in order to operate.
|
| EDIT: Yes, they didn't last long:
| https://hackaday.com/2018/10/11/i-ate-a-robot-hamburger-
| befo...
| pottertheotter wrote:
| I find this comment so out of touch with the history of the
| world. Would you have us stuck back at the art of knocking
| rocks together to create fire since the people who created
| matches and lighters had so much contempt for the rock
| knockers? If anyone has contempt, it's this line of thought.
|
| What are we if we aren't trying to move forward--solve
| problems, invent, and improve lives? A few weeks back I came
| across Hadrian, one of the machines profiled in this piece. The
| idea of building with higher accuracy, lower cost, greater
| speed, all while allowing people doing backbreaking labor to do
| something else, excited me. There was no contempt for anyone.
|
| I like woodworking. I'm currently thinking of purchasing an
| industrial-grade CNC router. I think it's analogous to robotic
| bricklayers in many ways. I have to design a piece before I
| make it whether I cut it with a hand saw, use a table saw, or
| have the CNC router do it. The reason I use a table saw instead
| of a hand saw is the same for using a CNC router instead of a
| table saw--it's faster and provides me with a more consistent
| and accurate outcome.
|
| If that's not a good enough justification, you should look into
| how much skill is required to operate a CNC router. You can use
| different bits, rpms of the router, speed the machine is moving
| at, entry speeds, depth of cuts, etc. There is a lot of skill
| involved. And when a lot of that is taken away so I can focus
| on what matters most--creating beautiful furniture--I'll be so
| very happy and won't feel the least bit bad about it.
| eru wrote:
| Had OP removed the last part of this sentence:
|
| > Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and
| most likely never will be.
|
| To read:
|
| > Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not.
|
| Or
|
| > Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and
| most likely will take a while.
|
| You would have nothing to complain about.
|
| As often with AI / automation, the things that seem simplest
| to humans are the hardest to automate and vice versa.
|
| As another example, look at translation: take an average
| English speaker and ask them to translate Japanese texts.
| They will take lots and lots of training to get good.
|
| But provide them with a literal word-for-word translation of
| the Japanese text into English as cheat sheet, and after a
| few hours of practice, she will become pretty good at
| rewriting those into fine English translations. Given long
| enough text snippets, she'll mostly be able to figure out
| from context how to resolve ambiguities.
|
| (She won't be perfect, of course, and professional
| translators bring additional skills to the game. But she'll
| become pretty proficient pretty quickly.)
|
| Try to do a machine to translate between human language, and
| you'll notice that doing the literal translation part is
| what's really easy for the computer, but all the context is
| hard.
|
| (Incidentally, that's why in the stone age of AI, people
| thought translation would be easy, but playing chess well
| would be hard.)
| bserge wrote:
| Why not build the CNC router? It's a surprisingly simple
| machine, you could build one of any size yourself. There's
| even open source firmware and designs around. Bonus points
| for making it double as a laser etcher/cutter :D
| imtringued wrote:
| >It's a surprisingly simple machine
|
| Yes, there is nothing dumber than a robot that doesn't know
| what it is doing. It is merely following a preprogrammed
| sequence of steps hoping nothing goes wrong.
| bserge wrote:
| Well, yeah, the thinking is left to you and the software.
| empiricus wrote:
| For my new house, laying the bricks (aerated concrete blocks
| actually) took 2 days. The rest of the house took more than one
| year to finish. Not really necessary to optimize this step in
| many cases.
| SlapperKoala wrote:
| In most major cities the real cost is the land and paperwork to
| be able to build there. The actual physical materials the
| building is made of are mostly aesthetic
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Yep, that's the real issue. It optimizes one of the less
| expensive steps in the construction process; therefore the
| savings are not significant enough to matter much.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I think about that every time I see yet another article on 3d
| printing houses.
|
| My parents added a bedroom to a stick framed house. The floor
| joists took a weekend. Nailing together and erecting walls took
| one weekend. Framing the roof, another weekend. That was my
| dad, mom, brother and I. And we used a skill saw, hammers and
| nails.
|
| I think the issue is each task of itself is fairly optimized.
| Yet there are a large number of them to do. And a problem is
| automation generally requires tight tight tolerances or you're
| back to hand fitting everything. For instance with molding a
| skilled tradesman will just install it without any detailed
| plans. Working around any small variation won't slow him down
| at all.
|
| Another issue I see is lot of focus on single family. Gut
| feeling is mass produced single family is a dying industry in
| the west.
| cudgy wrote:
| 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.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| 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.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I meant the US and Europe. And by extension places of that
| nature. Slower growing aging populations and the
| realization that low density single family both burdens
| local government with costly infrastructure that generates
| low revenue. Like a sewer main with 100 customers per mile.
| Only sustainable when growing fast.
|
| There is a lot of multifamily being built despite fairly
| intense NIMBYism. And despite that you're seeing cities
| getting rid of R1 zoning.
| yholio wrote:
| There is no fundamental reason for urban sprawl to stop.
| Western living standards and wealth are increasing, and
| the actual material costs of laying a sewer pipe or road
| become negligible.
|
| With the advent of electric self driving cars,
| transportation becomes cheap and hassle free. A network
| of highways converging to an urban center served by
| Boring co Loop tunnels can gather trafic from a 30 mile
| area. As long as travel times are less than say, around
| 45 minutes, those people will be living "in the city".
|
| A 30 mile radius means about 7 million plots of 10000 sq
| feet, so you could accommodate more than 20 million
| inhabitants in this suburbopolis of single detached
| family homes.
|
| The factors preventing it are land prices, regulatory
| pressure and homebuyer tastes.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| 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 some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the
| decision making part of the job for humans.
|
| This is both economically unviable and largely unpopular. You're
| not reducing labor costs by much, because you still need humans
| around. And workers lose control over their job, and have to
| "work around" the robot's limitations. Instead of being freed up
| to do more work, they become babysitters of machines that they
| have to oversee so it doesn't mess up everything.
|
| This is why partial robotic systems don't really exist; either
| it's a nifty tool that speeds up a small repeatable process of
| your work, or it's building the entire house.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _This is both economically unviable and largely unpopular._
|
| And yet, you can make billions of dollars on it.
|
| This is literally the modus operandi of modern tech companies
| like Google and Amazon. Automate the main workflow, silently
| ignore exceptions, and if anyone complains about problems (or
| your non-existent customer support), just wave your hands in
| the air and mumble something about "scale being hard".
| yholio wrote:
| If you can automate 80% of the jobs your customers require,
| you can make a billion dollars and send the other 20%
| potential customers to talk to Mailer Daemon. If you automate
| 80% of every job and leave 20% to every customer, you have no
| customers.
| SlapperKoala wrote:
| If you have bugs in an app or website people get mildly
| annoyed, if you have bugs in a bricklayer a building can fall
| down. The cost benefit calculation is very different
| IanSanders wrote:
| That somehow hit home regarding software development (and
| technology in general). Brick laying is a metaphor for
| something else
| MillenialMan wrote:
| I don't really understand this. When I see a small house being
| built, it will have four or five builders on-site at all times,
| mostly doing labour (and they're, frankly, extremely slow. It
| will take months to lay the bricks). If you still need the
| decisions, can't you cut that down to one, or maybe two? That
| strikes me as a dramatic reduction in labour cost.
| necovek wrote:
| Multi-story buildings take only a few days of brick-laying by
| 4-5 people. Before you can lay the bricks though, you need a
| firm foundation to carry those bricks, including those
| concrete floors which take a while to dry up.
|
| There is still a bunch of work in construction that can
| happen while brick laying happens (plumbing and electrical
| installations in the floor, pillars to carry roof/next floor,
| ...) and there is usually a mandated licensed professional to
| oversee the construction (or few, one for safety, one for
| quality and ensuring the project is actually followed).
|
| And you can also start doing things as parts of walls get
| completed (installing windows, insulation, more electrical
| installations). After the building is put under a roof,
| that's when the real work begins :), though that's even
| easier to parallelize.
|
| Brick laying is literally one of the quickest parts and most
| effective parts of making a building look like a building,
| but it's nowhere near the most costly thing.
| MillenialMan wrote:
| There's a build happening at the end of my road at the
| moment, I can see how this maps onto that. Thanks - this
| explains a lot.
| himinlomax wrote:
| > including those concrete floors which take a while to dry
| up.
|
| FWIW, the slower concrete dries, the stronger it gets. To
| the point where critical concrete buildings like bridges
| are kept moist for days or even weeks with hoses and wet
| blankets.
| j7ake wrote:
| This is a well written point.
|
| In our interactions with robots, I feel the future valuable
| work will come from work where humans have the agency and
| direction, while robot's functions have been specifically
| tailored to augment the specific human's skills or relieve the
| human of certain repetitive parts of the process.
| raptor99 wrote:
| I was confused at first; I thought you were talking about self
| driving vehicles, or cooking robots, or practically any
| "automation" that has to interface with the chaotic, random,
| and analog, real world. Hmm.
| JacobDotVI wrote:
| Would you not consider a power drill a "partial robotic
| system"? Is this a situation where once something is useful it
| switches from being a "robot" to just a "power tool" and so
| "robots" are a kind of endless frontier?
| moss2 wrote:
| By that logic, power tools don't exist.
| LightG wrote:
| Sounds like FSD.
| paxys wrote:
| > 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 some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping
| the decision making part of the job for humans.
|
| You are wayyy underselling the importance of convenience tools.
| Even without working out edge cases you can reduce a workforce
| of 100 people to 95 robots and 5 supervisors/decision makers.
| mbesto wrote:
| > This is why partial robotic systems don't really exist;
| either it's a nifty tool that speeds up a small repeatable
| process of your work, or it's building the entire house.
|
| I think I understand your overall point, but what you said
| isn't exactly true. Isn't "speed up a repeatable process"
| essentially a partial robotic system?
|
| Just look at a modern car manufacturing plant - it's
| essentially one big chain of robotics with human overseers.
| There aren't that many exceptions to car manufacturing once the
| set car variants are establish (LX, CX, blah blah model
| variants). I would consider that whole system a "partial
| robotic system".
| spyckie2 wrote:
| Yeah, my point wasn't really well stated, I think that was
| why it generated discussion.
|
| Robots exist en masse already, we just don't call them
| robots, we call them washing machines and dishwashers and
| factory lines. There's a blurred line in between machines
| that do stuff and robots.
|
| In discussing the automation revolution, I like to think the
| difference is robots functioning autonomously (sorry
| dishwasher, you're not included). While there is still a lot
| left to do in speeding up repeatable processes, building
| robots that can run themselves with higher abstract
| operational input ("build a brick wall") is where the
| revolution is at.
|
| Robotic tooling plays a huge role in this, unsurprisingly -
| robots need to do everything humans can do. But... we mostly
| build human interfaces, not robot interfaces - switches
| instead of electrical signals, handles instead of joints,
| etc.
|
| This is for good reason; mass produced robots can't do basic
| movement, precise placement, etc. (well, not at cost). So
| robots are extremely limited to being bolted in factories or
| otherwise constrained environments. But when robots can start
| to do generalized tasks, I'd be interested in seeing exactly
| what kinds of autonomous stuff robots will start to do.
| atoav wrote:
| 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 2000 has to
| share the job both with the workers whose jobs it replaces
| and with people from non-brickbot-2000-educated workers from
| different companies.
| gmadsen wrote:
| take a look at the seers catalog houses of the 30s
| brnt wrote:
| > 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.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| 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 the
| complete panel to be attached to the car.
|
| In short, if we ever see a major change to automate
| housing construction I expect it will also come along
| with significant changes in construction methods.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Have you seen the concrete 3D printers? They printed
| weird looking houses with them. Very nifty. There are
| even people living in them.
| toyg wrote:
| In many ways this is what much of prefab is. Building is
| carried out offsite by robots, and humans just assemble
| panels onsite. However, this reduces the adaptability of
| the building, increases transport and storage costs and
| complexity, and creates new issues (apparently prefabs
| can be at higher risk of fire).
|
| Construction is one of those things where the process is
| much less regular and perfectly-repetitive than outcomes
| would suggest.
| wnkrshm wrote:
| 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 it's really impressive.
|
| 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...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > 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?
| _trampeltier wrote:
| And outside it can be sunny, rainy or even snowing,
| sometimes even on the same day.
| goguy wrote:
| Just wait for electrobot 2000 and the problem is resolved
| :)
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| 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.
