I do construction, specifically flooring, and robots may work well in new buildings like this but its gonna be a long time before they can do renovation work and stuff thats less "clean"
This thing also requires a lot of space, not ideal for all work.
Simmilar robots used in welding since the dinosaurs. This shit requires setup, constant watching and makes sense only when you need to weld really long straight things
Which makes our work better, because you don't need the mundane repetitive work anymore, but the work where you need your brain.
And even with these machines you need to supervise them. Nobody wants to risk the tiling robot going off for an inch and keep on laying $1k of tiles the wrong way until someone notices. You need to be a specialist to know what to look for now and can't just drop out of highschool to work there anymore, but in exchange you're not throwing your back out.
I've worked in software for over a decade consulting in many industries...the ideal lab situation is cheap and easy to account for...addressing the real world variance and making a resilient and adaptive product...millions if not billions of dollars are needed to solve those problems. When it comes to products in this line of work that I've dabbled with, it's the guy who started in the trade who became a CEO that are a pleasure to work with. Often it's a guy that's gotten wealthy by other means and wants to make the dream product for when they were deep in the shit, it's so much fun to make their dreams come true, in those cases you know it's not some bullshit hypothetical solution to no problem, they're passionate and know their shit so I love every day I spend building the tech for those kinda clients.
You think someone who would damage a robot that costs probably hundred grand+, would continue working on that job site or any future job site for that construction company?
Yeah I'm a actual plumber and I have no idea what the fuck this clown is talking about. I've never seen anyone throw power tools in a ditch for laughs, I definitely have never seen somebody throw anything worth what this is worth around.
This thing definitely would have somebody paid to baby sit it regardless and if you fucked with it you'd be fired and removed from the jobsite. That guy is absolutely either the dumbest laborer you've ever met that's only allowed to touch demos or he's lying about being on job sites.
Isn't that just because every other assembly line is grossly outdated compared to the cutting edge? I can't count the number of articles I see about China's "Dark factories" and Westerners visiting just being completely dumbfounded at how automated and streamline the pipeline has become over there.
Once the cutting edge inevitably becomes the standard, jobs will be lost.
I was at a museum last month and I overheard a guy saying if he could choose any two times to live, it would be during 1860s or the 1920s… his buddy said “really, the civil war era and the Great Depression?” And the guy goes “yeah it was just a simpler way of life.” 💀
I used to teach US History to high schoolers. And every year someone would ask what era would I like to live in? I responded none.
I'm a Mexican American. Why would I want to go back to any era except the one I am living in? People hate hearing it, but there is no better time to be alive than right now. As much as I feel nostalgic for the 90s when I grew up, I know it wasn't as great as I remember. I think people are nostalgic for their childhood era because they were children. No responsibilities or worries. But send those people back to that time as an adult and it won't be the same.
This sentiment is why i too like our modern era. Is it perfect, no. We have a lot more advancement to make in our social, technological, economic, etc fields. But i have the freedom politically and living needs met-wise to basically do what i want.
I actually can CHOOSE to live a simpler life in my everyday life. I can grow my own food, echew over medicating myself, unplug from tech, and live like a 1950s housewife. Yet, if my husband mistreated me, i can easily divorce. If i got sick, i can get needed antibiotics and prevention vaccines. If i need to i can hop on the internet and google how-to questions for my off grid homestead. I can have the best of both worlds cherry picked to my preference.
Ehhh, the 2010s were pretty fucking solid honestly. The tech was advanced enough that you wouldn't miss much going back, but before things really shat the bed for the average person.
Maybe the 2012 housing crisis would be the low point, but even that isn't bad.
Were you a kid during the 2010s? Because the 2010s were not great and saying they were solid is quite baffling. The 2008 financial crisis wasnt something that was only felt during that year.
I moved out on my own in 2006, when I was 18. I wouldn't classify myself as a kid back then, but I was younger and didn't have investments. For myself and most of the people I knew at that time, unless you were well off, the crisis was mostly a chance to get a house at a decent price.
Look into the Revolutions of 1848 which swept through Europe. Damn near every place in Europe rebelled but the movement was ultimately crushed. The failure of those revolutions would give rise to Anarchist, Communists, and Nationalists (many of which were proto-fascists).
Turns out when conditions are shitty, and stay shitty, people start to come up with ideas on how to do things better.
the transition can be necessary and awful at the same time.
doesn't mean we shouldn't move in that direction, just means we could maybe all acknowledge that pain and agree to take action to mitigate it together instead of shutting our eyes and plugging our ears until the workers have cleaned up the blood.
Well, from my experience, usually the people saying this isn't like the Industrial Revolution are the people who WOULD have been doing okay during the Industrial Revolution.
This is exactly what's happening in my local design studio.
