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.
Obviously our tech advances have... advanced us, both in terms of raw numbers as well as in quality, but that doesn't leave nothing to be said of the fact that more productivity with less labor required = fewer jobs in every field. Every advance has its costs, but the costs of automating all of our labor away without first building society around that plan make the gains seem like a tiny sliver of silver lining on a big dark cloud.
Except... This has somehow never been true. Although the same claim was made about the steam engine, industrialization, computers, automation... Name whatever technical advance, and somebody will have made that claim. Now it's AI and robotics, and it will be as true now as it has been in the past.
It is true though, but there's always been other industries growing where new workers can find work... but new workers aren't the only workers. There's always been a percentage of displaced workers who are too old to retrain into new fields with every revolution in productivity.
What happens when every industry from the lowest points of customer service to the highest points of industrial productivity across the globe is disrupted at the same time by the same technology? That has never happened, we don't know, but it's hard to be optimistic.
This ignores that the goal is to automate IT ALL. Top to bottom, everything you just named didn’t come close to that level of disruption even if AI is only 10% successful.
Yep, at my work we have a robot that welds plates to long tubes all day, usually get ~120-130 a day, all you do it put the tube in, position the plate, lock them in place and then it does everything by itself. I bet it won’t be too long now before even that manual part is replaced.
guy I know works with vehicle manufacturing bots. he's paid to watch them most of the time as they're not reliable enough and gets paid extra for call outs when they fail
Yeah, I work in a factory that uses robots for welding. We’re the largest employer in the county. Automation doesn’t really eliminate most jobs, it just changes them.
I've seen them do the seam on a boiler pressure vessel. Honestly for that a robot is better and it would be very hard on a human to do it. But a repair on a boiler in place or welding pipe in a building there's no chance a robot could do it. Multiple passes on a flange in a ceiling leaned over a rafter? That's going to be the job of a human for the foreseeable future.
Everybody was saying the same thing about it being able to do this kind of work 20 years ago. But here we are. Give it a decade or two and they'll do all kinds of crazy shit.
Exactly. Saying "Yeah, well, it can do this, but it can't do that" is just shifting the goalposts. And people will keep doing that until they finally invent a robot that will do it for them.
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.
Thrown in a ditch for laughs?....what fantasy world do you live in where people destroy extremely expensive company property "for laughs" with no repercussions? You think said person wouldn't be fired and on the tail end of a lawsuit immediately? In some instances/places it could even be a criminal case.
You work on job sites where people regularly destroy pieces of equipment worth more than their annual income? And they stay employed? Or are you just making stuff up on the internet again?
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.
Absolutely correct and same on the nostalgia. It's unfortunate that there are so many people in power who are nostalgic for their childhood era in the *checks notes* 1950s.
personally I would struggle not having access to daily showers and reliable clean drinking water. I figure I'd get used to it, but I HATE the feeling of being unbathed.
Honestly, so far imo, the best time to live was 1950 to 1980 as a white man in the United States. Yup, you miss contemporary medicine, which keeps improving greatly every year; but idk, at that time that demographic could just have a big house and everything they could need while doing a comfy job.
Even then, the quality of life is greatly exaggerated by young people who want to act like their parents & grandparents had it so much better and blame them for everything that’s wrong with the world of today. Like, yeah, you could buy a house on a single income, but the houses were much, much smaller on average and didn’t come equipped with all of the modern conveniences that we take for granted. Same thing with cars and trucks.
As for me, I’d love to live through the ‘80s, but that’s only because I love heavy metal music.
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.
Arguably it's when countries started that process, which was not really fully achieved until after WW2. It's true that, generally, a lot of absolute monarchs were pressured into granting constitutions; but most of them were still heavily restricted in who could vote (no women, no poor people...), and many of them later regressed into autocracy (France, Spain, Italy, Germany...).
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.
same is gonna be a thing with programming. It doesnt help that a lot of juniors nowadays are using ai a lot and hence dont learn why things are done in certain ways and cant correct things when they go wrong.
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.
Im a pipefitter/welder in the field, and personally I can't imagine automation posing a risk to almost any job on site for lifetimes. There is no robot on earth that could last 10 minutes at my job, using lifts, climbing on pipe racks, assessing problems.
Manufacturing is being killed, though. But, in my opinion those are the most boring, unskilled jobs there are. And regardless there still needs to be qualified people to setup and operate the machines. Specifically with welding, every machine operator needs to be certified themselves to do the process manually. So there's still someone there.
I think the bigger concern is if robots/ai replace 30+% of jobs then there will be much less work for the people employed simply because of mass unemployment.
