My good buddy, Union carpenter, laughs at Silicon Valley hipsters trying to replace his industry with robots.
One of his greatest quotes is ‘We already have 3d printers for buildings, they’re called cranes’.
His advice every time I send him one these articles usually rounds to: ‘If these smart@$$ %|~>heads would spend a couple of weeks on the job actually sweating and doing some real labor, they’d realize the problem isn’t lifting things, it’s organizing it.’
I mean he can laugh but then one day it'll have happened.
For one thing, he's already identified but failed to realise the problem: organising labour to be on site and ready to work is expensive and tricky.
But when there's less labour and more machines, you're now only paying opportunity cost, not direct costs of people turning up and being unable to complete the job because it's not ready to go yet.
And unlike people, the quantity of capable machinery can constantly increase and thus the cost per unit decrease.
Eventually the machine is cheap enough to leave on site even if something else delays it.
One of his greatest quotes is ‘We already have 3d printers for buildings, they’re called cranes’.
His advice every time I send him one these articles usually rounds to: ‘If these smart@$$ %|~>heads would spend a couple of weeks on the job actually sweating and doing some real labor, they’d realize the problem isn’t lifting things, it’s organizing it.’