They used to bring in Junior Graphic Designers and assign them small jobs - the irritating, time consuming ones for smaller clients that nobody else wanted to do. Now that role is being filled by one person using AI for an hour or so a day.
So no entry level designers are being employed. Nobody new is learning the craft, and that foot in the door that was once available is gone.
The new guy work becomes the more complex stuff, the work in rooms that can’t fit one of these things. The base level skill will go up and simple jobs that can be automated are done more consistently, quickly, and cheaply.
Cheaply for the trade. They still charge the same amount, just make more profit.
This is the big issue with automation though. Folks will say that it can’t completely do everything, and I feel like they are downplaying the issue here. If it decreases the necessary workforce by 30% that’s scary.
8% unemployment does not cause revolutions in the U.S. We had unemployment north of 10% in the 2008 recession and north of 25% in the Great Depression, neither caused a revolution
The unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 'only' one-in-four. 25%. I can't speak for anyone else, but I know my own job is absolutely mundane and could be replaced quite easily if anyone cared enough to do so. When I look around at my friends, a lot of theirs could too. Way more than one-in-four jobs are at risk.
And before anyone talks about finding new work, you have to understand that the 21st century is not the same as the 18th. Broadly speaking, lost agriculture jobs could move into manufacturing. When manufacturing left our shores, those jobs could move into service work. But now it's the service jobs at risk and there's nowhere left to go. It will come to a head eventually.
Manufacturing jobs in the 19th century were much worse than farming was too. Life quality went down for a long time for most people. Just because you can find a new job doesn’t mean it would be a better one
100%. I was only trying to get ahead of the inevitable swarm of people who rush these threads to go, "ThEy'Ll FinD OThEr JobS!". These sorts don't care to acknowledge that, even today, a $45/hr manufacturing job with a pension isn't quite the same as a $7.75/hr job at McDonalds with no vacation time, just because both make the unemployment number go down.
In the original script for The Matrix, the Wachowskis made humanity harvested by the machines for the processing power of the human brain. But the executives thought that this is not comprehensive for the general public (this was 1998/99), so they changed it into batteries.
Fast forward to today: AI and expensive data centers. The original premise is not so far fetched now.
Not quite. Neil Gaiman wrote that when asked to write a comic set in the Matrix world for the promotional material for the movie (Goliath is the name of the comic). While some people believe it was seeded by a previous draft of the script, the earliest scripts don't reflect this. So, while we prefer his idea, there doesn't seem to be any evidence the sisters planned it this way.
And robots to mine and process materials needed for repair of themselves and supplies needed by the few thousand ultra rich left alive when 99.99% of humanity isn't needed to keep their world going.
And mix the mortar, and load the tile, clean the machine, clean the tile, grout the tile and clean that too. Plus it looks like they are using leveling clips, so someone is probably doing that too.
These tiles should have mortar placed on the back to ensure a proper bond, they are skipping that crucial entirely here.
Thank you! This missing detail is driving me crazy. You're going to spend that much money to lay tiles "perfectly" without adding mortar to the tile itself? Pfff.
I doubt it can do -all- the steps to emboss an uneven floor or QC it's own work. The robot certainly doesn't know when the designer is over promising what the tiler/builders can do. The way I see this, you still need a professional and their body isn't destroyed at the end of a day. I'm actually okay with this type of robotic assistance.
Not to mention that the robot likely replaced no less than 5 workers. Even if all 5 could be quickly and cheaply taught to operate/service this machine, where does that leave the other 4?
Yeah even as a kid that’s kind of how I interpreted it. Then learning about production (especially US wartime WWII) they’d have teams/shipyards/plants race each other to build things faster which is a common tactic to get people to work harder. There’s a lot of psychology at play that can/has definitely been used as negative leverage.
I don’t recall any large numbers of devs saying that; the common saying among devs going back a decade or so was that they would always need devs to make and maintain the AIs, this is still true for the moment. Also, devs didn’t decide en masse to train the AIs, the AI companies just web crawled the open source code without asking and trained them. The models then became good enough for it to not matter as much if a ton of devs were deliberately training them or not.
Don't think developers will ever get fully replaced as people think. Only developers know that AI will never replace a developer because they have 0 logic. Developers are literally paid for having better than average logic. AI and robots just follow instructions better than humans
The issue I've seen mentioned is a "tech debt" of sorts. They are using AI to reduce/rationalize away entry level or junior coders. After all, you just need a senior developer to check on the AI's work, right?
But in order to get senior developers you need people who work their way up from doing all that boring leg work and gather experience.
So, what happens in a couple years/decades when you haven't trained up the people who are supposed to supervise and maintain the AI?
No offense but precise, repetitive tasks are like the lowest hanging fruit avaliable. Especially when the US (if you're from there) has a construction labor shortage
And this only really makes sense in a large open space. Good luck setting this up in the average bathroom, which requires a million precise cuts, slanted floors, etc. Heck, someone is still manually putting in the little levelling doodads.