| Symmetry wrote:
| After WWII there was a big boom in houses made that way
| in the United States too but then homebuilders were able
| to get legislation passed so that "a small manufactured
| house is disfavored because it's mobile like a vehicle
| but it is also required by law to be mobile like a
| vehicle" and the problem for them went away.
|
| https://www.slowboring.com/p/trailer-regulation
| GFischer wrote:
| Very interesting read, we're facing similar regulatory
| capture issues here in my country.
| hippari wrote:
| You rarely get to build a new neighbourhood here, often
| it's renovation work done on already built areas.
| Building a whole new block all the time is simply
| unsustainable.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Are the factories mobile and/or relocatable to reduce
| transport costs; and/or are the neighbourhood location
| requirements somewhat specific (e.g. flat stable land,
| good road access etc)?
| nine_k wrote:
| This is a great way to build out when your city is
| growing like mad. I think China and Russia have seen and
| still see a lot of development like this.
|
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| What you're saying resonates for so many new products. I find
| that most time or labor saving ideas save time on something
| that is not actually the problem, or address a charicature of
| the actual workflow. I dont think it means we should give up
| and stop trying, rather that its critical to test with real
| users IMO before trying to sign deals on a product that doesn't
| make sense.
| pvorb wrote:
| And sometimes the things that are automated were the only
| thing that was pleasant. It's not true for laying bricks
| because the heavy lifting makes it unpleasant.
| version_five wrote:
| I have never laid brick but I've done a lot of shingled
| roofs. The "fun" part of shingling is long stretches of
| full sheets in the middle of the roof. This goes quickly
| and is rewarding. The less fun, and what occupies the time,
| is where there is a chimney or a valley or a dormer or some
| other feature that you need to figure out and cut some
| flashing for, and custom fit each shingle that butts up
| against the feature, seal with tar sometimes, etc.
|
| I picture a lot of automated solutions focusing on the "in
| the field" part where the work is easy and rewarding, and
| glossing over the manual intervention and craftsmanship
| that is needed for all the nonstandard bits. I don't know
| about bricklaying though I imagine it has similar
| characteristics, where a square windowless wall goes very
| fast, and could be pleasant work, and all the time is spent
| dealing with windows and the frame not being level and
| other edge cases.
| coldacid wrote:
| Not just test! Real users need to be there from the
| requirements stage.
| version_five wrote:
| Yes agreed, sorry I was thinking in terms of a new product,
| testing the value prop with users, which is probably better
| stated as requirements gathering.
| NonContro wrote:
| I'm planning to build a house, and it has surprised me that
| standardised house plans are not readily available online -
| particularly for European weather conditions - the emphasis is
| instead on custom floorplans.
|
| Creating new designs millions of times over seems like an
| obvious inefficiency.
| rurounijones wrote:
| I think the middle ground is something like
| https://wudl.co.uk/ where your house is essentially put
| together from smaller modular pieces. This allows pre-
| construction and the efficiencies in "mass production" while
| allowing semi-customisation.
| necovek wrote:
| Local companies doing construction in Serbia will happily
| provide you with a plan as well as a building cost ahead of
| time.
|
| However, plots and legal requirements differ significantly
| that in urban environments, it's hard to make the most of the
| plot without going custom (requirement to be that far away
| from the neighbour and the street, whether you can have
| windows facing that side or not, what kind of foundation is
| required by the terrain, etc).
| NonContro wrote:
| You're probably right. It makes more sense to sell those
| mass-produced floorplans to architects, who will make
| slight tweaks for local conditions and perhaps pay via
| subscription, rather than directly to consumers who will
| probably just copy the floorplan .jpg and take that to the
| builder anyway.
| lazide wrote:
| People who want a house built want to build _their_ house.
| Cookie cutter is for subdivisions and apartments, which those
| folks are often trying to escape.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Prefab houses are a thing and they aren't exactly rare.
| People escaping apartments usually complain about neighbors
| or lack of a garden, not about the floor plan.
| lazide wrote:
| They are pretty rare, at least here in the US, and widely
| seen as undesirable or 2nd-3rd tier at best.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Where I live, they aren't that rare. People like the fact
| that they can be built fast.
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| In Hungary we had house templates since the socialism.
|
| (following sites are in Hungarian)
|
| https://kulcsrakesz.hu/tipushazak/
|
| https://hellohaz.hu/tipushazak/
|
| https://www.leier.hu/tipushazak
| saberdancer wrote:
| These are prefab houses. They are built in factory and then
| pieced together on site. What the poster was asking for was
| free/cheap plans to build a house, without support.
|
| Kind of like open source design of a house.
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| Only the Leier one is prefab, the others are from
| protherm (clay) brick. And yes the planes there aren't
| free.
|
| However there also exists a state level catalog of free
| (open source) templates as well:
|
| https://www.oeny.hu/oeny/nmtk/mintatervek
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| It seems it's only available for Hungarian citizens, as
| it needs Hungarian Electric Id to login. I'm not sure it
| qualifies for open source but it's free as in beer to
| Hungarian citizens with the right to adapt the plan to
| your demands.
| josefx wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if the architects making the plans
| had catalogues with existing designs. I would however be
| surprised if they gave weeks/months of work to get them into
| compliance with non trivial legal requirements away for free.
| uCantCauseUCant wrote:
| The trick is to ask somebody who you know, who built a house
| similar to the one you plan for a copy of the plans.
| mavhc wrote:
| Not destroying your body lifting heavy weights for 50 years
| seems like something people might like.
|
| We automated looking after the house after it's been built, no
| need for people scrubbing floors and clothes any more, freed up
| 40% of the workforce.
|
| My partially automated vacuum cleaner, clothes washer, dish
| washer, food cooker, water heater, all work well.
| MillenialMan wrote:
| People already have the option to not lay bricks. They don't
| choose it, because they need money.
|
| I get that everyone is going to say, "well then, UBI" but
| bear in mind in an automated society, power is
| disproportionately in the hands of the people who own the
| machines, and they're unlikely to part with their wealth
| voluntarily.
| version_five wrote:
| Most construction relies on fit young men to do the "heavy
| lifting". It would be interesting to see how the dynamics
| changesd if technology moved the needle on the brawn->brain
| scale, so that the core value prop of a construction worker
| was not their fitness. I'm not convinced it would be for the
| better.
|
| Also just want to add that working in a physical job for 50
| years is much better for your body than sitting at a desk for
| 50 years.
| darkwater wrote:
| > Also just want to add that working in a physical job for
| 50 years is much better for your body than sitting at a
| desk for 50 years.
|
| This is a pipe dream of white collar who never did any
| actual, real, physical job for a very prolonged time. It's
| not like going to the gym for free or doing just the right
| amount of sport. It's something that stresses your joints
| and your muscles day in day out. Obviously you will partly
| get used to it and be "more fit" than a white collar but
| you will also develop back pain and joints pain.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Also just want to add that working in a physical job for
| 50 years is much better for your body than sitting at a
| desk for 50 years. "
|
| The experience of my neighbors from an industrial city is
| 100 per cent opposite. Physical jobs tend to consist of
| endless repetitive tasks that put a huge strain on certain
| joints and sinews while leaving other parts of your body
| idle. And many physical jobs will expose you to health
| risks such as breathing dust.
|
| All the miners, steel workers, construction workers etc. I
| knew had major problems with their joints around 35 years
| of age and none of them could continue to work in their
| original job after 50.
|
| On the other hand, negative effects of sedentary work can
| be mostly compensated by not eating processed crap (to
| prevent obesity) and exercising moderately three or four
| times a week. Plenty of people do that.
| oblio wrote:
| Office work is also less deadly than physical work. Just
| look up the numbers. Hard to fall off the office chair to
| your death, not so hard to fall off the scaffolding to
| your death.
| MillenialMan wrote:
| This is completely untrue. Contrary to popular belief,
| sitting at a desk is extremely healthy in comparison to
| manual labour, which destroys your body over time.
|
| Standing all day is also worse for your _back_ than sitting
| all day. Even being a shop assistant is harder on your
| body, and particularly your back, than sitting at a desk.
| (Alternating, i.e. an office job with a sit /stand desk, is
| best.)
|
| The primary issue is complete lack of inactivity (a large
| component just being weight gain), which you can combat by
| exercising outside of the office.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| >Also just want to add that working in a physical job for
| 50 years is much better for your body than sitting at a
| desk for 50 years.
|
| Not for my carpet-fitting granddad. And it's not like he
| has a private pension. Desk job damage can mostly be undone
| by proper exercise: it takes surgery to fix knees.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > physical job for 50 years
|
| I think you're envisioning jobs with high skill
| requirements or low demand, or a mix of both. Like
| landscaper for the town, or garbage truck operator.
|
| Otherwise you'll generally be met with a combination of
| RSI, hazardous product ingestion (dust, paint fumes,
| exhaust...), allergies, injuries, or sheer overwork.
|
| Working a low wage low level physical job is more often
| than not closer to Amazon warehouse worker than artisans
| healthily exercising their bodies.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| I just want to iterate that working an office job also
| carries with it its own health problems. Low physical
| activity from sitting all day, forward posture from
| sitting all day, RSI from typing and mouse movement, eye
| problems, overwork (Arguably more than labor jobs).
| oblio wrote:
| 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.
| mypalmike wrote:
| In addition, office workers have the option of engaging
| in exercise during their off time to compensate for the
| sedentary aspect of desk work.
| esailija wrote:
| Yep and in optimal amounts, which is surprisingly little.
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| > RSI from typing
|
| Most office jobs don't involve that much typing. You can
| also buy keyboards with softer switches. (RSI was more
| common in the days of mechanical typewriters.) Low
| physical acitivity can be made up for going to the gym
| after work.
|
| It sounds to me you never did a day of manual labor in
| your life.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| Well not to discredit your point but a day in the life
| off wouldn't really bring to life any of the points we're
| discussing when it comes to physical injuries. Without
| you picking at each of my points in detail, RSI is still
| an injury people STILL DO get nonetheless. In the same
| way that the introduction of the hard hat hasn't
| completely stopped people having their head caved in.
|
| My point, was that both physical/labor intensive jobs and
| office jobs bring their own types of workplace related
| problems. And just because the job may carry with it a
| risk of physical injury doesn't mean the job should be
| automated. Afterall, any type of movement the body does
| carries with it a risk of injury.
| necovek wrote:
| IMHO, anything that not enough people can find
| interesting and engaging should be automated -- injury
| risk is also a great reason to automate something. Of
| course, there is a cost involved, so we shouldn't expect
| any of it to happen overnight.
|
| While your point is true that every profession has an
| injury risk, it's the type of comment that misses the
| point: there is a significant difference in those stats,
| and by trying to equate them, you are purposely watering
| down the significance of one where injuries are more
| prevalent (or at least harder).
|
| It's a response similar in style to deflecting from
| attempts to solve one crisis by introducing another
| crisis.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| As someone that has worked digging ditches and carrying
| shingles up a ladder all day. I respectfully disagree.
| They are not remotely comparabe.
| xyproto wrote:
| One doesn't exclude the other. All types of work-induced
| health problems are possible.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| Exactly
| coldacid wrote:
| >Not destroying your body lifting heavy weights for 50 years
| seems like something people might like.
|
| And that's why the exoskeleton system mentioned in passing in
| the article is more popular with construction labourers than
| any of these robots.
| minikites wrote:
| Better tools amplify human skills instead of attempting to
| replace them.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| This always has seemed like a good goal to have. There is
| some work where automation makes sense, but I don't think
| replacing is always the right goal.
| https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-
| centaur/#reverse-...
| yodelshady wrote:
| Think I'd put money behind a separate machine, but one that
| just delivers you the brick at hand height, rather than a
| continual bend-down/place/pick-up cycle. I would say "Brick
| Butler" or if a startup... Brcklr, the device is free, but
| the bricks have DRM and post instagram stories as you lay
| them.
| coldacid wrote:
| Yeah, that seems like the best plan. It might not improve
| the speed of bricklaying, but it would certainly be an
| improvement on the bricklayers' quality of life.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Nice, also build a management interface so they can see
| the workers brick per hour stats.
|
| Add in GPS, keep all the data and later sell the database
| to insurance companies so they can charge higher rates
| for construction that happened too fast.
| imtringued wrote:
| It does sound like a mason that can lift 5 bricks at a time
| is more productive than a machine that can lay bricks 5
| times faster in a synthetic benchmark.
| concordDance wrote:
| > freed up 40% of the workforce.
|
| And did that actually improve everyone's quality of life? Or
| did it just increase the cost of positional goods (check out
| house prices in the West)?