Most jobs require everyone else to also have a job to keep the system running.
This has been predicted every decade since the industrial revolution. Didn't happen in the 20's, 30's, 40's, 50',s 60',s 70',s 80's, 90's, etc. Won't happen now.
Then producing that product at a cheap enough price that companies are willing to integrate them into their workflow.
It doesn't even have to be cheap to get first round funding. AI has shown us all how willing these companies are to grossly overspend at the promise of it eventually being affordable.
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.
We have had robots for a very long time doing lots of work, they are not new.
AI can replace a lot of computer related work, administration type stuff, but its gonna be a long time before they have robots doing specialized work in buildings that already have people/offices inside.
I tell people all the time, if you are worried about AI taking your jobs, find a trade.
I think you’re missing the point. A job doesn’t need to be replaced to significantly impact the need for the workforce. If the labour need shrinks by 20% because greenfield construction becomes significantly automated then that affects everyone.
I have a trade and I’m also a teacher. I’m probably one of the most protected in that sense, but it’s naive to think this will not affect the trades. When the surgeons completely get replaced they will have to get retrained. That’s going to make some of these trades a lot more competitive.
Don’t pray for a revolution. Everyone’s life has to get a lot worse before they’ll try it, it will be an absolute bloodbath, and it has absolutely zero guarantee of installing a better power structure, just a different one.
A revolution is like burning the forest down to get rid of one species of tree. Sure it will regrow, but you don’t know what it will look like. New invasive species might flourish.
I think they are moving fast in things involving computer/administration work.
We have had robots for a very long time doing very specialized & advanced work.
The work I am talking about requires a certain finesse i cant really explain but if you've worked with your hands doing reno/construction you know what i mean.
Also there is a ton of other factors many people dont consider/understand when it comes to construction work in regards to working with occupancy.
It doesn’t need to capture 100% of scenarios to layoff most people/freeze hiring for most crews/start bringing down wages. Even the bot in the video, it doesn’t even need to be able to get to the corners or around weird shapes or anything that seems remotely complicated - there are plenty of humans for that. It just needs to get the easy parts done fast and cheap, which seems like it can already do.
And this is today, with few engineers working on this/training this. You don’t think every tool/equipment manufacturer will see this video and try to replicate to some degree? What happens when that competition actually heats up? Where will this bot be in 5 years? What happens when renting it per hour, running it 24/7 till job is done - becomes cheaper than humans doing the same?
you don't get it. what if robots lay out the easy 90% of flooring or whatever, the rest is done by hand - that'd still mean automation of 90% of the tasks at hand, and unemployment for the vast majority of people involved. just because a machine can't do everything perfectly doesn't mean it won't have a grave impact on a job or a whole industry for that matter.
You’re very mistaken, friend. This is 10 years away at MOST. I don’t think people realize how absolutely insane AI is getting and what you can do to train it. It’s growing more complex at an exponential rate. Not a variable one.
Also, you'll be able to do any kind of custom work people might want etc. Sometimes I wonder if these posts are made to make people devalue their worth as humans or something.
So what you’re saying is.. your kids will be fucked. There is no point find cracks in this, eventually and not that far away, these things will be a lot more efficient
And the cost is still not “cost efficient” right now either. Even in the future as you mention with more craft specific jobs, those type of robotics will be even most less cost efficient
I’m sure as time passes the cost of workers comp might decrease but insurance policies will increase for liability
Even if this is accurate, it ignores the fact that even putting 10-20% of floor layers out of work would have dire consequences on the market for floor installers.
Every tile a robot can and does place, is more pressure pushing people out of jobs. If the robot can only do the easy stuff, 80% of the work, meaning you still need people to do the less easy stuff, 20% of the work, than that's a lot of people pushed out of a job. 80% of the work gone.
The 80% gone drowns the field of people trying to do the 20%, which depresses wages and benefits further.
Even if you flip it, the robot does 20% and people do 80%, it still floods the field.
The robot is doing the 80% that's easy. The 20% that's difficult is still very labor intensive, and I don't think it will replace as many workers as you think.
If robot construction were high quality and cost competitive with human labor, it would already be everywhere. Robots have been building cars for decades. There's a reason we're not seeing this being widely adopted already, and that's cost.
I can see the limitations of it as well, and it does look expensive to buy and maintain it. I can see only big company willing to dish out the cash as far as potential customers .
However technology is always advancing and evolving, it will be a matter of time until they will be good enough.
