Wow, what a stupid construction company (if they are the ones behind this.) AI will come for manual labor in a way that makes what’s happening right now look unimpactful. And what’s going on right now is very fucked up.
Within my lifetime we will see a significant chunk of building site labour be replaced by robots.
Let’s not forget this isn’t unprecedented - plenty of jobs went away with we introduced the last big technological innovation, heavy machinery, to the building site. Suddenly one guy in a JCB can do the work of 20 guys with spades, etc.
I’m not talking about replacing everyone, not within my lifetime, that’s likely silly unless there’s a technological leap we can’t yet predict.
But the simpler the labour, the more likely it’ll go, and not every site job is specialised enough that it can’t be replaced by a well trained, well developed AI system in the year 2050 built into a similarly well developed body -which exist today, are already dropping in price due to refinements and ramping up production, and by then will be as competitively priced as the cost of a human.
This is a good thing though, capitalist politics aside. The more jobs we can replace, especially hard on the body, unhealthy, often very dangerous jobs like construction, the better. Assuming we can evolve society away from our capitalist overlords and into a society that works for the people.
Anyhoo, I wouldn’t rush to retrain in another sector just yet if you’re a brickie, but if you’re just getting in to the biz, keep your options open for sure.
If you’re a lorry driver and you’re young? Spend some of your spare time retraining for a new career now, because while lorry drivers will still be needed in 30 years time before you’re set to retire, the vast majority of the work will be automated, and driver jobs will be extremely scarce compared to the large number of workers trying to get them.
Like the coal miners of yesteryear, you don’t want to wait until it’s far too late to retrain and then complain that your career is ruined. Prepare now.
Best case scenario? Your main job never goes away, but now your skill set is diversified and you’ve always got options. Worst case? Your main job does, and you luckily can fall back on your alternative options.
They would love to replace the Working Class with an unpaid AI.
The irony being when they replace people with AI, they will live alone, on a doomed planet where there’s not even enough of humanity left to avoid extinction.
There they will sit, upon a throne of skulls, in an autonomous world that will outlive them, and only to serve a species that no-longer exists.
As a construction worker, I disagree. Construction sites are so cluttered, so tough to navigate, and there are so many unknown variables. I really think cars driving themselves will happen before construction workers are replaced. And personally I feel we are a long ways away before cars are driving themselves to begin with.
Like so many dystopian stories, the real life version that eventually comes about is more cringe and shitty.
Compare a decades ago EvilMegaCorp as presented in fiction to the Steve Jobs-emulating ukulele-strumming hellworld corporations burning the planet down around us while trying to seem insincerely quirky about it.
Ultor in Red Faction was evil and all that, but imagine if Ultor was Le Epic X and all of its maneuvers were narrated by an aging very divorced apartheid dad. my-hero
Ahhh yes. In capitalism, if you create a machine that can replace say, 10 people, you don’t give them 1/10 of the work. You fire them and maybe hire someone to operate it.
Machines and human workers can coexist. They don’t have to replace them.
Edit: Of course they should replace them, but only after we get good living conditions for unemployed people, which are currently non-existent.
Yeah, we arent going to get our Jetsons future if we refuse to restructure our society towards not having to work instead of just fighting the tech because its taking our jobs away
Of course, the end goal (mind the word “end”) is to replace them. However, in this current situation, where many people are struggling to find a job, it’s not good.
They should replace workers and people should deserve to live without being workers, but it should also be painfully obvious that our current economic system won’t support this idea, and won’t until we do some pretty drastic things.
It’s not that we couldn’t build a post-scarcity society probably even right now given some pretty radical adjustment of resource allocations, we just don’t want to build one – “we” being the 0.01% that have such insane amounts of wealth that they’ve essentially taken over the whole economic system, largely thanks to eg. dumb fucks like Reagan and sociopathic fucks like Thatcher and the people who idolize them buying into the idea that they too can be that rich because the wealth will somehow magically trickle down.