| mavhc wrote:
| It improved the quality of life of people who didn't have
| to spend all day washing floors.
|
| Isn't the point that house prices are high because they've
| not been automated? And also that people expect to buy a
| house using a massive loan over decades.
|
| Although from the videos it looks like the brick walls
| don't actually hold anything up half the time, so might as
| well replace them with brick patterned wallpaper
| imtringued wrote:
| House prices are high because land prices are high. There
| are some cities where permitting is a nightmare and the
| "brainy" people displaced the "brawny" people but those
| are the exception.
|
| >Although from the videos it looks like the brick walls
| don't actually hold anything up half the time, so might
| as well replace them with brick patterned wallpaper
|
| Idea: Assemble the wall paper on the ground with a
| machine and install it in one go.
| octokatt wrote:
| 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.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| I don't know. You are trading strange things here: Even if
| you like doing brickwork, is it worth the toll on your body?
| I've met a lot of construction workers: I've met fewer that
| are nearing retirement age that are still working - and
| generally, when they do work, they use the machines while
| folks who haven't hurt their back, shoulders, and other bits
| do the physical work. Not everyone needs mastery of something
| physical and not everyone needs to get "pride" or other
| positive feelings from work so long as their work isn't
| horrible and the hours aren't overly long.
|
| And I bet there are plenty of folks that would rather babysit
| this machine than babysit the machine at the fast food place.
| jameshart wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is like complaining that cars did away with the
| pleasures of horsemanship, or how laser printers have
| destroyed the pride engravers derived from their work.
|
| The history of technology is full of taking hard tasks that
| people took years to master and therefore derived status and
| self respect from, and replacing them with machines. People
| cope.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I remember around 10-12 years ago my son had a birthday party
| at our house and one of the children's fathers asked how long
| we had lived here. We told him and he replied "OK, I was
| pretty sure this house looked familiar: I built your stone
| fireplace. You have some boulder retaining walls out back,
| don't you? I built those too." The pride on his face, finally
| getting to meet the homeowner and show off his work, was
| amazing.
|
| The cool thing about bricks and rock is that those walls will
| probably be there 100 years from now.
| mstipetic wrote:
| Since when do we account for people's feelings when deciding
| to automate something or not?
| gotts wrote:
| Reading about your father having such a long career in brick
| masonry sparked joy in me. Thanks for sharing
| IkmoIkmo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Why? At the end of the day there'll be two companies offering
| to build your wall. Human vs Tech-assisted Human (and
| eventually, robot). If one is faster, more accurate and
| cheaper, the buyer will choose it. The other will go out of
| business.
|
| It's not about masons embracing this, it's about clients
| embracing superior outcomes (quality, price and/or time).
| Eventually the few masons that make the switch to superior
| outcomes will push the others out of the market.
|
| That is of course assuming tech-assisted/robot will actually
| be better. At the moment it's not in the vast majority of
| cases. But granting that assumption, I don't think
| 'satisfying the human experience of a mason' will go into the
| equation for long.
|
| That's not a value judgement, I think building good human
| experiences is important. I just don't think in the decision
| making process it'll matter due to inevitable competition.
| [deleted]
| azernik wrote:
| Construction is an economic activity, not a hobby.
|
| We generally do not structure our economic activity for
| maximum enjoyment on the part of the worker, but for lowest
| price and best quality to the consumer. To the extent that
| this translates into catering to the worker, it's by way of
| the increased efficiency allowing higher wages (though, as
| recent US experience shows, companies can also grab all the
| productivity gains for themselves).
| eloisius wrote:
| 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 big timber structures to wrap handrails
| and stringers around to form the spiral. He worked out the
| geometry on paper (or more likely on the timber itself)
| writing with flat pencils that he sharpened with his pocket
| knife. You couldn't just mass produce the handrails either.
| It took time, pinned to the template, for the wood to become
| permanently warped into a spiral.
|
| Years later, I ended up getting a job as a 5-axis CNC
| operator in the same shop. My dad thought it'd be a suitable
| job for me because I was good with computers, so he
| introduced me to the foreman in the strait stairs side of the
| shop. I was only cutting stair stringers, so it was basically
| mind-numbing data entry on some crappy Visual Basic app and
| then running the CNC which frequently got hung and ruined
| materials. The spiral staircase end of the shop was also
| different than from what I remembered as a kid. They still
| had a couple of the old-school spiral staircases in
| production at any given time, but those were special order.
| How do they churn out mass produced spiral staircases for
| tasteless McMansions? They glue a bunch of chunks of wood
| together and use a CNC to route out the negative space. Of
| course the grain of the wood doesn't match up like spiral
| constructed from one plank. The product looks like dog shit.
| The CNC screws up a non-negligible percent of the time
| resulting in tons of wasted materials. I and all the CNC
| operators I talked to loathed the machines we operated. They
| were all crappy Chinese tech, and it felt like tedious
| babysitting, not craftsmanship. I'd rather be swinging a
| hammer than do that job again.
|
| I wonder how the finances even come out ahead. Does no one
| care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo
| cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost
| possible? My dad is a curmudgeon about tech in general, but
| it's not hard to see why. He was a master craftsman, and
| because "the industry" was headed in another direction, he
| was eventually replaced by a bunch of button pushers that can
| produce a low-quality simulacrum the same thing at a fraction
| of the cost.
| cudgy wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| 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 France would have had access to
| colorful non-itchy clothes back in the day, and now
| everyone can have them.
| eloisius wrote:
| 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, even with
| ever increasing tech we work probably more than anytime
| in history. I don't believe we're going to hit some
| inflection point where suddenly humans will be freed from
| labor. There is satisfaction to be found in craft and
| honing skill. If we delegate all that to machines that
| spit out crummy imitations, and humans are relegated to
| the mind-numbing task of babysitting a glitchy piece of
| tech, clearing a paper jam and hitting reset all day, I
| think that is a net loss for life satisfaction. Who cares
| if you can own a shitty McMansion when what you
| experience during majority of your wakeful life is mind-
| numbing frustration?
| oblio wrote:
| At a higher price you can still find craftsmanship. But
| now, as always, you have to afford it.
|
| 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.
| eloisius wrote:
| I'm also not a Luddite, so if it seems I'm making a vast
| anti-tech argument, I'm truly not. It's easy to get drawn
| into a futurism vs tradition argument, but I don't want
| to take either side in that debate. I love tools and I
| love inventions that amplify a human being's power and
| effectiveness. But there are tools that are miserable to
| use, produce horrible results, but are just enough to be
| acceptable and offer The Business enormous cost savings
| (or sometimes just the illusion of it). I don't have the
| energy to try and write a manifesto right now for which
| tools fall into either camp, but maybe some day.
|
| I like writing code, and I think a lot of other people do
| too. But it's not just that I like writing the code and
| want it to be as low-level and arcane as possible. Give
| me a language that lets me be more expressive and
| accomplish more and I'll be all the more happy to adopt
| this tool and incorporate it into my craft.
|
| But, imagine The Business decides that coders writing
| code is just too expensive, so we've purchased an AI that
| dials into all the conference calls stakeholders have
| regarding a project, and subsequently it can generate all
| the code necessary to meet the requirements. Well, kind
| of. After sitting in on the meetings, it can instantly
| generate the code that would have taken a dev team a
| whole quarter, and then send it over to QA. The only
| catch is that code is spaghetti and the defect rate is
| really high. Still, The Business only needs 25% of the
| coders that it used to have. But their job is a little
| different now. They don't write code per se. They just QA
| and fix bugs. The code is horrible, there's no design or
| architecture to speak of, it's hard to debug, and fixing
| defects is mind-numbing. But, at the end of the day, the
| low quality product is still good enough to sell,
| everyone else in the industry is doing it too, and
| besides, the cost savings is too huge to ignore.
|
| No one has to "write" code anymore. Did our lives get
| easier and better? What is the ultimate end of easiest
| and best? No one has to do a thing and minimally
| acceptable food shows up when we're hungry while we
| continually slurp down personalized, proceduraly
| generated sitcoms?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > we work probably more than anytime in history
|
| I doubt that. Here's a rough approximation:
| https://clockify.me/working-hours
|
| But that also ignores quality of life (as a result of
| work) and general work conditions. Working in a mine for
| an hour (or a hunter stalking prey, or working in a
| field) is not the same as an hour sitting in an office.
|
| > where suddenly humans will be freed from labor
|
| If by labor you mean physically intensive work, we are
| already there, most people live sedentary working
| lifestyles. If you mean any type of work - perhaps not,
| but at the same time "The Devil finds work for idle
| hands" so I'm not sure it's desirable, humans need
| _something_ to do, and bored teenagers often cause
| mayhem.
|
| > humans are relegated to the mind-numbing task of
| babysitting a glitchy piece of tech
|
| Not sure how overseeing a brick-laying robot is more/less
| mind-numbing than laying the bricks yourself.
|
| > clearing a paper jam and hitting reset all day
|
| exactly the case with self-checkout, and the job doesn't
| seem more/less boring to me than working a checkout. At
| least the self-checkout machines improve over time.
| cseleborg wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. The smartphone enabled a few very
| unique scenarios, like car sharing, and made everything
| else worse. It didn't use to be the case that you had to
| enter a PIN code, resist distraction from half a dozen
| notifications and hope you had got the power management
| right the night before when you wanted to read the
| morning news, but now that's the norm, just to give one
| example.
| iso1631 wrote:
| I don't have notifications, my phone has a fingerprint
| reader, and I get the news from the radio which turns on
| at 7am anyway. It might be the norm for you, but it
| doesn't have to be. Turn off your phone and charge it in
| the kitchen.
| eloisius wrote:
| Same. I used to be absolutely starry eyed about the
| endless possibilities of digital tech. Now anytime I see
| computers getting involved where they previously were
| not, it's just a cost savings measure resulting in a
| severely inferior product that is just above the
| threshold of being unsellable. An example that comes to
| mind is information and entertainment itself. Humans used
| to curate content for us to consume, but more and more
| we're being entertained by machine-curated feeds with low
| quality content. The endless stream-of-conscious format
| of infiniscrolls and recommendations and 'related' or
| 'relevant' content is vastly inferior to carefully human-
| curated hierarchies of information.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| This is a different kind of innovation. The issue is not
| every improvement will be to the consumer.
|
| Better weapons will enable you to kill
| better/faster/harder. Tech improves the "can", not the
| "should" - you still need politics to reign in control.
| [deleted]
| dagw wrote:
| _Does no one care about how their house looks?_
|
| I think people care more than ever how their house looks,
| and that is exactly why they buy "ugly McMansions".
|
| I mean why else would you buy a McMansion, other than for
| the look. From a construction point, most aren't built to
| last. From an architecture point they aren't great
| "machines for living in". From an economic point they're
| neither frugal or a great investment.
|
| Bottom line is the main reason people by a McMansion is
| because they care more than anything how their house look,
| and whether you or I like it they really want a house that
| looks like a McMansion.
| profsnuggles wrote:
| I don't know anything about spiral staircases or masonry I
| build commercial furniture offices, libraries, courtrooms,
| etc.
|
| Wondering how finances come out ahead is silly. Take for
| example take a CNC beamsaw. It does one thing cut straight
| lines. A person stands in front of it (or a robot but
| smaller shops it's a person) and puts a board on the
| machine. The machine grabs and executes a series of cuts.
| Then you take the parts it spits out rotate them feed them
| back in the machine to cut the other way. A person standing
| at a cabinet saw can do the same thing, faster even, with a
| nicer finish... for the first 10-20 cuts. The machine gives
| the same 95% quality cut every time in the same amount of
| time from cut 1 to cut 10,000.
|
| When my shop first got one I by myself cut twice as much
| material in 1/5th of the time as it took 3 workers on
| cabinet table saws. And I actually had enough downtime
| while the machine was running to also put the parts through
| an edgebander to put a finished veneer edge on the cut
| parts at the same time.
|
| The 3 CNC machines I run now don't screw up often and waste
| time or material. Even when there is a problem it's
| actually often due to user error. I just had to spend some
| time fixing our 5-axis machine because the operator
| accidentally left some loose material in it which a sensor
| on the machine detected to prevent the machine being
| damaged. The emergency stop it triggered ruined the part
| and the machine stopped so fast that the machine racked and
| I needed to re-calibrate it. But that is fairly unusual.
| Maybe instead of crappy tech they should have bought
| quality machines? Or maybe the machines were fine and
| someone should have invested in software instead of a
| crappy vb script? Or maybe the operators just needed more
| training?
