Where are the robotic bricklayers?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

> 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)?

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.

> 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"

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That seems like a large assumption.

> 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.

That may be the case. I am not in a position to say.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Not quite. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau