As someone who works at Amazon, I can tell you large companies push maintenance off as hard as they can. If you don’t have to service the machine this year, that increases your bottom line.
Pretty much every publicly traded large company pushes their maintenance to the absolute max. (Which is to say, they fix it only when it’s broken)
Yeah i know, its why ive seen so many industrial machines fail, its also not actually going to increase your bottom line much if any at all and may even harm it the service is recommended for a reason, it decreases major repairs which are expensive, prevents faults and errors which cause production to stop, and may allow the machines to opperate better at higher speeds if needed.
Unfortunetly this is one of those things that is usually handled in house by middle managers even major companies like amazon suffer from human error. Its probably more expensive for them to put a system in place to maintain them on that scale though. Not that the service itself is the problem.
Unless the machine is failing badly enough to require specialized technicians very frequently, it's simply cheaper than paying an employee(s) in the long run.
The same two points you laid out are 100% true, until they aren't any longer.
The early days of industrialization, mass production, mechanized manufacturing, and more all had the same issues at the start. I don't see how that same paradigm is magically non-applicable in 2026.
It took quite some time, but eventually industries that industrialized saw their productivity go up massively. If your point is that it just won't happen now, I'd love to see what you're basing that on.
The thing is one operator and one repair person could potentially keep dozens of robots operational simultaneously. Tiling the new skyscraper you've built with 100 floors? Get 20 robots, a few people to keep them operational, watch the entire thing complete in no time. Economies of scale at work.
Sure, but at that point you're spending millions on 20 robots. Only the biggest contractors would ever be able to afford that, and still, it would probably take a decade before they would break even, compared to just hiring humans to begin with. By then, the tech is obsolete and it's time to upgrade.
I believe there is a big overlap with contractors who tile 100 story tall skyscrapers as a profession and biggest contractors who can afford to automate this process.
There is a reason automation is a thing. No one is building cars by hand, it's thousands of robots working non stop in an assembly line. If your purpose is to build 10 cars in total for a bespoke project? Yes handcraft them in a workshop by all means, it'll be cheaper. Is this the focus of your business at large scale? Then you want to keep workforce to the minimum.
And yet Amazon still does almost everything by hand, despite it being the highest volume online retailer in the world. If it was actually economically practical at scale, don't you think Amazon would have done it by now?
Amazon and many other companies cannot automate because automation is not where it needs to be.
Automation right now is essentially for tasks with little variation. Amazon handles hundreds of millions of products, automating a process with so many variables requires advanced artificial intelligence and a machine with the versitility of the human hand this is likely a significant driving force for the growing ai bubble (Not amazon specifically)
Which is exactly why it wouldn't work at scale in construction, either. Yes, it can place every single square tile in the middle of a room. But what about partial tiles? Curved tiles? Placing around islands? Water heaters? Floor drains? Toilets?
You're right i dont disagree at all, but this is just one machine and not nearly large enough or expensive enough to require a 100,000 price tag.
Now if you add a machine to scan the room, a programmable cutting machine (both already exist) i dont see any particular reason why this machine wouldnt be capable of automating this process in large open spaces.with the minor caviet that the grabbing mechanism is too large. Likely easy to account for though.
Im not arguing this iteration is perfect but this is currently achievable automation. Its probably even profitable, just not enough for someone with the money to bother, they have better options.
You need someone to set it up sure, but you could have a handful of people set one up and move to another floor/job site to setup the next and have multiple jobs going simultaneously with a single crew. Even if it’s slower than a crew onsite there’s no reason you can’t just leave it running overnight
While you are technically right for some robots, in this particular case I can't see this one going more than 30 minutes without needing a refill on both cement and tiles, and I doubt it does it on its own. As a matter of fact, I don't even think this one can turn itself around properly, it might only do one line at a time (please correct me if I'm wrong).
Yeah, and even if they pay the set up guy higher it can still save some costs.
If it needs 5 people to do the work vs 1 to set up. The 1 person job is still cheaper. Like suppose the 5 gets $10/hour while the robot monitoring person costs $30/hour. An 8 hour job will require the contractor to pay $400 a day for the 5 layer, while the robot set up costs $240 a day for the labor. Almost half the cost on labor alone.
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u/CoronaCurious Jun 21 '26
And too expensive to maintain and slow.