|
| A master craftsman can use a machine to create the same
| quality of work in less time if that is the goal. You can
| steam bend a board and then 5-axis machine it to create a
| very complicated edge detail that would be tedious to do by
| hand. Or you can glue blocks up with different grain
| directions and materials so the completed railing has an
| interesting design that would be impossible to create
| otherwise. Or even spend some more effort gluing up those
| blocks to make a better grain match.
|
| The reason they are gluing up blocks and machining them is
| because it is cheaper and faster for an okay quality.
| Almost no one buying the "McMansion" staircase was going to
| buy your bespoke custom master craftsman spiral staircase.
| I work in a shop that makes all custom-built to order
| furniture. Sometimes potential clients call and have
| sticker shock when they hear the price or sometimes they
| need to furniture sooner than we can build something
| custom. They just go and buy something they can live with
| from a larger company that mass produces a furniture line
| where they will have inventory.
|
| I don't see an issue with making something affordable for
| people who want it. I'm not even sure anything is lost,
| there are still people who will want the high quality
| product and someone will be there to supply that.
|
| There is whole world between button pusher and master
| craftsman. Master craftsmen that embrace the technology can
| expand what is possible. And a button pusher cannot exist
| unless there is a master craftsmen to do the setup work.
| moftz wrote:
| I was looking for a nice coffee table recently. I decided
| to try the unfinished wood furniture store, most of it
| made by the Amish or Menonites. I'm handy enough to stain
| but not equiped to build a table myself so I figured I'd
| save a few bucks doing the finish. Most the tables
| weren't our style but finally found one that looked great
| and was some real quality oak. Asked for the price and
| just about crapped my pants. We stopped by Ikea on the
| way home and bought probably the nicest table they had
| for a quarter of the price. The nicer Ikea table will be
| able to make it through any moving we do in the future
| but it most certainly won't be an heirloom like my
| parent's old oak stuff.
|
| I want try my hand at some furniture building in the
| future but just don't have the space or some of the
| standard tools for it now.
| profsnuggles wrote:
| That is also something people don't think about. Solid
| wood is great because it's easy to fix, but it's heavy
| and hard to move. Also it's less stable than a plywood
| and has to be taken care of.
|
| We had a customer with a reception desk that had solid
| wood 5-piece raised panels in it. One of the panels
| cracked, so we sent them a new one under warranty and
| over 3-4 years it cracked more times. We finally sent
| someone to try to figure out the issue.
|
| It was winter and the building was unusually warm and
| humid. The desk was positioned in front of the front door
| in a way that whenever it was opened the panel would get
| hit with an large blast of dry cold air. After convincing
| them to replace it with a more stable plywood raised
| panel simulacrum we haven't heard of an issue since.
| eloisius wrote:
| Thanks for your take on it, I really don't want to be the
| anti-tech curmudgeon so I'm sincerely happy to read a
| different perspective. Especially your last paragraph
| makes me feel better. Maybe it's because CNC technology
| has come a long way since 15 years ago, or more likely
| because the staircase company I worked for were just
| cheapskates willing to strip mine their company's
| reputation. I feel like I had to recalibrate the damn
| thing hourly. The vacuum that held the stringers in place
| was not strong enough, so they would break loose and end
| up jamming the routing bit constantly. Having PTSD
| thinking about it.
| profsnuggles wrote:
| Well CNC technology has come a long way. The 5-axis
| machine we purchased was actually cheaper in absolute $
| than the 20 year old 3-axis machine we were replacing it
| with.
|
| But yes vacuum clamping is still annoying. There are of
| course strategies like onion skinning, leaving tabs. On
| nesting machines I often cover the table with laminate if
| I'm running small parts and need to prevent vacuum loss
| through the spoil board.
|
| Most people that I talk to that brought CNC into a shop
| haven't seem to have laid anyone off but instead seem to
| be able to retrain people and grow sales because of the
| new capacity it brought.
|
| Although if there are people who are actually button
| pushers and legitimately bring nothing else to the table
| I think their time is limited. I wish I could find the
| video but last year our CNC vendor sent me a video of a
| concept manufacturing cell using an autonomous guided
| vehicle. It blew my mind. There was no operators or
| conveyors just robots cutting a whole lot of different
| sized parts of of different material at the same time.
| The parts got stacked on a pallets which the AGV drove
| around to the different operations. They were even
| showing off handling non rectangular parts with no
| problem.
|
| Probably not that expensive either I was thinking maybe
| $2 million based on the prices of machines I knew and...
| wildly guessing at the price of the robotics. Expensive
| but imagine 15 more years?
| jacquesm wrote:
| I just ordered two all-wood staircases to replace the steel
| spiral monstrosity that was built into the house where I
| live from the beginning. It was unsafe, unstable and way
| too steep so they really had to go. But the stairwell is a
| weird shape, there is partial overlap with the front door
| and the direction of turn had to be reversed. Enter the
| master carpenter who spent a 1/2 hour to measure up the
| stairwell and who then proceeded to create two new complete
| stairs that fit to the millimeter and solved all of the
| weird problems in one fell swoop. It wasn't cheap, but
| given the challenges and the materials used, the fact that
| they will probably last another 60 years or so and that
| they look amazing I figure that it was well worth it.
|
| No way you could automate that kind of ingenuity. So, props
| to your dad, and there are more people like him still doing
| this work today.
| donavanm wrote:
| > They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was
| produced at the lowest cost possible?
|
| Yes, very much. That's how a lot of trends and styles move
| "down market." The new consumers want teh _appearance_ of
| what they see as wealthy /elite/etc. But they frequently
| dont understand, appreciate, or recognise, what actually
| goes in to the goods they're trying to copy. You'll see
| this everywhere from houses to clothes.
| forcry wrote:
| Sadly this is a global phenomenon. The same thing can be
| seen in, for example, movie/music industry as well. And we
| have to assume that the same holds in other fields as
| well..
|
| I wonder if we can generalise the lost quality and
| attribute it to a lack of case by case application human
| ingenuity and experience that an experienced craftsman
| brings to the trade.
|
| Or may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the
| financial gain it brings. There is no free lunch, and
| somethings got to give to make gains elsewhere. And it is
| inevitable that when one of those two things is extreamly
| measurable (finance) and the other extremely un-measurable
| (aesthetics), the measurable thing always ultimately wins.
| toyg wrote:
| _> may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the
| financial gain it brings._
|
| That's an element, but another big element is specialist-
| subject education.
|
| If you are an old-money guy, you can spend your life
| figuring out the best attributes of everything around
| you, and pursuing excellence in what you own. Your
| parents and grandparents can educate you in what a great
| staircase looks like, and you can spend weeks going from
| shop to shop until you find the right thing, or hire a
| carpenter to make it for however long it takes to be
| "just so".
|
| If you are somebody who's just made their money, and
| maybe are still neck-deep into the rat race, you don't
| know anything about staircases and you have no time, nor
| contacts, to educate yourself on what it should look
| like. Developer shows you the staircase, it looks
| alright, sold.
|
| More and more people are chained to their day job for
| longer and longer. More and more people are coming up in
| the world and buying stuff they don't know anything
| about, enriching companies targeting the mass-market more
| than specialist ones. This is nothing new: in the XX
| century we've seen this happening for anything from
| clothes to cutlery. In a way, it's a good thing: objects
| become more and more _efficient_ and _functional_ ,
| eschewing aesthetic values that are somewhat irrational
| and often just classist. It's true, though, that we lose
| a cultural element.
| eloisius wrote:
| I'd love to see a study done on this. What you you wrote
| made me think of Phaedrus slowly losing his mind trying
| to define quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
| Maintenance. Quality goods are still available, even if
| they are buried in the marketplace of cheap disposable
| goods and hard to find amongst all the noise of
| advertising and sponsored content.
|
| What worries me more is the receding availability of
| _quality work to be done_. If you've ever worked with
| tools and materials, I mean physical ones, you know. It's
| among the most satisfying experiences in the world to
| feel the sensation of being good at (and becoming better
| at) something through practice. To be able to select the
| materials you use and discern their quality. To feel a
| familiar and trusted tool manipulating the materials to
| produce something. Those things are innately pleasurable.
|
| McJob robot babysitters that only intercede when the
| machine screws up, overseeing the production of low-but-
| acceptable-quality products at a predictable pace is, in
| my mind, a dystopia. Getting a Bricklayerbot 2000 unstuck
| a few times per hour is not the kind of skill I can
| imagine being pleasurable to hone. There's a very low
| ceiling on the craftsmanship there.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Yeah, but for every craftsman, there's 10 people who just
| want a job that can make them a good living. That's
| really just how the world is.
|
| There will always be people who take great pride in their
| work and enjoy doing the best job they can with the tools
| & materials they have. But they will always be a small
| minority.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Loved reading this post!
| iso1631 wrote:
| > Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd
| rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced
| at the lowest cost possible?
|
| 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.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > most people just want somewhere to live
|
| sure, except old houses sell for pretty high prices,
| implying there are plenty of people who want more than
| just a house.
|
| I think there is a big difference between people
| _without_ a house, who want to get on the lower rung of
| the housing ladder, and escape the poverty of renting
| (where rent costs more than mortgage payments, without
| any equity) versus those that _have_ a house and want
| something better.
|
| Cheap houses should be build (maybe even w/ government
| funding) to keep otherwise exploitative rentals
| competitive, _but_ there should still be healthy
| competition & industry in higher quality housing.
| Folcon wrote:
| Could you link to some screenshots?
|
| Sorry it's really hard to get a sense of the difference
| you're describing and I'm really interested to see what it
| looks like.
| eloisius wrote:
| Screenshots of woodwork?
|
| Edit: sorry that was unreasonably snarky. I know you're
| looking for pictures. The CNC-milled kind that I am
| talking about are easy to find. Google image search
| 'curved handrail cnc.' I'm actually having a hard time
| finding pictures of classic steam-bent curved handrails
| amongst tons of content marketing from bendywood and
| contractors. If you happen to tour an antique house with
| curved, wooden handrails, study the way they look. it's
| usually one long beam, maybe with carved, ornamental caps
| at the end. I don't really know when the change took
| place, but if you look at any house built at least since
| the nineties, the handrail (if not painted) will look
| like a bunch of disjoint blocks stuck together.
| Folcon wrote:
| Ahh, so one continuous block of wood following the grain
| vs sliced together chunks that will bring to mind
| Frankenstein's monster.
|
| Hmm, I wonder if you can feel the difference when you rub
| your hand over it if it's just polished, probably not if
| painted. So perhaps people who want polished wood for
| their staircase might go for the older style even if it's
| more expensive?
|
| Yea, flubbed on the screenshots bit, was just thinking
| images of stairs and as I expected them to come from your
| computer my brain clearly went to screenshots instead of
| pictures =)...
| mauvehaus wrote:
| There are, on the other hand, ways to combine the old and
| the new harmoniously. I'm building a cabinet on stand, and
| because there are drawers behind a door, the pulls need to
| be inset.
|
| Carving the undercut by hand is pretty time consuming (i.e.
| unprofitable). But I have access to a CNC router. I laid
| out a template in FreeCad, and cut it out. Using template
| bushings and an edge fluting bit with the bearing boss
| ground off, I can cut the pulls with the undercut in a
| couple minutes each. And they come out more regular than
| doing them by hand.
|
| I'll admit that I'm not much of a carver, but I don't think
| I could get the time per pull down anywhere near that while
| maintaining the same consistency even with a lot of
| practice.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| From a financial perspective, no one cares if the blue collar
| laborer has a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day.
| We've automated away plenty of jobs out there with little
| concern about the devices having to be babysat or how the
| observers feel.
| d--b wrote:
| The construction industry is full of these "convenience" tools.
| If you had a working human-sized robot that could just lay some
| bricks, pretty sure everyone would use it, even if it didn't do
| the angles or whatever.
|
| The problem must be somewhere else: setup time is too long, too
| many constrains or whatever. It's not that the edge cases are
| not handled, it's that the main case is not handled well...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> robot that could just lay some bricks
|
| How often does that actually come up in modern construction?
| We don't really do brick buildings anymore. Bricks are
| generally only a facade, a decoration, rather than the
| structure of a building. They have to look great because that
| is now their job. They have to fit between other decorative
| features and adapt to curves and non-perfect angles. Previous
| edge cases are now a daily norm.
