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The value of work is not in the work done; it's in the decisions being made. It's the ability to handle edge cases, to work your way through ambiguity, to "unst

The value of work is not in the work done; it's in the decisions being made. It's the ability to handle edge cases, to work your way through ambiguity, to "unstuck" a stuck situation, and to resolve tricky unforeseen issues. If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the decision making part of the job for humans. This is both economically unviable and largely unpopular. You're not reducing labor costs by much, because you still need humans around. And workers lose control over their job, and have to "work around" the robot's limitations. Instead of being freed up to do more work, they become babysitters of machines that they have to oversee so it doesn't mess up everything. This is why partial robotic systems don't really exist; either it's a nifty tool that speeds up a small repeatable process of your work, or it's building the entire house.

version_five 5y ago
What you're saying resonates for so many new products. I find that most time or labor saving ideas save time on something that is not actually the problem, or address a charicature of the actual workflow. I dont think it means we should give up and stop trying, rather that its critical to test with real users IMO before trying to sign deals on a product that doesn't make sense.
- pvorb 5y ago
  And sometimes the things that are automated were the only thing that was pleasant. It's not true for laying bricks because the heavy lifting makes it unpleasant.
  - version_five 5y ago
    I have never laid brick but I've done a lot of shingled roofs. The "fun" part of shingling is long stretches of full sheets in the middle of the roof. This goes quickly and is rewarding. The less fun, and what occupies the time, is where there is a chimney or a valley or a dormer or some other feature that you need to figure out and cut some flashing for, and custom fit each shingle that butts up against the feature, seal with tar sometimes, etc. I picture a lot of automated solutions focusing on the "in the field" part where the work is easy and rewarding, and glossing over the manual intervention and craftsmanship that is needed for all the nonstandard bits. I don't know about bricklaying though I imagine it has similar characteristics, where a square windowless wall goes very fast, and could be pleasant work, and all the time is spent dealing with windows and the frame not being level and other edge cases.
- coldacid 5y ago
  Not just test! Real users need to be there from the requirements stage.
  - version_five 5y ago
    Yes agreed, sorry I was thinking in terms of a new product, testing the value prop with users, which is probably better stated as requirements gathering.
mavhc 5y ago
Not destroying your body lifting heavy weights for 50 years seems like something people might like. We automated looking after the house after it's been built, no need for people scrubbing floors and clothes any more, freed up 40% of the workforce. My partially automated vacuum cleaner, clothes washer, dish washer, food cooker, water heater, all work well.
- coldacid 5y ago
  >Not destroying your body lifting heavy weights for 50 years seems like something people might like. And that's why the exoskeleton system mentioned in passing in the article is more popular with construction labourers than any of these robots.
  - minikites 5y ago
    Better tools amplify human skills instead of attempting to replace them.
    - dendrite9 5y ago
      This always has seemed like a good goal to have. There is some work where automation makes sense, but I don't think replacing is always the right goal. https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-...
  - imtringued 5y ago
    It does sound like a mason that can lift 5 bricks at a time is more productive than a machine that can lay bricks 5 times faster in a synthetic benchmark.
  - yodelshady 5y ago
    Think I'd put money behind a separate machine, but one that just delivers you the brick at hand height, rather than a continual bend-down/place/pick-up cycle. I would say "Brick Butler" or if a startup... Brcklr, the device is free, but the bricks have DRM and post instagram stories as you lay them.
paxys 5y ago
> If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the decision making part of the job for humans. You are wayyy underselling the importance of convenience tools. Even without working out edge cases you can reduce a workforce of 100 people to 95 robots and 5 supervisors/decision makers.
octokatt 5y ago
I’d add to the list of why partial automation isn’t worth it: it’s more satisfying to build a brick wall than babysit a bricklaying machine. Doing the physical labor is difficult. My father was a bricklayer from ten to fifty, when he finally had to stop working. But he loved showing me the buildings he built. He helped build city government buildings, schools, libraries. The pride he felt, that he’d built something with his hands that would outlast him, kept him going. We don’t need to solve just for the physical actions, but also for the human experience of building and the feeling of mastery. Particularly for physical trades.
- gotts 5y ago
  Reading about your father having such a long career in brick masonry sparked joy in me. Thanks for sharing
- eloisius 5y ago
  My dad was a stair builder his whole career until finally becoming a freelance carpenter after getting laid off. Stairs, like bricks, are probably another implement that us techies use daily with absolutely no appreciation for complexity and skill involved. Spiral staircases are an incredible work of craftsmanship, or at least they were. I used to go to the shop with my dad when I was a kid. They would rig up these big timber structures to wrap handrails and stringers around to form the spiral. He worked out the geometry on paper (or more likely on the timber itself) writing with flat pencils that he sharpened with his pocket knife. You couldn't just mass produce the handrails either. It took time, pinned to the template, for the wood to become permanently warped into a spiral. Years later, I ended up getting a job as a 5-axis CNC operator in the same shop. My dad thought it'd be a suitable job for me because I was good with computers, so he introduced me to the foreman in the strait stairs side of the shop. I was only cutting stair stringers, so it was basically mind-numbing data entry on some crappy Visual Basic app and then running the CNC which frequently got hung and ruined materials. The spiral staircase end of the shop was also different than from what I remembered as a kid. They still had a couple of the old-school spiral staircases in production at any given time, but those were special order. How do they churn out mass produced spiral staircases for tasteless McMansions? They glue a bunch of chunks of wood together and use a CNC to route out the negative space. Of course the grain of the wood doesn't match up like spiral constructed from one plank. The product looks like dog shit. The CNC screws up a non-negligible percent of the time resulting in tons of wasted materials. I and all the CNC operators I talked to loathed the machines we operated. They were all crappy Chinese tech, and it felt like tedious babysitting, not craftsmanship. I'd rather be swinging a hammer than do that job again. I wonder how the finances even come out ahead. Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? My dad is a curmudgeon about tech in general, but it's not hard to see why. He was a master craftsman, and because "the industry" was headed in another direction, he was eventually replaced by a bunch of button pushers that can produce a low-quality simulacrum the same thing at a fraction of the cost.