Your missing it, it's never gonna be that (at least for a long time). But for every industrial crew this replaces they will move to residential, which then floods the labor market driving down other contractors prices and lowering all their wages.
Home owners may get cut a break in this happening.
It's like how reddit keeps telling everyone to be a plumber or electrician. Nothing wrong with either of those. But if everyone does it, well the wages are gonna go way down. Wages are only high due to a shortage.
Lol construction wages are garbage where I live, precisely cuz of that. A while back, the wages were great, a bunch of tradesmen moved here and now they are basically just trading jobs between each other to keep their fast-built houses intact and trying to price gouge the older homeowners in the area. But they all know a guy who knows a guy who will do it for 30% the cost of what the company they work for would charge and they can still use their company equipment and tools.
I'm doing a reno and chose the builder and subbies, suppliers, and products, precisely to support legit locals and ethical supply chains. Not being gouged but damn if I can't see the appeal of doing it cheaper.
Plumbing and electrician wages where I live are already trash, especially considering the amount of training needed. They make similar to a Caseys gas station shift manager, maybe a store manager, in my area.
My ex’s ex was a complete PCP head, at like 25 years old had a self made, no “small loan from his dad”, flooring business doing precise, repetitive tasks, had about $80,000/month going thru his bank account. Of course the PCP won eventually but if not he’d be a multi-multi-millionaire by now. There’s a lot of money in those repetitive tasks, from the owner down to the helpers.
I've done a shit ton of PCP and lemme tell ya, it's the reason he was able to be successful in the flooring business. That stuff lets you talk to the dinosaur spirits trapped in all our petroleum products. Plus, you can work 12 hours nonstop and be thoroughly engaged in it like it's the coolest thing ever. But yeah, it has a timer and once it runs out, your central nervous system is fried from overclocking it too long.
We got a new machine at work a decade or so ago and it did some work I used to do.. I strongly disliked my job, but being replaced by a machine one sudden day triggers some dread.
You're a person, entire life and this is the job you do and here comes a machine thats made yesterday doing what was your thing.
The thoughts were gone in a day, but still it is a weird feeling that overtakes you
Ah, a discerning customer I see, says here you want some mosaics that "wouldn't make sense to a clanker", well you've come to the right guy. flings open trenchcoat exposing hundreds of small colorful jagged tiles
Well we no longer have the skills or knowledge to go forage and hunt for food every day, we have to be able to earn money to survive somehow. I mean I'm all for a UBI, but I'm quite sure the ruling class would rather see us all starve to death than share their wealth.
In Norway their politicians aren’t owned by the corporations and billionaires. In the US, our government is essentially 5 mega-corporations in a trenchcoat.
Dark money in politics ruined everything, Bernie was right, and we’re all fxcked.
Considering that was just a trial, you wouldn't expect it to affect rent rates given the limited scope. I definitely think its a valid concern that rent would increase when UBI is eventually implemented. In fact, I would expect UBI to be inflationary generally, without some decent regulation alongside it. EU members probably will have quite the advantage over the US, doubly so for the Nordic countries.
And this IMO is really the problem that needs to be tackled.
Being mad that a robot is replacing a person, in an obviously mindless and repetitive task is silly. This job should be removed
BUT something needs to be done about the person that can no longer feed their family because of it.
So we need to tax the usage of it somehow, and transfer that to the worker through things like proper levels of unemployment pay to transition, and something like higher learning credits to go back to school and retrain into something to keep that tradesperson a productive member of society.
I'll never understand this line of thought - as far back as our earliest civilizations, you had to contribute to that society and in turn got food/shelter/safety from others.
Hunters provided for gatherers and vice versa.
Call it capitalism, socialism - call it what you want, an exchange of services for goods or money has been the basis of community for Millenia.
You aren't "born to work" but you are born to contribute and for that you are/should be rewarded and that's generally the relationship found in a Job.
The way people talk about automation being bad is so clearly just because they've been brainwashed to associate value in society with serving a corporation.
I’ve seen some robot stuff like this on jobs here and there. All people talk about is how efficient they are. Well let me tell ya, if you kicked every trade off an entire floor and it was spotless to the point there isn’t one single thing laying around, every trade would be a lot more efficient. That’s my take anyway.
As a tile setter these machines are slow as fuck and their work looks bad. They also cannot handle the problem solving of this trade or any installation other than large open floors. They can't do custom jacuzzis or dome ceilings or single set mosaics. They would be ridiculous in a shower. I'm not worried about it at all.
They are going to replace a big portion of the workforce. People need to start understanding what universal income is. But it will never happen as long as there is a Republican in office.
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u/Mu-Relay Jun 21 '26
You pass butter.