|
| I say that the robot brick machine is already common. Those
| trucks that pump concrete into forms are the automated brick
| layers. This is an important point for all robotics. It is
| always very hard to build a robot that can directly replace a
| human. The way forward is to build a robot that gets the job
| done using different means. The human "dishwasher" was
| replaced by a machine that does the same basic task but via
| very different means. The concrete pumping robot now creates
| solid walls faster than any team could ever lay bricks.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| I do not know where you live, but I can speak for Czech
| republic (mid Europe): basically all houses are made by
| layling bricks. Its not "the" small brick, it typically
| range 10-50 cm in depth, which is its shortest dimension.
| Sure, theres ytong and such, but that too is essentially a
| big brick. Module or wood houses are absolute minority
| here.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| In north american, hand-laid bricks are just to
| expensive. It is far cheaper to build wooden forms and
| fill them with concrete. Bricks are then stacked as non-
| structural decoration on the outside of the concrete or
| wood walls.
| vl wrote:
| My guess would be that the main reason is that in the
| event of the earthquake you would survive in the second
| and die in the first.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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 some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping
| the decision making part of the job for humans._
|
| Which is still automation.
|
| Robots in factories making cars still leave most of the
| "decision making part of the job for humans".
|
| See, the size of the "decision making part of the job"
| matters...
| markdown wrote:
| Robots in factories can only do one job, building the same
| car over and over again.
| coldtea wrote:
| Which is neither here nor there.
|
| It's still automation (which, as a concept, doesn't require
| being able to do multiple jobs, or even to do a single job
| from start to completion).
|
| A mechanical system that frees a human from having to do do
| part of a job is already automation, and can still save
| tons of time and worker costs/effort. E.g. a system that
| automatically assembles 95% of a car door, and a human just
| has to come in at the end and attach some hard to automate
| part, is still better than the human having to assemble to
| whole door.
| markdown wrote:
| Have you ever worked in construction?
| babesh wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The first part describes programming perfectly.
| [deleted]
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > economically unviable
|
| > You're not reducing labor costs by much
|
| You could make the same argument wrt supermarket self checkout.
| They still need a worker to manage the machines. Yet you need
| fewer human workers overall, so productivity still increases
| per-worker at the right scale. Allow the tech to develop and
| they may become more viable.
|
| arguing "you still need humans" seems to me to be a straw-man;
| there no rule that this is useless so long as humans are still
| involved - if productivity increases, that's enough.
|
| > you're building a convenience tool
|
| Which seems fine to me. Removing the majority of the "labour"
| part of the job removes the most unskilled part that humans are
| least appropriate for (repetitive uncreative/boring work) and
| freeing them up for the "hard/creative decisions" aspect that
| humans are better at.
|
| > largely unpopular
|
| > workers lose control over their job
|
| This might be unpopular among workers; not sure, other worker
| might prefer it. At least, if this requires fewer workers to
| lay brick, either the demand is such that it can still meet
| worker supply, or workers suffer (from lower wages or
| unemployment).
|
| But this is irrelevant - barring union influence, it's not the
| workers that get to decide. If the job is to "babysit machines"
| you either refuse the job, or you don't - so long as people
| take the job, they will grow.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Where I live, there's often master bricker (who does all the
| skilled work) and dumb labour assistants who are doing dumb
| work like moving bricks, mix the cement and so on which does
| not require skill. Master gets all money and assistant gets
| some low payment (something like $1-$2/hour). I think that
| assistant work could easily be automated. But probably in my
| country low wages would make it economically unviable. But in
| US something like boston dynamics robot dog might actually be
| viable for such dumb labour I guess.
| gridspy wrote:
| The odd thing about "dumb labor" is that many of those tasks
| are only easy for humans. Dealing in a messy world of human-
| to-human interfaces and cluttered unstructured worksites is
| generally hard for robots.
|
| The dog for instance might be able to drag a load, but would
| probably need help refilling it.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I expect dog to have a robotic hand and eyes, so it could
| refill himself, move bricks to a target location and put
| them onto the top of the wall, use stairs and so on. Of
| course it should not be a one-trick pony, the whole point
| is in something universal which could easily configured to
| perform different tasks.
| rubenbe wrote:
| Also, adding complex robots adds the need for more qualified
| (hence more expensive) personnel. It's better to have only have
| to recruit and pay "bricklayer"-profile instead of the rare
| "can fix complex robots and is a bricklayer"-profile.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| Exactly. If you need an expert to constantly babysit the
| machine then you may as well dispense with the machine and have
| the expert build the wall themselves.
| onion2k wrote:
| That's only true if the machine builds walls at the same
| speed as a person and the person can only babysit one machine
| at a time. If the machine is 10 times faster, or the person
| can babysit 10 machines, then you've reduced your labor costs
| by 90% or your output by 1000%.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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 decrease, quality of
| life seems to increase for all involved. My mantra is "People
| are bad at being robots. Robots are bad at being people."
|
| Just yesterday, I worked on a cell that's automated the placing
| of small seals in a plastic assembly. For the past 8 years, for
| 12 shifts per week, there's been a person sitting at a dial
| table that indexes every 2.5 seconds. They were responsible for
| placing a tiny part in a magazine with a buffer of about 20
| parts, a really fast operator could work ahead and have 30
| seconds to stand up and shake their wrists out or take a drink,
| and then sit back down to place parts. Now, a robot pours the
| seals out and picks them up automatically; there's still an
| operator around monitoring stuff like the amount of talc powder
| on the seals, the quantity of parts in all the hoppers, running
| pressure tests every couple thousand parts, adjusting speeds
| and pressures of the multitude of actuators, and generally
| optimizing the cell. They can use their human analytical and
| decision-making work because they're not tied down clumsily
| using their fingers to grab a seal every 2.5 seconds; the robot
| does that mechanical function without complaint. The robot
| cannot refill hoppers, it cannot sense when new parts are
| contaminated with moisture that won't feed through the machine,
| or when a nipper is getting dull; outfitting it with sensors
| and algorithms to attempt those more complex processes would
| not be a productive endeavor.
|
| People use tools because tools are useful. Scope and
| adjustability are critical; when a tool takes over the entire
| process and gets in the way, that's a bad thing, but a good
| tool is far better than no tool at all.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| 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 smoothly.
|
| When talking about the automation revolution, I think it's
| important to make the distinction between robotic tooling and
| autonomous robotic systems, even though they evolve from each
| other. The difference is when humans interface and at what
| abstraction humans can operate it on. Generally, tooling is
| constrained to an individual's output. Robotic augmentation
| is in it's own category as well (human activities being
| enhanced by machinery).
|
| Tooling is extremely useful, still has a lot of future
| potential and I don't mean to undermine work on new tooling.
| Just - usually when we look at robots, especially with the
| buzz around deep learning, we set the bar for problem solving
| at the level of autonomous construction because we assume,
| sometimes incorrectly, that optimizing our current tooling
| yields little efficiency benefits relative to the former.
| phreeza wrote:
| > If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and
| can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating
| anything.
|
| Sounds to me like this criticism could have been made of the
| dishwasher and washing machine, too. I suppose what matters is
| the ratio of edge cases to regular cases.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Automating any repeated sequence of actions is a valid concept
| that doesn't need to be rebranded as "convenience tooling". If
| decision-making is required, that sounds more like an autonomy
| requirement to me. Autonomy is a concept distinct from
| automation, and not mutually exclusive.
| [deleted]
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| This is just an example of not enough software has been written
| to handle all the edge cases, and/or not enough has been done
| to the field to turn it into a factory (groundworks not level
| etc)
| yarg wrote:
| 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.
| lapsed_pacifist wrote:
| Print a house out of what material? Will that material stand up
| to sub freezing and very high temperatures? Can it withstand a
| temperature variable between indoor and outdoor temps? Does it
| have lateral strength against wind and snow? Does it
| deteriorate in sunlight? Will it last more than 10 years? Is it
| flammable?
|
| I can walk down my street in Northern New England and see brick
| buildings that are over 100 years old in a harsh climate, and
| that were reasonably affordable when they were built. The
| shapes and contours are usable and attractive to most people.
| They are able to be remodeled and repaired using very basic
| technology.
|
| There are reasons that Dymaxion Homes weren't popular.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Indeed. If you have heavy machinery available, why use bricks?
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Why don't we use (something like) Legos?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Bricks are easier to remodel and repair than concrete. You
| can take them out, replace them, etc.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Bricks are good at demolition time, compared to poured
| concrete, and can be recycled. They also look kinda nice.
| nly wrote:
| Demolishing a brick wall and cleaning the bricks by hand is
| expensive though, compared to running a bulldozer through
| it
| michaelt wrote:
| We've had the technology to make arbitrary shapes quickly and
| cheaply for decades: poured concrete.
|
| The problems with new building tech are twofold:
|
| First of all, for most people a house is the biggest investment
| they'll ever make, so they're not really keen to gamble. Oh,
| they'll make minor gambles - but a complete new way of building
| houses is a tough sell.
|
| Second of all, building a house involves so many different
| costs that even a big saving in one area is only a drop in the
| ocean on the total project cost. If I'm building a brick-and-
| block house, the total cost of materials and labour might be
| $180,000 with brickwork comprising 10% of that. That's nothing
| to be sniffed at - but no matter how great and cheap your
| brickwork replacement is, someone taking a risk and using your
| new tech can't possible save more than 10%.
| wil421 wrote:
| Why 3D print a house? You can buy a trailer aka mobile home.
| They've been around for decades maybe a century by now. They
| come preassembled, on wheels, and are utility hook up ready.
|
| The only problem is they seem to attract tornados.
| bern4444 wrote:
| I think this reveals a much more interesting trend that's
| likely to continue.
|
| It's not that existing jobs will always be automated, we'll
| come up with tools that completely automate several layers of
| work.
|
| It's a different view than all current jobs will be automated.
| Automation can be used to remove several verticals and improve
| efficiency by magnitudes in the process.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| 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.
| yarg wrote:
| Which is still infinitely more than 30 years ago.
| ianbicking wrote:
| Are there buildings that aren't demonstrations that are
| being printed? There's always been demonstration homes and
| buildings using novel techniques, and that's no indication
| that the technique will go anywhere.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > And yet, almost no houses at all are 3D printed.
|
| It's brand new, give it a minute.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Most people don't buy brick houses. They buy vinyl siding
| which is 1/5 the cost of bricks and bricklaying.
| wil421 wrote:
| That's not the case in my area. Lots of homes are wood
| framed and 3 sided brick with vinyl in the rear.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Depends on price for sure. In Chicago where a new single
| family home is 1.5 million dollars, better believe its
| brick.
|
| Where I live in Indiana an average single family home is
| like 200k. No one is paying 50k for brick on that, so
| vinyl siding you go.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| In the US, perhaps, but brick construction still
| predominates in many countries including much of Africa,
| the Middle East and India. Not coincidentally, all three
| also have limited supplies of timber.
| dragonsky67 wrote:
| The question I would have around automated building construction
| is "why use bricks?".
|
| Bricks are great for humans to build with, they are just the
| right size and weight for the human hand to manipulate and place.
| They are not optimised for machine manipulation.
|
| I would guess that if you wanted to automate construction you
| would start by making things like walls on an automated
| production line, then ship the largest practical piece to the
| construction site. Once there I'm guessing some automated cranes
| could move them into location far more easily than thousands of
| slightly randomly sized pieces of hard clay.
|
| Work out what problem you are trying to solve. Do you want cheap
| construction? then why choose a material that requires thousands
| of operations just to build a wall regardless of if it is a human
| or machine doing the building. There are far more efficient
| building materials used every day... Just see how fast commercial
| buildings can be constructed and you can be sure that they are
| optimised both for speed of construction as well as (hopefully)
| energy efficiency and ease of maintance after construction.
|
| The problem seems to be people have a emotional idea of what a
| dream house is, an idea that is firmly stuck in the red brick
| house of 1970's sitcoms.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Three dudes can do the bulk of a cinder-block foundation in a
| few workdays with no special equipment. Blocks and bricks are
| cheap to work with because there are no special material
| handling requirements to increase overhead costs. This approach
| is economically viable pretty much everywhere except the urban
| areas most heavily represented on HN.
|
| When you get into fancy high dollar construction in HCOL areas
| where time costs more money that's when you get bigger blocks
| that need machines to move them or you get formed and poured
| structures.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Agreed. Bricks aren't great for construction. Not structural,
| poor R-value, a ton of labor.
|
| Just have concrete poured or stick frame and a fake brick
| facade. Will probably last longer as well.
|
| Seems like the wrong problem to solve.
| fy20 wrote:
| What you are talking about are facing bricks, which are used
| on the facade. In Europe almost all new residential
| construction is made from masonry blocks, which are basically
| just bigger bricks.
|
| They are structural (in terms of compression, but have low
| tensile strength which is probably why they aren't popular in
| North America)
|
| They have a good R-value
|
| They are easy to work with
|
| We are building a house right now, and the cheapest, quickest
| and easiest part so far has been building the walls. We are
| using clay blocks[0] which are R-10. Compared to other tasks
| no specialised equipment is needed, it's literally just
| manual labour. When you get to a corner or window, they can
| easily be cut with an angle grinder or even by hand (for a
| rougher finish). The house is two floors and the exterior
| walls for each floor took less than a week to build. It's
| quicker (building forms takes a long time), cheaper, better
| insulating and better for the environment than monolithic
| concrete.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__T8PWnntkU - Not this
| exact product, but this was the best explanation I could find
| in English.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| > but have low tensile strength which is probably why they
| aren't popular in North America)
|
| out of curiosity, why do the blocks need to be different in
| North America?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The person appears to be from Europe. If HN is the bulk
| of their exposure to mundane topics regarding the US I
| can see why they'd be unaware that California building
| codes are not representative of the rest of the nation.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| But not your Texan school textbook regulations...