strogonoff 5y ago
Automating any repeated sequence of actions is a valid concept that doesn’t need to be rebranded as “convenience tooling”. If decision-making is required, that sounds more like an autonomy requirement to me. Autonomy is a concept distinct from automation, and not mutually exclusive.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> This is both economically unviable and largely unpopular. And yet, you can make billions of dollars on it. This is literally the modus operandi of modern tech companies like Google and Amazon. Automate the main workflow, silently ignore exceptions, and if anyone complains about problems (or your non-existent customer support), just wave your hands in the air and mumble something about "scale being hard".
- yholio 5y ago
  If you can automate 80% of the jobs your customers require, you can make a billion dollars and send the other 20% potential customers to talk to Mailer Daemon. If you automate 80% of every job and leave 20% to every customer, you have no customers.
- SlapperKoala 5y ago
  If you have bugs in an app or website people get mildly annoyed, if you have bugs in a bricklayer a building can fall down. The cost benefit calculation is very different
NonContro 5y ago
I'm planning to build a house, and it has surprised me that standardised house plans are not readily available online - particularly for European weather conditions - the emphasis is instead on custom floorplans. Creating new designs millions of times over seems like an obvious inefficiency.
- lazide 5y ago
  People who want a house built want to build their house. Cookie cutter is for subdivisions and apartments, which those folks are often trying to escape.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Prefab houses are a thing and they aren't exactly rare. People escaping apartments usually complain about neighbors or lack of a garden, not about the floor plan.
    - lazide 5y ago
      They are pretty rare, at least here in the US, and widely seen as undesirable or 2nd-3rd tier at best.
      - inglor_cz 5y ago
        Where I live, they aren't that rare. People like the fact that they can be built fast.
        lazide 5y ago
        Near as I can tell from Googling around, they make up 2-6% if the US housing stock.
        inglor_cz 5y ago
        This is one of the corporations that has been popular in my country for the last 10 years or so: https://www.rdrymarov.cz/en/all-about-building https://www.rdrymarov.cz/en/all-about-building I do not know the percentage of the housing stock either, but housing stock here is very conservative. Many people still live in 100+ year old houses. New houses are being built, but the turnover rate is probably less than 1 per cent of all units a year right now, due to the vast bureaucracy. But among the newly built houses, I see quite a lot of prefabricated houses out of wood. And the process of building them is rather quick. Once the lot is ready, a semi and a crane arrive and the house just grows in front of your eyes. Brick houses take a lot longer to build.
mbesto 5y ago
> This is why partial robotic systems don't really exist; either it's a nifty tool that speeds up a small repeatable process of your work, or it's building the entire house. I think I understand your overall point, but what you said isn't exactly true. Isn't "speed up a repeatable process" essentially a partial robotic system? Just look at a modern car manufacturing plant - it's essentially one big chain of robotics with human overseers. There aren't that many exceptions to car manufacturing once the set car variants are establish (LX, CX, blah blah model variants). I would consider that whole system a "partial robotic system".
- atoav 5y ago
  Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car. Sometimes you have to lay down every row of bricks differently with a ton of unplanned (or unplannable) things to account for, because the electrician might work while you lay your brick etc. Not that you cannot automate whole houses and sell them off the shelve for cheap (see prefabs), it just isn't something that could be done at a site where your brickbot 2000 has to share the job both with the workers whose jobs it replaces and with people from non-brickbot-2000-educated workers from different companies.
  - goguy 5y ago
    Just wait for electrobot 2000 and the problem is resolved :)
  - brnt 5y ago
    > Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car. But aren't many of them? May be country specific, but in the one I currently reside there are tons of neighbourhoods that were built at once, 1000 homes+. In the US I've seen areas like that too. I can easily imagine a robot puts down the basics, and the individual tweaking is done later by hand.
    - VBprogrammer 5y ago
      For me this feels like robotics operating at the wrong layer of abstraction. It's like those old tomorrow's world programs where they show the robotic helper diligently sweeping the floor with a grass broom. In car manufacturing robots are used to bolt and weld together stamped metal panels, this feels more like someone designing a robot which would be given a flat sheet of metal and using hammer and dollies forming the complete panel to be attached to the car. In short, if we ever see a major change to automate housing construction I expect it will also come along with significant changes in construction methods.
babesh 5y ago
> The value of work is not in the work done; it's in the decisions being made. It's the ability to handle edge cases, to work your way through ambiguity, to "unstuck" a stuck situation, and to resolve tricky unforeseen issues. The first part describes programming perfectly.
tragomaskhalos 5y ago
Exactly. If you need an expert to constantly babysit the machine then you may as well dispense with the machine and have the expert build the wall themselves.
- onion2k 5y ago
  That's only true if the machine builds walls at the same speed as a person and the person can only babysit one machine at a time. If the machine is 10 times faster, or the person can babysit 10 machines, then you've reduced your labor costs by 90% or your output by 1000%.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
This is just an example of not enough software has been written to handle all the edge cases, and/or not enough has been done to the field to turn it into a factory (groundworks not level etc)
phreeza 5y ago
> If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything. Sounds to me like this criticism could have been made of the dishwasher and washing machine, too. I suppose what matters is the ratio of edge cases to regular cases.
coldtea 5y ago
>If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the decision making part of the job for humans. Which is still automation. Robots in factories making cars still leave most of the "decision making part of the job for humans". See, the size of the "decision making part of the job" matters...
- markdown 5y ago
  Robots in factories can only do one job, building the same car over and over again.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Which is neither here nor there. It's still automation (which, as a concept, doesn't require being able to do multiple jobs, or even to do a single job from start to completion). A mechanical system that frees a human from having to do do part of a job is already automation, and can still save tons of time and worker costs/effort. E.g. a system that automatically assembles 95% of a car door, and a human just has to come in at the end and attach some hard to automate part, is still better than the human having to assemble to whole door.
    - markdown 5y ago
      Have you ever worked in construction?
      - coldtea 5y ago
        Again, a non sequitur. Is there a point here?
        markdown 5y ago
        The point is that it's easy to, from a distance, think that something is just like another thing. Without experience in a particular domain, you really don't know how things work. No two walls are alike.
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IanSanders 5y ago
That somehow hit home regarding software development (and technology in general). Brick laying is a metaphor for something else
j7ake 5y ago
This is a well written point. In our interactions with robots, I feel the future valuable work will come from work where humans have the agency and direction, while robot’s functions have been specifically tailored to augment the specific human’s skills or relieve the human of certain repetitive parts of the process.
moss2 5y ago
By that logic, power tools don't exist.
rubenbe 5y ago
Also, adding complex robots adds the need for more qualified (hence more expensive) personnel. It's better to have only have to recruit and pay "bricklayer"-profile instead of the rare "can fix complex robots and is a bricklayer"-profile.
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MillenialMan 5y ago
I don't really understand this. When I see a small house being built, it will have four or five builders on-site at all times, mostly doing labour (and they're, frankly, extremely slow. It will take months to lay the bricks). If you still need the decisions, can't you cut that down to one, or maybe two? That strikes me as a dramatic reduction in labour cost.
- necovek 5y ago
  Multi-story buildings take only a few days of brick-laying by 4-5 people. Before you can lay the bricks though, you need a firm foundation to carry those bricks, including those concrete floors which take a while to dry up. There is still a bunch of work in construction that can happen while brick laying happens (plumbing and electrical installations in the floor, pillars to carry roof/next floor, ...) and there is usually a mandated licensed professional to oversee the construction (or few, one for safety, one for quality and ensuring the project is actually followed). And you can also start doing things as parts of walls get completed (installing windows, insulation, more electrical installations). After the building is put under a roof, that's when the real work begins :), though that's even easier to parallelize. Brick laying is literally one of the quickest parts and most effective parts of making a building look like a building, but it's nowhere near the most costly thing.
  - MillenialMan 5y ago
    There's a build happening at the end of my road at the moment, I can see how this maps onto that. Thanks - this explains a lot.
  - himinlomax 5y ago
    > including those concrete floors which take a while to dry up. FWIW, the slower concrete dries, the stronger it gets. To the point where critical concrete buildings like bridges are kept moist for days or even weeks with hoses and wet blankets.
LightG 5y ago
Sounds like FSD.
vbezhenar 5y ago
Where I live, there's often master bricker (who does all the skilled work) and dumb labour assistants who are doing dumb work like moving bricks, mix the cement and so on which does not require skill. Master gets all money and assistant gets some low payment (something like $1-$2/hour). I think that assistant work could easily be automated. But probably in my country low wages would make it economically unviable. But in US something like boston dynamics robot dog might actually be viable for such dumb labour I guess.
- gridspy 5y ago
  The odd thing about "dumb labor" is that many of those tasks are only easy for humans. Dealing in a messy world of human-to-human interfaces and cluttered unstructured worksites is generally hard for robots. The dog for instance might be able to drag a load, but would probably need help refilling it.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    I expect dog to have a robotic hand and eyes, so it could refill himself, move bricks to a target location and put them onto the top of the wall, use stairs and so on. Of course it should not be a one-trick pony, the whole point is in something universal which could easily configured to perform different tasks.
Chris2048 5y ago
> economically unviable > You're not reducing labor costs by much You could make the same argument wrt supermarket self checkout. They still need a worker to manage the machines. Yet you need fewer human workers overall, so productivity still increases per-worker at the right scale. Allow the tech to develop and they may become more viable. arguing "you still need humans" seems to me to be a straw-man; there no rule that this is useless so long as humans are still involved - if productivity increases, that's enough. > you're building a convenience tool Which seems fine to me. Removing the majority of the "labour" part of the job removes the most unskilled part that humans are least appropriate for (repetitive uncreative/boring work) and freeing them up for the "hard/creative decisions" aspect that humans are better at. > largely unpopular > workers lose control over their job This might be unpopular among workers; not sure, other worker might prefer it. At least, if this requires fewer workers to lay brick, either the demand is such that it can still meet worker supply, or workers suffer (from lower wages or unemployment). But this is irrelevant - barring union influence, it's not the workers that get to decide. If the job is to "babysit machines" you either refuse the job, or you don't - so long as people take the job, they will grow.
d--b 5y ago
The construction industry is full of these "convenience" tools. If you had a working human-sized robot that could just lay some bricks, pretty sure everyone would use it, even if it didn't do the angles or whatever. The problem must be somewhere else: setup time is too long, too many constrains or whatever. It's not that the edge cases are not handled, it's that the main case is not handled well...
- sandworm101 5y ago
  >> robot that could just lay some bricks How often does that actually come up in modern construction? We don't really do brick buildings anymore. Bricks are generally only a façade, a decoration, rather than the structure of a building. They have to look great because that is now their job. They have to fit between other decorative features and adapt to curves and non-perfect angles. Previous edge cases are now a daily norm. I say that the robot brick machine is already common. Those trucks that pump concrete into forms are the automated brick layers. This is an important point for all robotics. It is always very hard to build a robot that can directly replace a human. The way forward is to build a robot that gets the job done using different means. The human "dishwasher" was replaced by a machine that does the same basic task but via very different means. The concrete pumping robot now creates solid walls faster than any team could ever lay bricks.
  - MaxikCZ 5y ago
    I do not know where you live, but I can speak for Czech republic (mid Europe): basically all houses are made by layling bricks. Its not "the" small brick, it typically range 10-50 cm in depth, which is its shortest dimension. Sure, theres ytong and such, but that too is essentially a big brick. Module or wood houses are absolute minority here.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      In north american, hand-laid bricks are just to expensive. It is far cheaper to build wooden forms and fill them with concrete. Bricks are then stacked as non-structural decoration on the outside of the concrete or wood walls.
JacobDotVI 5y ago
Would you not consider a power drill a "partial robotic system"? Is this a situation where once something is useful it switches from being a "robot" to just a "power tool" and so "robots" are a kind of endless frontier?
raptor99 5y ago
I was confused at first; I thought you were talking about self driving vehicles, or cooking robots, or practically any "automation" that has to interface with the chaotic, random, and analog, real world. Hmm.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
I build robotic cells, specifically industrial manufacturing automation. They are definitely designed for the main workflow; they handle the most common exceptions gracefully but when something rare happens they just throw a fault back to the operator. The response from users (operators, engineers, customers) is overwhelmingly positive. Quality of parts increases, quantity of parts increases, cost of operations decrease, quality of life seems to increase for all involved. My mantra is "People are bad at being robots. Robots are bad at being people." Just yesterday, I worked on a cell that's automated the placing of small seals in a plastic assembly. For the past 8 years, for 12 shifts per week, there's been a person sitting at a dial table that indexes every 2.5 seconds. They were responsible for placing a tiny part in a magazine with a buffer of about 20 parts, a really fast operator could work ahead and have 30 seconds to stand up and shake their wrists out or take a drink, and then sit back down to place parts. Now, a robot pours the seals out and picks them up automatically; there's still an operator around monitoring stuff like the amount of talc powder on the seals, the quantity of parts in all the hoppers, running pressure tests every couple thousand parts, adjusting speeds and pressures of the multitude of actuators, and generally optimizing the cell. They can use their human analytical and decision-making work because they're not tied down clumsily using their fingers to grab a seal every 2.5 seconds; the robot does that mechanical function without complaint. The robot cannot refill hoppers, it cannot sense when new parts are contaminated with moisture that won't feed through the machine, or when a nipper is getting dull; outfitting it with sensors and algorithms to attempt those more complex processes would not be a productive endeavor. People use tools because tools are useful. Scope and adjustability are critical; when a tool takes over the entire process and gets in the way, that's a bad thing, but a good tool is far better than no tool at all.
- spyckie2 5y ago
  I didn't expect this comment to get this much discussion, I should have been clearer. In the context of automation, the "robotic revolution" has already happened between the 4 industrial revolutions - basically, robots exist en masse already, we just don't call them robots. The majority of manufacturing and processing is already hyper optimized to only needing a few overseers to make sure the machines are running smoothly. When talking about the automation revolution, I think it's important to make the distinction between robotic tooling and autonomous robotic systems, even though they evolve from each other. The difference is when humans interface and at what abstraction humans can operate it on. Generally, tooling is constrained to an individual's output. Robotic augmentation is in it's own category as well (human activities being enhanced by machinery). Tooling is extremely useful, still has a lot of future potential and I don't mean to undermine work on new tooling. Just - usually when we look at robots, especially with the buzz around deep learning, we set the bar for problem solving at the level of autonomous construction because we assume, sometimes incorrectly, that optimizing our current tooling yields little efficiency benefits relative to the former.
samstave 5y ago
Why does the robot have to handle all the "edge cases"??? That seems really stupid to think that the robot must be able to build the whole thing or it's useless. Just have robots put up large, long, straight walls. Have a separate one for curves, or a special one that only handles corners etc... Or have a robot that just preps the brick with correct amount mortar and hands the brick to the human for placement, maybe there is an aligning contraption (doesn't have to be a robot)...
rualca 5y ago
> If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the decision making part of the job for humans. The key part is that, much like what humanity got from washing machines, automating some parts of the process is enough to have substantial savings in both cost and turnaround time, which also reflects in cost. > If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the decision making part of the job for humans. I'm not sure this "all or nothing" train of thought makes sense. Shipping containers were a terribly simple solution that covered only a very specific aspect of a logistic chain but it was enough to revolutionize international trade. Washing machines only focus on one specific task but they revolutionize economical and even social aspects of society. Heck, a crane only lifts weights up or down but it radically simplifies operations to the point of being indispensable. Why should the value added by a brick-laying robot be any different?

