Was that a KOTOR reference??
New technological innovations are keen and all but every time someone talks about the end of manual labor I remember that after all these millennia people still dig holes with shovels.
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I think you should read that post again… It expresses similar skepticism to mine.
As a former carpenter, I can assure you that the building trades adapt very, very slowly to new technology. I would suggest that on the East Coast of the USA, there are very few drywallers today who are using drywall mud “banjos,” a labor-saving tool, the way they started doing back in the 1960s in the Western USA.
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I was agreeing, and explaining why I agree - since the weight of current tech robots doesn’t match that of a human, the claimed/perceived advantages of human morphology don’t seem worth the extra effort involved, at least in construction applications.
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Sorry- I totally misunderstood!
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Exactly. They show this robot hanging a simple, vertical sheet with no cut-outs, and it was still slow as hell. They need to do way better than that to compete with the whirlwind pace of jobsite drywallers.
What does seem like a promising technology sooner at hand are exoskeletons, for human workers to wear. You get the increased strength and endurance, and keep the human brain.
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Sounds like a job for…
Sex Robot!!!
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“Look for… the union la…”
bzzzz !click!
“Look for… the union la…”
bzzzz !click!
“Look for… the union la…”
bzzzz !click!
“Look for… the union la…”
bzzzz !click!
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That’ll change once they get a bossy, overbearing robot foreman into the mix.
If you just want a 3d-printing robot that can repurpose other structures for sustainable development I think I’ve got something for you. Some limitations, admittedly; but the R&D costs are attractively low:
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Have the termites fill up a cavity the same way you’d pour concrete into a mold? I guess the (relatively) easy bit is to incentivise them to only construct inside your mold, but how to make sure they only collect material from where you want them too instead of just eating up your neighbour’s house?
I guess the safer solution would be a completely sealed shut termite factory making termite bricks, a bit like those Damien Hirst artworks. You’d dump food/material into the factory via a chute, then bricks would come out on a conveyor belt the other end. Some kind of laser thingie would ensure that no live termites follow the finished brick on its way out.
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I suspect that implementation would veer into “nature, um, finds a way” territory without great care; but their use of chemical cues could probably be exploited to guide their activity. The individual termites don’t do much sanity checking of the instructions they are following (hence the always fascinating “conveniently ordinary ballpoint pen ink often contains one of the chemicals they respond to( 2-phenoxyethanol, I think); so draw them a path!” lab demo).
That said, the technique probably wouldn’t make much sense of you just had them inside a brickworks: they just aren’t all that fast compared to filling molds by more conventional means(though, if you wanted a ‘green chemistry’ alternative it might be worth plundering their digestive process and gut flora to obtain a base for the cellulose processing vats producing fill slurry for the molds; so you could produce termite-type materials in vastly greater volume (not sure how many liters of gut cotents a termite has; but it’s a small number)).
Where they might actually be interesting is unfortunately also the place where “and how are you going to get the guidance chemical trail in if it’s so inaccessible?” considerations arise: if you need material added or removed from a bunch of tunnels and conduits and crevices in an existing structure, without ripping the thing open, a supply of termites that swarms about adding insulation, or one with a taste for scavenging asbestos and returning it to the next, could be handy. But if you can chemtrail those crevices you could likely just blow insulation in directly; so you’d either need to crack that problem or significantly modify the behavior of your termites.
The fun sci-fi vision(not actually a terribly common use case on Earth; where labor is usually available where buildings are wanted and some urgency often attends construction) would be to exploit their ability to also generate more termites. The von Neumann machine is science fiction on the robotics side; but organisms can do the ‘drop seed population, massive workforce constructed in-situ’ thing quite readily.
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Oh, sometimes it does.
Ask me how I know.
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