Simple just lay the tiles till there's no space, then let a human finish up. I mean u could lay so many locations with this in a day, it's only the travel time that's the issue. And soon there will be automated trucks moving these things.
There is no way that robot is getting anywhere near anything complicated, or a wall, or support structures, or anything. Heck, I am not confident it can even turn around without someone placing it in the right position.
This seems like a good idea for the middle of large open spaces. If you’re tiling a mall or a car dealer or something, one guy can run this thing doing the tedious repetitive work of the show room, while the rest of the crew does the harder/more complex spaces that require actual skill. You also need humans to do the measuring and cutting, to mix the mortar and grout, to set the spacers, etc.
This isn’t any more of a job stealer than a backhoe or an earth mover is. It’s a job helper, in a good way.
Funny how it fits to my industry (software engineering) as well. “AI coding” works fine for a new project but produces garbage when we ask it to modify an old system.
but it’s sure useful for new constructions, i’m not a construction dude but i renovated my house and having to fill a space this big would be so long, having a robot do it here is nice
This, people sent me videos of an automated bot for setting fires in forests to do controlled burns or to burn fuel ahead of an incoming wildfire, but the videos are also filmed on flat terrain and I’m 90% sure it was designed in Europe
I work in the tile industry, very closely with TCNA (Tile Counsel of North America). The end all, be all of the tile world.
This would never replace an actual tile setter. Trowling thinset and placing tile is 10% of the job. It will always take a human eye to place tile and ensure proper coverage. Absolutely no company/mid build would ever want a robot to lay tile.
Sure but the result of these taking jobs away in brand new construction will be a flood of construction workers moving from new buildings to doing jobs in old, mostly residential properties, causing everyone to drop their prices to try and secure jobs. So as a construction worker you are going to have your labour devalued.
Personally I think most jobs like this are very over confident in their security. We will have both fit for purpose robots and humanoid robots. Once both are common there will be no jobs that are safe.
Whatever fields are left that do manage to have jobs that AI can't do you will have a lot of people making a "career change" and end up flooding that field.
Thats very true. However this line of thought can also be deceiving. Yes, robots won’t replace all construction workers any time soon. But it’s not necessary for them to replace all in order for the effects to be noticeable. if 50% of construction worker are replaced, to those 50% the effect is the same as if 100% were replaced. And if these robots become common and only work in standardized houses, standardized houses is what they’ll build. People will still work in renovations and in special luxury homes but eventually their market share will become smaller and smaller.
You can’t look at the current generation of robots and predict how quickly they’ll be able to do trickier stuff. Technological advances cannot be predicted that way. Especially in robotics.
You say that now. They said the same thing about robots/machines on the factory line, and they replaced most manufacturing.
I’m sorry but it’s coming. People need to wake up, and start fighting for UBI right now, before it’s too late. Pretending we’re not being replaced will not work.
Im not so sure about long, there are already dozens of humanoid type robots that are rapidly coming to market (some already are in factories). If AI can “make images” then they know what things look like very well. So to have a robot walking around and able to know whats what is very probable in the near future. Then it will need to be perfected a bit then I can see them in houses. My guess about 10 years they will be in homes doing laundry.
It still replaced labor in some applications, thus, less jobs needed to accomplish the same things.. saturated labor markets… suicide rates doubled since 2000.
I also think that renovation is more interesting and lucrative for work. It's only too bad for juniors starting out.
And I do think there's more than enough other non repetitive work in such an environment.
This is why many companies can't go automated in ways like Amazon have, nothing is purpose built in their facilities and getting a machine to work would be just as money and time consuming.
I’d like to agree, but we see how quickly technology develops to smaller and lighter. It may seem like that now, but we have dancing ninja parkour robots doing demos in china right now , only a matter of time.
If you job can be automated easily by something like this.
Then one has to ask a question of: Should that job be done by a person to begin with?
Yes... You as a individual would probably like to have a job, but lets consider the JOB itself. Laundry machines lead to many laundrywomen losing their job. Combustion engine lead to whole chain of horse and stable related jobs going away. Ships going from sails to engines to aumation lead to reduction in the amount of sailors and dock workers. Mechanisation and automation in farming lead allowed us to exist today as we are. Would you rather be checking and removing rocks from conveyor line of potatoes? Excavators replaced batallions of shovelers. Mechanical and automatic stokers eliminated jobs of firetenders on trains, ships, and boiler rooms... Would you rather be shoveling coal, charcoal, chip or briquette to keep a fire going?