version_five 5y ago

What you're saying resonates for so many new products. I find that most time or labor saving ideas save time on something that is not actually the problem, or address a charicature of the actual workflow. I dont think it means we should give up and stop trying, rather that its critical to test with real users IMO before trying to sign deals on a product that doesn't make sense.

pvorb 5y ago
And sometimes the things that are automated were the only thing that was pleasant. It's not true for laying bricks because the heavy lifting makes it unpleasant.
- version_five 5y ago
  I have never laid brick but I've done a lot of shingled roofs. The "fun" part of shingling is long stretches of full sheets in the middle of the roof. This goes quickly and is rewarding. The less fun, and what occupies the time, is where there is a chimney or a valley or a dormer or some other feature that you need to figure out and cut some flashing for, and custom fit each shingle that butts up against the feature, seal with tar sometimes, etc. I picture a lot of automated solutions focusing on the "in the field" part where the work is easy and rewarding, and glossing over the manual intervention and craftsmanship that is needed for all the nonstandard bits. I don't know about bricklaying though I imagine it has similar characteristics, where a square windowless wall goes very fast, and could be pleasant work, and all the time is spent dealing with windows and the frame not being level and other edge cases.
coldacid 5y ago
Not just test! Real users need to be there from the requirements stage.
- version_five 5y ago
  Yes agreed, sorry I was thinking in terms of a new product, testing the value prop with users, which is probably better stated as requirements gathering.