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Meh, every state has crap curriculum. They all just skip
| different chapters of history or science depending on the
| way the local political winds blow.
| fy20 wrote:
| Tensile strength is equally important when you have
| strong winds.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The half of Florida that's made out of masonry (typically
| cinderblock) does just fine.
| com2kid wrote:
| Bricks can last a long time.
|
| Brick houses also hold their value well.
|
| No one cares about a brick facade.
|
| Also why do you say bricks aren't structural? I assumed those
| 100 year old brick houses used bricks for structural support.
| robocat wrote:
| Structural bricks absolutely suck if you are in a high
| earthquake risk zone. Earthquakes or slumping really screw
| up brick buildings (and brick facades).
| mypalmike wrote:
| Even in 100 year old brick houses (like the 1920s craftsman
| I once owned), the brick is almost always non-structural.
| Only in old urban commercial buildings do you typically
| find structural bricks.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Bricks are for decorative purposes nowadays (pretty
| siding). They aren't practical as you won't meet code for
| insulation. You will also need to frame another interior
| wall for vapor control.
|
| A single layer brick wall isn't structural.
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| > A single layer brick wall isn't structural
|
| My 92-year old house with single layer brick walls says
| otherwise. (And yes, it insulates badly, but it kept
| standing through a lot of storms.)
| danans wrote:
| > My 92-year old house with single layer brick walls says
| otherwise. (
|
| Not structural by current building standards. No doubt it
| is carrying a load today, bit you can't build a house
| that way anymore.
| uCantCauseUCant wrote:
| There are foam bricks which meet the insulation codes in
| europe - in one wall with no additions. Will all be
| special waste though one day.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| My brother lives in an apartment building from the 1930s made
| of bricks. It is absolutely horrendous.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Bricks are easy to maintain and remodel and repair. It's a
| modular system.
| krapp wrote:
| >The problem seems to be people have a emotional idea of what a
| dream house is, an idea that is firmly stuck in the red brick
| house of 1970's sitcoms.
|
| Your fully automated house-extrusion company isn't going to
| have many customers, especially after you explain to people why
| their ideal dream home is obsolete and that they should pay you
| for a plascrete tube to live in instead because the profit
| margins are better.
|
| Those "emotional ideas" are what drive market incentives, you
| can't simply ignore them.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| > ideal dream home
|
| It's weird to focus on the upper end of the market for a
| thing like this. If the utility in automated construction is
| to reduce costs, it might make more sense to consider the
| more price-conscious portion of the market. I.e. starter
| homes and the like. My guess is that since there are so many
| other large costs involve in home construction, automating
| this one component just doesn't make a significant price
| impact in almost any market segment.
| flemhans wrote:
| Plasteel is even better.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| This (and similar comments below) are a very American view of
| the situation.
|
| To be honest, as a kiwi I was the same when the first moved to
| the UK "why are they building NEW buildings out of brick???"
| It's because there's so much clay here, the materials to make
| bricks are abundant and this is similar in other parts of
| Europe.
|
| Brick is also more resilient to the weather here, if they build
| hosues with wood like NZ (or America) they'd degrade incredibly
| quickly.
| necovek wrote:
| It is a great question, but it's like jumping on refactoring:
| you'll solve all the problems that were obvious with the old
| solution, but introduce new ones that you didn't think of that
| were already solved by the old one.
|
| Basically, "thermal blocks", which is mostly what's used in
| construction in areas where they are used (Europe, rather than
| filled-in bricks) need to be modified to accommodate
| imperfections: you need half bricks, third-bricks, and they are
| easy to make on the spot.
|
| For automated construction, you'd have to have a bunch of these
| pre-made, and the larger the block you are building with, the
| more types of those smaller ones you'll need.
|
| These blocks are also relatively simple to put electrical and
| plumbing installations in (it's a lot more demanding to make
| "channels" in concrete than bricks).
|
| Anyway, block construction is way cheaper than eg. gypsum board
| construction for interior walls in Serbia, and other than
| taking a lot more space, being heavier, and requiring curing
| time, it has a bunch of better properties (acoustic,
| thermal,...). The price not being high is actually the reason
| this is not further improved.
|
| Filled-in bricks are mostly used for decoration of outside
| walls these days (and usually as plasterboards these days), and
| as far as paying for things go, humans will happily pay the
| most for good looks!
| function_seven wrote:
| Because they're pleasant to look at. Half the time, the wall
| isn't even "needed", other than for aesthetic purposes.
|
| Whenever a wall is purely functional, it's almost never made of
| small clay bricks today. I'm talking about foundation walls,
| subsurface retaining walls, and similar things. The types of
| walls that aren't meant to be looked at, but instead meant to
| hold something back or up.
|
| Whenever you see a wall being made of red clay bricks, that's
| because the builder wants it to look nice. I suppose you can
| cast a concrete wall and apply a facade of bricks. But there's
| still a skill required for that final step.
|
| Of course, you may have a different design aesthetic, wherein
| exposed concrete or large modular sections are both functional
| and pretty. But brick laying is all about looks.
|
| CMUs are a different story, and kind of prove your point.
| They're much larger and so reduce the piecework involved, but
| still small enough to allow for onsite flexibility in
| construction.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Because they're pleasant to look at.
|
| I expect that this is less a case of "bricks have long been
| used because they're pleasant to look at", and more a case of
| "Bricks are considered pleasant to look at, because they have
| long been used, and have that old-timey feeling"
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't think so. I see a lot of buildings that are 30
| years old and they look ugly because they don't have any
| complexity in their facade, just a single color of paint.
| Bricks add natural complexity to a facade. You can make a
| single color building look nice by adding details.
| necovek wrote:
| Actual clay bricks even more so with their imperfect
| uniformity and consistency.
|
| FWIW, at least here, in construction even the thermal
| insulation clay blocks (basically, any wall-construction
| material made from clay, those red blocks :)) is called
| "bricks".
|
| They are laid exactly like the regular (uniform, filled)
| bricks, so I would assume that's what's mostly used in
| construction everywhere even when not going for looks
| (they are lighter and have better thermal properties).
| saalweachter wrote:
| It's funny how hard it is to fake imperfections.
|
| People frequently try to mass-manufacture imperfections
| by having a larger block with smaller imperfect sub-
| blocks artistically arranged.
|
| It looks fine at first, but once you notice the
| repetition of the imperfections at regular intervals...
| dazc wrote:
| Also people like to think they are buying something
| substantial that is literally made of bricks - even if
| those bricks are just a facade.
| Closi wrote:
| This is the reason for a lot of design trends - This
| morning I have been:
|
| * On a laminate wooden desk, in a room with laminate wooden
| floor (The same logic - neither are real wood, just an old-
| timey construction).
|
| * Wearing a knitted jumper (which again could be considered
| stylish from an old-timey perspective, as the manufacturing
| could have used less thin cotton, but thick cotton is
| supposed to make it look hand woven)
|
| * In a office which has LED lights hanging down which are
| designed to look like exposed old lightbulbs (same logic)
|
| * While typing email on my laptop (the logo to which is an
| envelope, arguably to remind you of the old-timey mail
| system).
|
| Heck, even my headphones have some fake leather on them,
| which is effectively just a fake material just to look like
| older materials which are actually less soft, and my coat
| has some fluff that is designed to make it look like coats
| used to look like when they were made from animal fur (even
| though, now, that is considered abhorrent, fake fur is
| still a thing, everyone just knows it's simulating the old
| material for whatever reason, because that was the old
| style).
|
| So I think design trends _in general_ come from historic
| use-cases in the context.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| These aren't always aesthetic though, sometimes they are
| practically: leveraging knowledge of the well-known tech
| to help people understand the new.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > But brick laying is all about looks.
|
| I've seen stores with moulded facades designed to look like
| bricks that are attached to reinforced concrete.
| endymi0n wrote:
| From what I'm understanding the hard part of doing that
| stuff concrete is curation time. There's a lot of projects
| trying the "easy" route and effectively do additive 3D
| printing with concrete instead of glue. Conversely, they
| have the same problems... they look pretty ugly:
| https://www.realestate.com.au/blog/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/0...
|
| Doing it "properly" means building proper moulding, rebar,
| vibration casting all the stuff that sounds like almost
| impossible to automate with 2021 technology.
|
| Bricks have the advantage that they're pre-cured, so you
| don't have to wait ages until the wall actually supports
| something -- and if that something is just the next layer.
| candiodari wrote:
| So what people do is you build the "ugly" way (usually
| large panels, maybe even prefab, I doubt 3d printing is
| working that well right now), then cut bricks into 5
| slices and stick those slices on top with glue. You can't
| tell it's not a brick wall except when you're standing
| right against it.
|
| And of course, you only do this on visible walls. It can
| even be done on top of wood.
|
| https://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/skills-and-know-
| how/carpen...
| cudgy wrote:
| Paint or stucco would be a big improvement to the
| aesthetics of the primary exterior surfaces that house
| ... and changing the hideous orange puke trim color.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Whenever you see a wall being made of red clay bricks,
| that's because the builder wants it to look nice._
|
| There is a scene in Penny Dreadful (Which is set in a
| fictionalized Victorian London) where a character laments all
| the brick buildings that are being built, replacing wood
| buildings that have "character", because wood "holds its
| history" unlike bricks which are all the same, forever.
|
| The main appeal of bricks is essentially nostalgic, similar
| to the appeal of low resolution 8-bit graphics. We call one
| 'traditional' and the other 'retro' but those labels are
| arbitrary.
| dmix wrote:
| So bricklaying it's basically an 'artisanal' type of product
| not a mass production type of thing that is ill suited for
| automation anyway.
|
| The article links to the MULE product (which was an evolution
| or pivot of their 15yr attempt at making a traditional
| bricklaying robot) makes more sense as it takes advantage of
| the lifting power of machines and uses much larger/longer
| bricks that would otherwise be too heavy to pick up by humans
| while accelerating the process.
|
| https://www.construction-robotics.com/
|
| This is much like why pigeonholing AI into traditional cars
| is more difficult than say having a fleet of cars region wide
| which all talk to each other and coordinate movements with
| roads and crosswalks that are also designed for automated
| cars.
| IkmoIkmo wrote:
| Yup. I'm from Amsterdam, the Netherlands as an example. A ton
| of the city and country has been built with brick. But modern
| construction typically is built with concrete with a thin
| facade of brick infront. The brick is just cosmetic, and
| typically pre-fab in large slabs of 20x20 bricks.
|
| For old homes that get renovated, it's popular to keep the
| old brick facade standing, demolish everything behind it,
| then build it up again.
|
| It's rarely functional.
|
| Although there are still a lot of old (mostly built between
| 1400 - 1950) brick buildings that get maintained with proper
| masonry, all of which is functional.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > and typically pre-fab in large slabs of 20x20 bricks.
|
| which were likely robotically brick-laid
| himinlomax wrote:
| > Because they're pleasant to look at.
|
| The article mentions cinder blocks ("CMU") -- those are not
| typically pleasant to look at. Even the ones that are less
| unpleasant are usually covered, with sidings or paint.
