Most of my town of 23,000 is made from 1920’s kit houses that all arrived on railway cars and got built after the war. As the Great Depression came on, labor costs dropped and it became reasonable to hire humans to do work. As you go up and down the local streets you can see the same designs scattered around. But they’ve certainly stuck in the past, no reason to see that they wouldn’t in the future, especially with a nice open floorplan and baths for every bedroom.
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Yeah, but my point it’s not necessarily going to happen. It depends on lots of factors, including the economy and the standard wages to employ a carpenter, as well as the kind of houses that people demand. But again, even if prefabs become popular again, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be built by robots… I suspect that the more the housing market is considered a profitable market, not a human necessity, the more these factors are going to intersect in unpredictable ways. The more well-off you are, the more you can demand a craftsman built home, while if you’re poor, it’s going to be prefab, of varying levels of quality.
We should have seen this coming the day someone invented the vibrator.
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Don’t worry. Dead batteries are a buzz-killer.
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This is going to be the rough patch in the transition. The company that slaughters Uber will be the one with self-driving taxies.
What scares me is that the people we’re putting out of work, we have no way or concept or even apparent
desire to include them as functional members of society. The cabbies who
are not getting hired or who are getting laid off? They’re not going to do other things,
they’re just out of a job, out of health insurance, stressed out and
poor. The Uber drivers will suffer much the same fate when the cars
become self-driving.
We aren’t set up to understand the concept of a good person who can’t
find work through no fault of their own. The Protestant Ethic that the
US marinates in can’t conceive of it. And we will dehumanize and debase
those people and cause decades - lifetimes - of human suffering before
the cultural ethic understands it.
That’s not a reason automation isn’t coming, but it’s something we
need to pay attention to as it does. Nothing destabilizes a nation quite
like an angry, out-of-work, disaffected class of hungry men who have
been told that they’re worthless. That’s the future that’s staring us in
the face right now.
Though I hope I’m being cynical.
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You’re not being cynical. You are, however, using future-tense when you should be using present tense. This is pretty much the US right now - what little jobs there are are devalued into nothingness, and the people who can’t make ends meet and blamed for their own suffering that are caused by awful, exploitive businesses.
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I wish you were, but how can we have a post-scarcity, leisure society when to be part of that you need to have money, and the only way to have money is to have a job, and you can’t get a decent paying job (or one at all) because so much is automated… etc. People talk about the post-scarcity economy in sort of utopian terms, but how do we get there without having a whole lot of people out of work, with no alternatives to support themselves?
And this.
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From the upper link: “WinSun’s 3D-printed villa has several rooms and has been deemed to be up to China’s national safety standards.”
okayfine…
I hope you are too but fear you are not.
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Fine, here’s a US one.
The house hasn’t been built yet. Nor has that rendered crawler machine/robot been built, from what I’ve been able to find. The biggest structure built so far is a gazebo.
So, would that concrete printed gazebo be built in the US to US codes? Thus negating the idea that concrete printed buildings are only in China?
There should be major exceptions for such experimental structures, and they should be easy to obtain. We need to innovate fast and the bureaucrats with their bumazhkas should get out of the way.
To be fair, catalogers are IN NO WAY known for their people skills. The internet, maaaaaaan, it’s coming for us all.
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There will be robot lunch eaters? But, that’s what I am good at…
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Unfortunately we don’t really have the luxury of thinking of ourselves that way, and in the present state of affairs we’re most of us forced to depend on jobs for survival. Worse, any substantial change on that front will probably come after automation has created unemployment on or beyond the level of the great depression.
Then again maybe the utopian capitalists are right and automation will simply lead to “new forms of work being created”.
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Until the fire department shows up when it’s in flames and wants to know what exactly was in that wiring jacketing that keeps giving their guys blisters in their lungs? There are a number of good regulations in place for buildings that we should keep abiding by.
For the most part inspectors are pretty good at knowing what will fly in their zoning and if a structural engineer has signed off on it, a lot of their work has already been done. Let’s not get jumping ahead on structures that will fail, I’ve seen signoff to final construction happen in as little as 12 months on major buildings, it all depends on how well the architect does their job.
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Everyone’s job is at risk, friend. Unionize!
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At least I still have sitting on the john going for me.
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This.
At least one large American political party already touts this to the ceilings.
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