mavhc 5y ago

Not destroying your body lifting heavy weights for 50 years seems like something people might like. We automated looking after the house after it's been built, no need for people scrubbing floors and clothes any more, freed up 40% of the workforce. My partially automated vacuum cleaner, clothes washer, dish washer, food cooker, water heater, all work well.

coldacid 5y ago
>Not destroying your body lifting heavy weights for 50 years seems like something people might like. And that's why the exoskeleton system mentioned in passing in the article is more popular with construction labourers than any of these robots.
- minikites 5y ago
  Better tools amplify human skills instead of attempting to replace them.
  - dendrite9 5y ago
    This always has seemed like a good goal to have. There is some work where automation makes sense, but I don't think replacing is always the right goal. https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-...
- imtringued 5y ago
  It does sound like a mason that can lift 5 bricks at a time is more productive than a machine that can lay bricks 5 times faster in a synthetic benchmark.
- yodelshady 5y ago
  Think I'd put money behind a separate machine, but one that just delivers you the brick at hand height, rather than a continual bend-down/place/pick-up cycle. I would say "Brick Butler" or if a startup... Brcklr, the device is free, but the bricks have DRM and post instagram stories as you lay them.

paxys 5y ago

octokatt 5y ago

I’d add to the list of why partial automation isn’t worth it: it’s more satisfying to build a brick wall than babysit a bricklaying machine. Doing the physical labor is difficult. My father was a bricklayer from ten to fifty, when he finally had to stop working. But he loved showing me the buildings he built. He helped build city government buildings, schools, libraries. The pride he felt, that he’d built something with his hands that would outlast him, kept him going. We don’t need to solve just for the physical actions, but also for the human experience of building and the feeling of mastery. Particularly for physical trades.

gotts 5y ago
Reading about your father having such a long career in brick masonry sparked joy in me. Thanks for sharing
eloisius 5y ago
My dad was a stair builder his whole career until finally becoming a freelance carpenter after getting laid off. Stairs, like bricks, are probably another implement that us techies use daily with absolutely no appreciation for complexity and skill involved. Spiral staircases are an incredible work of craftsmanship, or at least they were. I used to go to the shop with my dad when I was a kid. They would rig up these big timber structures to wrap handrails and stringers around to form the spiral. He worked out the geometry on paper (or more likely on the timber itself) writing with flat pencils that he sharpened with his pocket knife. You couldn't just mass produce the handrails either. It took time, pinned to the template, for the wood to become permanently warped into a spiral. Years later, I ended up getting a job as a 5-axis CNC operator in the same shop. My dad thought it'd be a suitable job for me because I was good with computers, so he introduced me to the foreman in the strait stairs side of the shop. I was only cutting stair stringers, so it was basically mind-numbing data entry on some crappy Visual Basic app and then running the CNC which frequently got hung and ruined materials. The spiral staircase end of the shop was also different than from what I remembered as a kid. They still had a couple of the old-school spiral staircases in production at any given time, but those were special order. How do they churn out mass produced spiral staircases for tasteless McMansions? They glue a bunch of chunks of wood together and use a CNC to route out the negative space. Of course the grain of the wood doesn't match up like spiral constructed from one plank. The product looks like dog shit. The CNC screws up a non-negligible percent of the time resulting in tons of wasted materials. I and all the CNC operators I talked to loathed the machines we operated. They were all crappy Chinese tech, and it felt like tedious babysitting, not craftsmanship. I'd rather be swinging a hammer than do that job again. I wonder how the finances even come out ahead. Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? My dad is a curmudgeon about tech in general, but it's not hard to see why. He was a master craftsman, and because "the industry" was headed in another direction, he was eventually replaced by a bunch of button pushers that can produce a low-quality simulacrum the same thing at a fraction of the cost.

strogonoff 5y ago

Automating any repeated sequence of actions is a valid concept that doesn’t need to be rebranded as “convenience tooling”. If decision-making is required, that sounds more like an autonomy requirement to me. Autonomy is a concept distinct from automation, and not mutually exclusive.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