| webmaven wrote:
| At some point cinder block construction will become it's
| own aesthetic (or an element of an aesthetic), perhaps
| something like the current 'industrial' trend or maybe an
| architectural equivalent of 'tactical' stylng.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > The question I would have around automated building
| construction is "why use bricks?".
|
| Well, eventually roads will also be optimised for self-driving
| cars not human drivers. But until then, self-driving car have
| to interoperate with the existing, pervasive, legacy
| infrastructure, even if it isn't optimal for their needs.
| tsjq wrote:
| pre-cast concrete slabs made offsite and then lifted by cranes
| to lock on to make walls. eg this builder's projects
| https://www.providenthousing.com/
| rmbeard wrote:
| I'm not sure bricklaying makes a lot of sense as a construction
| method, when you can 3D print a house.
| exabrial wrote:
| 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 and contact
| the relatively soft surface of bricks and destroy them in a few
| years. Having an incomplete mortar seal allows the elements to
| penetrate through what would normally be waterproof, especially
| in places with high wind. An improper excavation, compaction
| material or compaction of said material, improper leveling, and
| many more factors will lead to failure within just a few years.
|
| The best way to learn about this stuff is to go try it! One could
| volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or a local shelter that builds
| homes and get some time with the tools. None of this stuff is
| simple, straightforward, or easy, and there are a million ways to
| do it incorrectly.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >If you think bricklaying is a simple task, you've probably
| never laid bricks, or likely ever worked a construction job.
|
| If you think the bulk of the actual laying of bricks, siding of
| a wall or shingling of a roof isn't a simple task you've never
| worked a construction job.
|
| Thinking is required around corners, windows and other
| interruptions. The bulk of the material laid, hung or otherwise
| expended is done so in a simple and repetitive manner. Once
| you've figured out your non-standard bits of the job you
| basically just run on autopilot.
|
| That said, I agree that 99% of the the engineers who try and
| design this stuff never actually have the requisite experience
| to understand the nuance of what's going on.
| 6nf wrote:
| I feel like bricks were probably shaped the way they are today
| specifically to help bricklayers do a good job easily and
| quickly. If we're moving to automated wall building maybe using
| traditional brick is just a waste of effort. Automation will
| probably benefit from using different shapes or materials. For
| example a human can't handle a 30 pound brick but a machine
| might be a lot faster if you use larger bricks with different
| mortar configurations.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| 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.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| A lot of complex tasks are done by machine today, and they do
| it better than master craftsmen.
|
| 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.
| exabrial wrote:
| You forgot trees in the yard, how much sunlight the wall
| receives, moisture content of the soil beneath the brick
| walls, roots that are growing there, and existing
| structure.
|
| The hard part isn't laying bricks. It can be already be
| done in a day efficiently. The hard part is the near
| infinite things that are different between every
| construction site.
| RegBarclay wrote:
| I've laid a little block and brick for myself. I found it kind
| of fun and pretty rewarding work. As soon as I saw the headline
| and started pre-thinking about the content, I immediately
| thought, "well, the mortar for one thing..." The bricks aren't
| all that uniform either. My big takeaway from doing myself was
| that it's easy to obsess over each brick (like a machine might)
| but when people look at a brick wall, they see the forest, not
| the trees: it's not necessary for each brick to be laid
| perfectly.
|
| I also heartily second volunteering for Habitat for Humanity.
| It's rewarding work, fun if you're with a good crew, and a
| great way to learn new skills.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| The number of edge cases is simply too high
| [deleted]
| arduinomancer wrote:
| I don't think programmers have contempt for the skills of the
| workers
|
| What they have is edge case blindness
|
| They literally don't know what they don't know
| pkphilip wrote:
| This may be because robotics companies don't want to stop at just
| laying bricks - they would prefer to 3D print the entire house.
| There has been huge advances in the space of 3D printed buildings
| in just the past couple of years with printers capable of
| printing far more complex designs.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xqnx0EwOk
| nashashmi wrote:
| Probably the biggest problem in automating construction is not
| just that every job is in a different location but these
| materials are so bulky and heavy and composite that the cost is
| not in the labor of installation but moving the materials to
| location.
|
| Asphalt paving requires 4 guys to level the asphalt but a truck
| to pour it. The best you can get is an attachment on the truck to
| level the asphalt. This attachment is called a paving machine.
| And it requires an operator and two-man crew to maintain. So no
| real advantage besides workers won't be tired. And the leveling
| will be done super well.
|
| Other automation problems are similar. If there is no need for
| precision, there is no need for automation.
| necovek wrote:
| Even with leveling I can imagine a bunch of problems: to drive
| water away, roads are usually tilted to one side, or even to
| both, and there's a slight curve to them. Depending on the
| width of the road, that curve will have ever so slightly
| different characteristics which makes it harder to achieve
| (compared to humans doing it manually but less consistently).
|
| Still, a lot simpler than laying bricks, which is why it's
| already there :D
| h2odragon wrote:
| Roads are "crowned"; that is, the center is supposed to be
| higher than the edges, for water to run off.
|
| Banking curves is a real thing and you notice when someone
| got it wrong.
|
| Paving a road is a small step compared to building the
| roadbed; but its what people see. It's probably better to
| think of that like painting a house, building the road is a
| much bigger thing, but then it gets the surface refreshed
| often enough you see that.
| dolmen wrote:
| If there is no need for precision _at scale_ , there is no need
| for automation.
| analog31 wrote:
| Where are the robotic hod carriers?
|
| Without looking closely at the economics, my impression is that
| brick work is expensive, but if you want it cheaper, you can get
| siding installed.
| bumby wrote:
| The article mentions many current companies in R&D regarding 3D
| concrete printing. What is it about brick laying that makes it
| more difficult or less likely to be pursued?
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Perhaps wall construction / partition construction itself needs
| to be thought from the ground up, to enable automation.
|
| For example, is it possible to have LEGO like slot fitted bricks,
| with cavities in slots filled with mortar?
|
| Alternatively, toothed bricks that can be slotted, such that the
| top brick slots into two lower bricks.
| necovek wrote:
| Definitely a curious idea!
|
| But it would make the "hard" part of laying bricks (on wall
| connections which might not be right angle, when you only need
| 1/5th of a brick to reach the wall/window/door opening...) even
| harder. Basically, you'd move the mortar laying complexity into
| "where and how do we join the joints".
|
| Basically, how many non-right angles did you make with regular
| Lego bricks? And how many types of Lego bricks did you need to
| get that nice figure built out? :)
| jointpdf wrote:
| Insulated concrete forms (ICFs) closely match what you
| described. They are hollow LEGOesque foam bricks that get
| filled with concrete.
|
| Here is a great video (and a great channel generally) on the
| subject: https://youtu.be/MRipzKkeQik
| tekno45 wrote:
| Very good overview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAD48rqqcd8
|
| Its just a very intricate process, a messy material and probably
| a manual job for a long time.
| salar wrote:
| If this specific problem excites you and you're a hardware
| engineer, get in touch with us. We're working hard on solving
| this specific problem with the goal of getting construction
| speeds and cost down significantly:
| https://about.terraform.industries/engineering
| SlapperKoala wrote:
| What's your solution to the systemic problems they raise?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Seems like it's another mini-mills waiting to happen, with
| perhaps ML as the required technological innovation.
|
| Current low hanging fruit is long, straight walls. So a few
| customers will bite, using the human masons (who are paid more)
| as the high quality, judgement based service. The easy sections
| will be done by the machine.
|
| Over time the machine maker uses their foothold to encroach on
| the more juicy work. As they collect data some ML will creep in
| and solve some of the harder brick laying issues. Maybe it will
| figure out about the mortar too.
|
| Eventually the machine will be doing the whole job, and you can
| use an app to build yourself a heart-shaped wall just for fun.
|
| Or perhaps there's just no economic incentive, and more
| inexperienced masons will do the easy bits for the foreseeable.
| punnerud wrote:
| Combine ML with a wire system used for stadium camera, and you
| get a cheap robot that is both strong and have a long range
|
| Wire camera example: https://youtu.be/j0K3XUqZI9w?t=187
| inasio wrote:
| They state in the article that the main problem is not in
| positioning the bricks/blocks, but on handling the cement
| mixture (non-Newtonian fluid...)
| punnerud wrote:
| True. Hard to get enough people to work on the non-
| Newtonian problem when the robot is expensive. Easier to
| have several of them, and fix any mechanical problem on the
| robot, when the robot is simple and inexpensive
| nabla9 wrote:
| Do prefabricated brick wall elements count.
| adrr wrote:
| As mentioned in the article. There are brick laying machines for
| roads that are really interesting.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cGhzzcgfHNc
| sharkmerry wrote:
| but that still has a human loading it and arranging the bricks,
| which i presume is amongst the largest time sink, sometimes 2.
| It is probably a vast improvment in terms of human-power
| required though
| kazen44 wrote:
| it was originally designed to prevent the street brickmen
| from breaking their backs and knees when building a street.
| iandanforth wrote:
| Important insights from this article:
|
| - The hard part is the mortar
|
| - Any useful number of brick lays will require after placement
| adjustment to maintain level/true alignment
|
| - Those adjustments are where a good deal of 'skill' comes in
|
| - Finishing / jointing is even harder
|
| So it looks like this is an RL problem and the focus of the
| research needs to be geared toward the above. Basically you need
| a system to understand mortar and how to place various shapes of
| objects in it so that over time you achieve the goal of a
| specific wall shape.
|
| This problem suggests an arm-farm like setup. Normally I always
| urge sim-first, but I'm not aware of any useful simulator that
| can do non-Newtonian fluids and robotic systems well. (either
| sure, but both? Let me know if you know of one.)
| scythe wrote:
| Printing brick roads actually sounds like a pretty interesting
| step forward even though it isn't the most obvious use of bricks.
| The drainage is much better than asphalt and that could make a
| difference in many cities that are dealing with increased
| flooding. Not so great for snow-plows, though. Before I saw that
| machine I never would have thought it would be a scalable
| solution to the problem, though.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| "People don't want to buy a drill, they want to buy a hole".
|
| If I was building construction robots, I don't think I'd be
| aiming to replace skilled human crafstmen directly, but rather
| render them unecessary. Most likely that would mean robots in
| factories churning out standardised components that somehow let
| you build strong, aesthetic walls without bricks.
|
| I've seen brick effects that get applied to flat walls, which
| seems like one solution to this if you want the look but not the
| expense.
| amai wrote:
| Houses of the future will be build from sustainable materials
| like wood. The walls will be prefabricated in factories and then
| just assembled at the construction site like IKEA furniture.
|
| There simply is no need for robotic bricklayers as there was no
| need for robotic horse feeding. Instead humanity invented cars.
| sscarduzio wrote:
| If non-newtonian mortar and bricks are too complex for robots,
| it's ok.
|
| We did not come up with mechanical horses, did we? We came up
| with automobiles.
|
| Let the robots build houses in their own radically different
| ways: for example, 3D printing on site. Or anything else, really.
|
| Don't let's just get obsessed with bricks in particular.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| Obviously, it's a conspiracy by the Freemasons to control their
| ancestral art. (sorry)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The article is very informative, but its title feels like "Where
| are the airplanes that flap their wings like birds?"
|
| Bricks aren't very suitable for automatization and 3D printing
| seems to be quite a lot more promising, even though the current
| early forms look clumsy.
|
| Printing a wall gives you an ability to leave precisely
| calculated empty spaces for plumbing, cables, electrical sockets
| and whatever we are going to need in the future. This is
| valuable, speeds up the construction process and reduces total
| dust.
| codeulike wrote:
| They've probably gone to the pub
| papito wrote:
| I mean, there are already prototypes:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVWayhNpHr0
|
| It's only a matter of time. A building is planned, the step-by-
| step orchestration is QA'ed by a qualified engineer, and a set of
| robots go to work to build a whole building. Construction jobs
| _will_ be phased out.
|
| Also, in the movie Runaway - which actually predicted police
| areal drones as well, almost 30 years ago (but the concept of a
| drone did not exist yet, so it was called a "floater").
| balozi wrote:
| The problem is not the science or the mechanics. The problem is
| the economics. And not just the economics of any single builder,
| but of the construction industry as whole.
| [deleted]
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| 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?
| munificent wrote:
| With 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.
| SlapperKoala wrote:
| The cheapest way to automate something is always poor
| people.This applies even more so in the developing world. Where
| the vast majority of new construction is happening.
|
| Though it would be interesting to see what the state of
| construction is like in developed countries that don't have
| access to a vast pool of cheap immigrant labor. Maybe New
| Zealand? Northern Europe?