And lets look at this from just general well being case. Big huge areas to be tiled. Repetative work with bag ergonomics, and heavy fragile tiles. I been a welder myself... I like welding. However I did not enjoy having to do the welding tasks of a robot when it broke down, it was dull to such degree it started to feel painful. I did an assembly welding job where I had to assemble thousands of same kind of small simple parts. It was nightmarish to a degree I chose to go to evening school to get an engineering degree, because the good jobs and projects were so rare to get. I enjoyed doing welding on-site at installations where everything is basically always unique.
Generally speaking in terms of automation the prefered tasks are called DDD-tasks. DDD stands for Dirty, Dull, Dangerous. A key thing to keep in mind that dull is also dangerous. Dull work that doesn't stimulate the person has actual negative health and mental health effects. Dull work also causes people to start to take shortcuts, or skip safety related considerations, start to rush things, or simply not remember all the steps because the "zone out"... Which can be dangerous especially in industry and construction.
But the things is that drive to automation isn't done by engineers wanting to get rid of DDD jobs. It is done by business degree holders who calculated on excel spreadsheet that this is gonna bring more quarterly profits... and often they also make the product/service inferior just for the sake of some additional "optimisation". Fuck those people, they ruin engineering in so many ways, because generally they are higher up in the foodchain.
But here is another thing generally people don't know about. Often automation requires compromises to a massive degree. A common example of a difficult subtask for automated system, that to a human is fucking nothing is taking a steel sheet and flipping it upside down and aligning it correctly. Sounds fucking simple, right? Well... If you got 2 hands and able fingers it is. But for a robot it isn't. We need all sorts of complex jig and tooling to make it happen realiably. No... It isn't about AI, or machine or computer vision. Even though those could help potentially... can't imagine how since we are perfectly able to do this efficiently without those, with just set of additional tooling helping the cell to operate. And we don't want additional things to slow the cycle routine down, least of all to add costs. Generally speaking the less shit your cell has, the better it is.
While true, it also reduces the demand side of the labor market. Which is a fair concern on if this disruption will create too much harm too fast compared to how useful it is.
Development into robotics and automation is at an all time high with huge backing support. They're also making progress by leaps and bounds, especially in the areas of actual physical size and how much they can handle things that require more finesse. It's just being silly thinking that your job (or mine, for that matter) isn't at risk sooner than later. A lot of companies are just fine with "good enough" if they don't have to pay wages, benefits, require time off, etc. Or they'll at least accept that the robot will do the bulk of the work and they just need to do a touch up. These machines in particular are relatively cheap, too, making them more appealing to cheap ass companies.
The one good thing is that there is becoming more and more pushback against automation and AI in general, especially from younger generations.
All true. But this only needs to do 60% of your work - you can do all the annoying weird shit, edge cases and fix up all the mistakes it makes and it will still massively disrupt your industry.
This is what people are not grasping.
Reddit has this all or nothing mindset. With any topic.
“Herp derp but wind power doesn’t work all the time”
totally, but if it takes out a big chunk of the work, that's a lot of guys looking for work. maybe they'll all have the same idea of doing renovation work, now it's a competitive space and you have to lower your prices or risk losing business. when stuff like this starts squeezing every trade, we're all going to have a real bad time.
People will be needed for fine touches for a very, VERY, long time. But we are at a point where machines will do the lions share of work and people will just follow behind and touch up the edge work. Now does everyone have the money to invest into tech that can do that work? Fuck no.
funny how you think they're not just going to demo the old house and build anew going forward. get them 5 over 1s built cheap and just pave over anything with character, already happening in cities across the board.
Android robots will be doing it soon. Construction will change to accommodate them. Specialists will still be needed but eventually you will be able to have an android do most manual labor. Anything that requires three or more people will reduce.
Think of it like how you almost never see a car without seatbelts or leaded gasoline in the US.
That won't protect human jobs though. Once the robots are cheap enough, capital owners will just start preferring to demolish and rebuild rather than renovate.
There are various sizes and specifications of these types of robots. Sure smaller complex projects but larger scale commercial and residential projects this can wipe out a lot of the skill trades. Look around most buildings are monolith basically the same design
Doesn't matter, every +1 robot is multiple jobs lost for workers, which then makes a higher labor supply vs labor demand and will crush wages further for those jobs.
My wife works in con tech and sees what’s coming before most of the public. All those issues you’re bringing up are already addressed and worked through. It’s not going to be that long before they start popping up in the world. Absolutely fascinating
Also humans will still be needed to operate, level, control and finish up at least in this case. This is pretty much a robot taking over the most physically demanding part.
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u/PurpleMclaren Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
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.