> This is both economically unviable and largely unpopular. And yet, you can make billions of dollars on it. This is literally the modus operandi of modern tech companies like Google and Amazon. Automate the main workflow, silently ignore exceptions, and if anyone complains about problems (or your non-existent customer support), just wave your hands in the air and mumble something about "scale being hard".

yholio 5y ago
If you can automate 80% of the jobs your customers require, you can make a billion dollars and send the other 20% potential customers to talk to Mailer Daemon. If you automate 80% of every job and leave 20% to every customer, you have no customers.
SlapperKoala 5y ago
If you have bugs in an app or website people get mildly annoyed, if you have bugs in a bricklayer a building can fall down. The cost benefit calculation is very different

NonContro 5y ago

I'm planning to build a house, and it has surprised me that standardised house plans are not readily available online - particularly for European weather conditions - the emphasis is instead on custom floorplans. Creating new designs millions of times over seems like an obvious inefficiency.

lazide 5y ago
People who want a house built want to build their house. Cookie cutter is for subdivisions and apartments, which those folks are often trying to escape.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Prefab houses are a thing and they aren't exactly rare. People escaping apartments usually complain about neighbors or lack of a garden, not about the floor plan.
  - lazide 5y ago
    They are pretty rare, at least here in the US, and widely seen as undesirable or 2nd-3rd tier at best.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      Where I live, they aren't that rare. People like the fact that they can be built fast.
      - lazide 5y ago
        Near as I can tell from Googling around, they make up 2-6% if the US housing stock.
        inglor_cz 5y ago
        This is one of the corporations that has been popular in my country for the last 10 years or so: https://www.rdrymarov.cz/en/all-about-building https://www.rdrymarov.cz/en/all-about-building I do not know the percentage of the housing stock either, but housing stock here is very conservative. Many people still live in 100+ year old houses. New houses are being built, but the turnover rate is probably less than 1 per cent of all units a year right now, due to the vast bureaucracy. But among the newly built houses, I see quite a lot of prefabricated houses out of wood. And the process of building them is rather quick. Once the lot is ready, a semi and a crane arrive and the house just grows in front of your eyes. Brick houses take a lot longer to build.

mbesto 5y ago

> This is why partial robotic systems don't really exist; either it's a nifty tool that speeds up a small repeatable process of your work, or it's building the entire house. I think I understand your overall point, but what you said isn't exactly true. Isn't "speed up a repeatable process" essentially a partial robotic system? Just look at a modern car manufacturing plant - it's essentially one big chain of robotics with human overseers. There aren't that many exceptions to car manufacturing once the set car variants are establish (LX, CX, blah blah model variants). I would consider that whole system a "partial robotic system".

atoav 5y ago
Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car. Sometimes you have to lay down every row of bricks differently with a ton of unplanned (or unplannable) things to account for, because the electrician might work while you lay your brick etc. Not that you cannot automate whole houses and sell them off the shelve for cheap (see prefabs), it just isn't something that could be done at a site where your brickbot 2000 has to share the job both with the workers whose jobs it replaces and with people from non-brickbot-2000-educated workers from different companies.
- goguy 5y ago
  Just wait for electrobot 2000 and the problem is resolved :)
- brnt 5y ago
  > Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car. But aren't many of them? May be country specific, but in the one I currently reside there are tons of neighbourhoods that were built at once, 1000 homes+. In the US I've seen areas like that too. I can easily imagine a robot puts down the basics, and the individual tweaking is done later by hand.
  - VBprogrammer 5y ago
    For me this feels like robotics operating at the wrong layer of abstraction. It's like those old tomorrow's world programs where they show the robotic helper diligently sweeping the floor with a grass broom. In car manufacturing robots are used to bolt and weld together stamped metal panels, this feels more like someone designing a robot which would be given a flat sheet of metal and using hammer and dollies forming the complete panel to be attached to the car. In short, if we ever see a major change to automate housing construction I expect it will also come along with significant changes in construction methods.

babesh 5y ago

> The value of work is not in the work done; it's in the decisions being made. It's the ability to handle edge cases, to work your way through ambiguity, to "unstuck" a stuck situation, and to resolve tricky unforeseen issues. The first part describes programming perfectly.

tragomaskhalos 5y ago

Exactly. If you need an expert to constantly babysit the machine then you may as well dispense with the machine and have the expert build the wall themselves.

onion2k 5y ago
That's only true if the machine builds walls at the same speed as a person and the person can only babysit one machine at a time. If the machine is 10 times faster, or the person can babysit 10 machines, then you've reduced your labor costs by 90% or your output by 1000%.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