| moduspol wrote:
| Not everywhere in the US has a vast pool of cheap immigrant
| labor. That's a fairly localized thing.
|
| I'm just outside of Pittsburgh and, I guess I can't say
| conclusively, but the vast majority of landscapers,
| construction workers, and other outdoor laborers appear to
| come from the general local population. It's not like what I
| hear about California / Texas where hispanic immigrants are
| disproportionately represented.
| munificent wrote:
| _> The cheapest way to automate something is always poor
| people._
|
| The corrolary to this, if you are a tech nerd who wants to
| see more automation is: If you want more automation, work to
| reduce poverty. Support unions, high wages, and other systems
| that give people the freedom to say no to shitty jobs that
| robots could do.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| My 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)
| zz865 wrote:
| The last few decades I've seen a lot of bigger buildings have
| slab concrete walls with brick veneers. This seems a quicker and
| cheaper way of doing it. Would seem like a good place to try to
| automate the veneer placement.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| It seems to me many software engineering types vastly under kL
| estimate the difficulty of automation in a lot of different
| fields. Why do you think this is? I suppose I could come up with
| some hypotheses but I am interested in what other people think.
| "Edge conditions" are actually core conditions for automation. If
| your automated process can't self-regulate it often negates the
| point of automation. If your process costs more than human labor
| then it may not be price competitive.
| joshfraser wrote:
| The reasons are economic, not technological.
|
| There's a surplus of cheap labor in the world, so it doesn't make
| financial sense to bear the upfront costs.
| necovek wrote:
| That's oversimplified. First robots usually did not make
| economic sense. After they were made useful and sold in
| quantities, this made them worth their initial investment.
|
| The problem is simply fricking hard. Bricks need to be split
| into pieces (half-bricks, third-bricks etc) to accommodate
| windows, doors and edges. Due to real-world plot plans, there
| will be plenty of non-right angles. And yes, there's laying
| mortar which is an art form :D
| jjk166 wrote:
| The article claims the difficulty is with the non-newtonian
| mortar, but this doesn't pass the sniff test. Non-newtonian
| fluids are easy to model and position feedback is common in
| virtually all modern automation systems. I say this as someone
| who used to do masonry work, worked in a rheology lab in college
| and is now an industrial automation engineer. The fact that
| numerous attempts to make bricklaying systems that didn't involve
| mortar but still did not succeed would certainly seem to indicate
| that mortar is not the dealbreaker. Indeed, the fact masonry
| assistant machines haven't seen wide adoption suggests that the
| problem has nothing to do with software.
|
| Nature has optimized the design of muscles and skeletons over tbe
| course of hundreds of millions of years. People tend not to
| appreciate just how good of an actuator muscle is. You can
| certainly beat it in power, speed, precision, duty cycle, or form
| factor, but not all at once. Bricks and blocks are specifically
| optimized for being handled by a human laborer: they are small
| enough that a human arm can precisely manipulate them but big
| enough that you don't need to place an absurd number of them.
| Anything that's optimized for human manipulation will be
| difficult for a robot to manipulate.
|
| A typical block weighs about 35 lbs. A robot arm capable of even
| lifting a payload that heavy will cost you somewhere on the order
| of 80k not including end of arm tooling, weigh hundreds of
| pounds, and draw several kilowatts of electricity. Then you need
| to take this arm and put it on some platform capable of moving
| around a job site such that it can reach any place a human could.
| At scale, you're probably looking at a quarter million dollar
| machine just to get a brick near where it needs to go. Combined
| with maintenance costs, it's likely such a system would never pay
| for itself over its useful life. Maybe you could do a little
| better with bricks but 5 lbs is still a lot for a precision
| robot. All the artificial intelligence in the world is useless if
| the actuators just aren't up to the task.
|
| For better or worse, human muscle is cheap, it can be leased with
| no money down, and you typically don't need to pay for
| maintenance. That it comes equipped with an extremely powerful
| computing system for no additional charge is just icing on the
| cake. People tend to have the mistaken belief that things which
| are conceptually simple must be easy to automate and that things
| which are hard to automate must be secretly complex, but that's
| not really it at all. Tasks appear simple to us because we are
| good at doing them, and they appear complicated when we're not.
| Picking ripe fruit seems like such a simple task to us because
| that is exactly what we evolved to do. Simulating quantum
| chemistry, not so much. Picking fruit isn't secretly more
| complicated than quantum chemistry, but it's much easier to
| automate the latter because it's not hard to be better than a
| human at a task humans perform poorly to begin with.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Hey, I want to take a break from the normal HN flow to wish
| everybody a happy Tuesday. Take a moment to appreciate the people
| around you. It's easy for life to speed by.
|
| Anyway. I better quiet down. I'm sure the robotic bricklayers
| will be here to take our jobs soon enough. No need to rush it.
|
| (Well actually, laying bricks is one of those fiendishly
| complicated problems at scale...)
| elliebike wrote:
| thank you! hope you're having a good day :)
| filoeleven wrote:
| Mostly unrelated, but the headline reminded me of this very
| satisfying video.
|
| https://youtu.be/-BTWiZ7CYoI
| dalbasal wrote:
| 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 seems.
|
| ...And bricklaying, while conspicuous and important, is still
| just one job in construction.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > ...And bricklaying, while conspicuous and important, is still
| just one job in construction.
|
| My understanding is that bricklaying is a bottleneck. You can
| do things before bricklaying, and things after, but not really
| at the same time.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| lol.. and we're talking about AI replacing humans next year so
| come get your basic income check.
| failuser wrote:
| AI replacing humans as workers will not result in basic
| income. It will result either eradication of non-ruling
| classes or humanity itself.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Historically, most people were farmers. That got automated,
| and yea, I guess the non-ruling classes were eradicated in
| the sense that we stopped having serfs and slaves and
| everyone became more powerful, could own land, etc. It was
| good news, not bad.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Maybe it'll be like that cow that wants to be eaten. Don't
| count your evil crow chicks before they've hatched.
| magwa101 wrote:
| Bricklayers do not get paid as much as programmers.
| rwmj wrote:
| It's a good article, but he doesn't mention TBMs which use
| robotic arms to lay the masonry-like blocks that line the tunnel,
| and I believe that's mostly or completely automated.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Cheaper to hire a human for $20 an hour.
| [deleted]
| ben_bai wrote:
| The robotic bricklayers are in the factories. They do construct
| prefab elements that then get hauled to the building site to be
| quickly assembled.
|
| Usually it's done with wood but there are also factories that
| build prefab houses with bricks.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJIDjdFTVW8
| guerrilla wrote:
| 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 cheaper but faster and
| "easier on the nerves" for the builders.
|
| 1. https://youtu.be/CBZYwI3BJ9E
| ben_bai wrote:
| In the end it's about the same cost (for the same quality).
|
| Also prefab houses have a lead time of about 6 month.
|
| But once the on site build has started it's fast and those
| elements come with electrics, water piping and (sometimes)
| windows preinstalled. They just need to be connected.
|
| You basically have the choice between the classic building
| methods with an architect and contractors, or an All-in-One
| Firm that has it's own contractors and almost always uses the
| prefab model. The later also is way less hassle for the once-
| in-a-lifetime home builder, usually.
| [deleted]
| taneq wrote:
| 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.
| qayxc wrote:
| > it's about what happens when they're busy and don't show
| up for three months
|
| This sounds like a problem with the process and contracts,
| not something that cries for a technological solution.
| locallost wrote:
| But it also does not use mortar, which according to the article
| seems to be the biggest issue.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| They are kind of here, not the classic concept, however:
| https://www.dezeen.com/2021/06/22/broad-group-modular-apartm...
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It'd be nice to see an actual cost breakdown. All-in cost per
| brick laid at a certain capacity factor between major maintenance
| events and so on.
| bingidingi wrote:
| I suspect part of the problem is that bricklaying is a human
| designed activity... what would a building process optimized for
| robots look like? more like 3d printing?
| gorgoiler wrote:
| 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.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Your comment reminds me of the old classic post, "Falsehoods
| Programmers Believe About Names":
| https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
|
| Simplifying a complex problem to look like an easily solvable
| problem is something that businesses and engineers are really,
| really good at. It's one of the reasons we leave people behind
| at the margins all the time, and it's one of the reasons that a
| thousand failed brick laying robots will be built.
| mLuby wrote:
| The robotic bricklayers are in the future and on the moon.
| Intelligence, dextrous, cheap labor is plentiful on Earth, but
| that won't necessarily be true elsewhere.
|
| 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.
| quirkot wrote:
| Robotic masonry is the "faster horses" version of cars. It's
| everything humans do easily but is nearly impossible for machines
| h2odragon wrote:
| Right.
|
| I'm expecting something like a cement truck with a long arm and
| a multiple pass deposition process. Possibly foaming the
| concrete at the nozzle; if anyone ever gets that chemistry to
| work. It might well be called "manually operated", I'd
| anticipate someone at the controls at all times even if it can
| do some sections by itself, just for safety and "shit happens".
|
| I'd also anticipate at least one person at the nozzle at almost
| all times, dealing with inclusions and inspecting etc.
|
| Even this won't be cheaper or faster than current techniques,
| but the onsite foamed concrete extrusion might become popular
| enough to endure for insulation, looks, or other reasons.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Laying the bricks is only a tiny proportion of building a brick
| house.
|
| A good brick layer can do all the work in a few days.
| Yurtle2 wrote:
| It looks to me that masonry is a technique that has evolved to
| the human form for 1000's of years. Duplicating people is hard.
|
| Matching the building technique and materials to what is
| automatable seems a better bet.
| ThomPete wrote:
| the will come over time, just not yet as its still to expensive
| and there is still too much generational baggage to force the
| change.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Fun read! I feel like that's one of the first thing you learn out
| of college that's a bit of a rude awakening. While ideas are fun,
| economics kill during execution. Without a scalable product that
| solves the right problem, it's pretty hard to make a good product
| (unless you get VC money and sell things at a lost anyway).
| Inhibit wrote:
| Anyone taking part in the design of one of these machines should
| be required to stop, prior to starting design, and build a wall
| of bricks by hand. In a grassy field. From scratch.
|
| The problem with all of those (less the exoskeleton) seem to be a
| poor grasp of the challenges involved in doing the job. They all
| seem to assume a perfect environment; something rare
| (impossible?) for most on-site work.
| glasss wrote:
| I recall finding the below blog post on HN not long ago which I
| think pairs well with this.
|
| https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/construction.html
| aaron695 wrote:
| This should be required reading for probably anyone who votes.
|
| This quote is my take away -
|
| "Almost every advancement in construction is small enough for a
| man to carry"
| scotty79 wrote:
| Not quite. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| The article mentions those. There's a reason they are not
| used much outside of parking garages.
| kazen44 wrote:
| modern plattenbau is used extensively in Europa. almost
| all modern construction uses pre made segments.
|
| it doesn't look the same as a Soviet era building
| project, but the technology and system is roughly the
| same.
| scotty79 wrote:
| In some cities in Europe as much as 97% of population
| lives in those and they rise in value faster than other
| types of housing there.
|
| Article dismisses them unjustly.
| aaron695 wrote:
| Looking at the documentation on those -
|
| "Industrialized Building In the Soviet Union" (1969) -
| "Panels and slabs average 5 tons up to a maximum of 10
| tons. Transportation is considered within economic limits
| if factory to job site is no more than 150 kilometres"
|
| Which is what the original article says on pre-fab -
|
| "Because of transportation costs, they are all limited to
| selling within a few hundred miles of their factory."
|
| They were also considered disposable in the USSR, and no
| one wants to live in them. Also talked about in the
| article, it's a good article give it a read.
| oriolid wrote:
| These are quite common in Finland, not just Rovaniemi
| (which does not really have extraordinary cost of living
| unless you have electric heating). So, here's how I see
| it:
|
| - When whole new neighborhoods are built, it's not
| unusual to start with building a factory to manufacture
| the elements. For smaller projects there's usually a
| factory within 150 kilometers. This is not Siberia.
|
| - There's always insulation and outer wall on top of the
| panels. The result is not always pretty, but not
| necessarily worse than concrete poured on site.
|
| - The construction crews aren't always competent and
| there are many ways to screw up a concrete cast. Quality
| wise both precast and on site casting have their own
| problems.
|
| - The seams between element need periodic repair. If the
| house owners decide to save money here, it's going to be
| expensive later. They're also a huge sound insulation
| problem.
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