That would be the mentality I’m talking about us needing to kill. Regardless, AI will help with this problem, in both it being inevitable that it will provide people with more free time (due to efficiencies or unemployment) - which is needed to be able to effectively revolt - and it will help address the issues of transforming our economic model, as the machines will have a much better way of distributing goods and services. Also capitalism needs workers to have money so that they can buy the products they produce, which should at some point necessitate a universal basic income, which will further help erode the work = money paradigm.
If you think this current brand of capitalism requires plebs to have money, I’m not sure how you explain the fact that when taking inflation into account wages have been either stagnant or actually going down ever since the 70’s / 80’s, the amount of wealth owned by the same plebs compared to the “financial ruling class” (mainly executives and such, and especially the banking sector thanks to deregulation) has shrunk dramatically, and cost of living keeps getting higher, while at the same time the compensation for the “financial ruling class” has grown at a frankly exponential rate.
Sufficiently advanced AI will, if anything, make it even more likely that that “ruling class” will realize they don’t need quite as many of us around because all we do us suck up their resources and complain how we haven’t eaten anything but cup noodles in a week and our teeth hurt.
Still need someone to build it for the computer. What would really help the “AI” is to have something that can handle the creation of different interfaces and modules. Then, it would need to solve or mitigate the maintenance conundrum of repairing itself when it breaks.
How soon do you think it will be before technology reaches the point that we can build completely functional houses with just robots? Give me a timeframe.
So robots will totally take over house building and humans will have nothing to do with it at some indefinite point in the future and that’s why people right now should be worried about their jobs. I see.
You’re right that robots aren’t going to be able to replace plumbers or electricians in traditional building projects.
But why can’t we change how new buildings are built so the method better suits robots. I’m sure with current technology we could design a building that could be built entirely by robots.
I don’t think it’ll happen because it will take a lot of time and money to develop such a holistic system, with no return on profit until it’s a complete system.
And the second that it is economically viable the companies will be dumping their bricklayers/carpenters down the drain and replacing them with computer controlled construction methods.
When will it be economically viable to dump all the people who have to set up the equipment and all of the people who have to do everything but make the basic structure? Is this ‘house set up and entirely built by robots down to the light fixtures with no human intervention’ a near future proposition?
When was it economically viable to replace hand-sewn lumber with lumber mills?
Then they went and made portable electric saws. What a world!
And then electric drills! And laser levels!
Remember paper ledgers and abacuses? Ever hear of Microsoft Excel?
We keep making tools that always increase productivity and reduce time and cost. It’s Constant incremental progress, and on a large scale it’s great because it frees up (human) resources to focus on new industry and technology, which furthers the CIP. On the micro scale, there may be a small number of temporarily displaced workers as jobs shuffle around and workers re-skill.
But at this particular intersection of technology, we are at a pretty bad spot. We are on the verge of massive progress in multiple industries, and wealth has concentrated in the elite classes. “Temporarily displaced workers” won’t have the capital to re-skill or invest their own resources into new industry. This is bad.
what they are saying is that in the past, technological leaps meant increases in productivity and generally freed the displaced workers into new careers, but this time the sheer scale of change that is imminent doesn’t leave time for that. it’s going to be bad
Ah, I guess I missed your answer. If every prediction about the future is true, it includes all the predictions that humanity will be wiped out relatively soon, meaning that house building will never be fully automated and no one will commute by personal jetpack. But also all housing will be automated and people will commute by personal jetpack.
At the same time.
I can’t wait to see how you resolve civilization simultaneously collapsing and advancing.
You really shouldn’t talk about things you don’t understand. First of all, that wouldn’t literally happen to a cat. Secondly, that’s not what a quantum superposition is.
I was a porr attempt at a joke. You’re allowed to laugh a little dude. I don’t know what will happen in the future. Nobody does. I choose to belive in a world heading towards Star Trek over Mad Max. We have bad ‘jetpacks’ now. Why is it so hard to think they’ll upgrade to the point where they will be more accessible in the future. A la what happened the buggies and cars. They would be self driving I presume to.keep everyone more safe cause trusting the average person to fly is a bit much, but idk maybe.
We may also start ww3 at any point. Still don’t know the future. I guess for my own sanity I try not to think that way. But like, if you really want to get into thus we have to bring up a lot more subjects, mainly UBI. But, regardless, most jobs being automated, including construction, so everyone gets to be happier is a world I want to live in.
So now you’ve gone from 'house will definitely construction will definitely be entirely automated" to “I don’t know what will happen.”
Fascinating.
As far as jetpacks- people don’t want to fall to their deaths if they run out of fuel or have engine trouble on the way to work in the morning. I would have thought that would have been obvious.
You have a strange way of relating to people- arguing with them, refusing to answer their questions, making trolling comments, insulting… not to mention never asking the person you’re trying to relate to any questions about themselves.
Sorry, after you’ve insulted me, especially since you didn’t apologize for it, I’m not particularly interested in telling you about my day. It’s strange, but I’m just not inclined to have a friendly discussion with someone who just called me an asshole.
Not so much of the physical building, but I bet the designing isn’t too big of a stretch. Think something like procedural generation to make 2/3 of a floor plan and have humans make sure it makes sense and add details.
Nobody is saying that but reading a headline that says "Construction company prints some walls!" and then saying "welp that's it they're out here just 3D printing whole ass buildings" is pretty uh... Dumb.
There is a danger. The select few of “us” who are “more equal” will become “them”.
How do you think slavery sustains itself? A few slaves get to become slave-masters when the old masters die.
I guess it boils down to the age old questions of what is the value of a human life, and who gets to decide what laws we base upon the answer to the first question.
What I meant was that “they” can not just simply erase “us” from existence once we stop providing them enough value, I believe in a revolution of some kind if such practices were to be tried.
Though I do not believe it would be rational nor beneficial for the elites at the first place, I was just pointing out that there is little chance of that happening.
There were more natives in the Americas and Caribbean when the European settlers arrived, too. Only one side had way more advanced military technology and no scruples around genocide and slavery.
I can only imagine 50 years from now, when climate crisis is in full swing, there are no more salaried jobs for people without extreme, cutting edge technological specializations or PhDs, and people are doing shit like menial servant work or acting as delivery drivers for 16 hours a day for the ultra wealthy just not to starve, you’ll have some 70 year old zoomer politician that introduces a bill to legalize prostitution in order to open up “new sources of income for struggling Americans” while quietly including a clause that effectively creates death camps for the poor. Conservative Americans will praise the bill on the basis that it’ll get rid of “welfare queens” and create more economic opportunities for the people who don’t get turned into Soylent Green.
50 years after that, America is littered with the hollowed out ghost towns of long abandoned suburbia. The coasts have been destroyed by flooding from the melted ice caps. Automated workers outnumber Americans 10 to 1. There are around 30 million Americans left in the continental United States. Almost all of them are literal slaves after slavery was re-legalized. Almost everything is owned by a handful of incredibly powerful families. Virtually everyone lives in or around Chicago. Whatever hope people once had for a better future is a long distant dream of a bygone era as the world slowly dies and the people who are left simply persist without ever truly living.
I don’t even understand the benefit of it. It’s not like memeing is a job where you have to protect your intellectual property. Why even do it? Do they think so highly of themselves that they need to “protect” memes that they create? They’re randos on the Internet adding captions to images, not V/A professionals…
It also goes against the longstanding spirit of Internet memes, that they are things to by definition be shared, not intellectual property to be bound.
You should take a few minutes to watch this video if you want to see how serious memers can get about ‘stealing memes’ kids with partially developed brains with too much internet access and free time obsess over nutty things
Sort of… we can 3D print walls out of specific concrete blends that run nicely through an extended hose system that runs from the mud pump to the print nozzle. But, concrete has a limited time as mud before it starts to harden, so you can only print for so many hours before you have to stop and flush out the pump and hoses before it turns into rock, and the concrete mix can’t be too chunky (like including gravel) to flow through the system.
Also, if you get all that right, then you can print walls… but not structural frames that would support a multistory building, or plumbing or electrical wiring or insulation or windows or roofs…
We’re a long way from 3D printing a building wholesale.
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