This is just an example of not enough software has been written to handle all the edge cases, and/or not enough has been done to the field to turn it into a factory (groundworks not level etc)

phreeza 5y ago

> If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything. Sounds to me like this criticism could have been made of the dishwasher and washing machine, too. I suppose what matters is the ratio of edge cases to regular cases.

coldtea 5y ago

markdown 5y ago
Robots in factories can only do one job, building the same car over and over again.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Which is neither here nor there. It's still automation (which, as a concept, doesn't require being able to do multiple jobs, or even to do a single job from start to completion). A mechanical system that frees a human from having to do do part of a job is already automation, and can still save tons of time and worker costs/effort. E.g. a system that automatically assembles 95% of a car door, and a human just has to come in at the end and attach some hard to automate part, is still better than the human having to assemble to whole door.
  - markdown 5y ago
    Have you ever worked in construction?
    - coldtea 5y ago
      Again, a non sequitur. Is there a point here?
      - markdown 5y ago
        The point is that it's easy to, from a distance, think that something is just like another thing. Without experience in a particular domain, you really don't know how things work. No two walls are alike.

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IanSanders 5y ago

That somehow hit home regarding software development (and technology in general). Brick laying is a metaphor for something else

j7ake 5y ago

This is a well written point. In our interactions with robots, I feel the future valuable work will come from work where humans have the agency and direction, while robot’s functions have been specifically tailored to augment the specific human’s skills or relieve the human of certain repetitive parts of the process.

moss2 5y ago

By that logic, power tools don't exist.

rubenbe 5y ago

Also, adding complex robots adds the need for more qualified (hence more expensive) personnel. It's better to have only have to recruit and pay "bricklayer"-profile instead of the rare "can fix complex robots and is a bricklayer"-profile.

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MillenialMan 5y ago

I don't really understand this. When I see a small house being built, it will have four or five builders on-site at all times, mostly doing labour (and they're, frankly, extremely slow. It will take months to lay the bricks). If you still need the decisions, can't you cut that down to one, or maybe two? That strikes me as a dramatic reduction in labour cost.

necovek 5y ago
Multi-story buildings take only a few days of brick-laying by 4-5 people. Before you can lay the bricks though, you need a firm foundation to carry those bricks, including those concrete floors which take a while to dry up. There is still a bunch of work in construction that can happen while brick laying happens (plumbing and electrical installations in the floor, pillars to carry roof/next floor, ...) and there is usually a mandated licensed professional to oversee the construction (or few, one for safety, one for quality and ensuring the project is actually followed). And you can also start doing things as parts of walls get completed (installing windows, insulation, more electrical installations). After the building is put under a roof, that's when the real work begins :), though that's even easier to parallelize. Brick laying is literally one of the quickest parts and most effective parts of making a building look like a building, but it's nowhere near the most costly thing.
- MillenialMan 5y ago
  There's a build happening at the end of my road at the moment, I can see how this maps onto that. Thanks - this explains a lot.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  > including those concrete floors which take a while to dry up. FWIW, the slower concrete dries, the stronger it gets. To the point where critical concrete buildings like bridges are kept moist for days or even weeks with hoses and wet blankets.

LightG 5y ago

Sounds like FSD.

vbezhenar 5y ago

Where I live, there's often master bricker (who does all the skilled work) and dumb labour assistants who are doing dumb work like moving bricks, mix the cement and so on which does not require skill. Master gets all money and assistant gets some low payment (something like $1-$2/hour). I think that assistant work could easily be automated. But probably in my country low wages would make it economically unviable. But in US something like boston dynamics robot dog might actually be viable for such dumb labour I guess.

gridspy 5y ago
The odd thing about "dumb labor" is that many of those tasks are only easy for humans. Dealing in a messy world of human-to-human interfaces and cluttered unstructured worksites is generally hard for robots. The dog for instance might be able to drag a load, but would probably need help refilling it.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  I expect dog to have a robotic hand and eyes, so it could refill himself, move bricks to a target location and put them onto the top of the wall, use stairs and so on. Of course it should not be a one-trick pony, the whole point is in something universal which could easily configured to perform different tasks.

Chris2048 5y ago

> economically unviable > You're not reducing labor costs by much You could make the same argument wrt supermarket self checkout. They still need a worker to manage the machines. Yet you need fewer human workers overall, so productivity still increases per-worker at the right scale. Allow the tech to develop and they may become more viable. arguing "you still need humans" seems to me to be a straw-man; there no rule that this is useless so long as humans are still involved - if productivity increases, that's enough. > you're building a convenience tool Which seems fine to me. Removing the majority of the "labour" part of the job removes the most unskilled part that humans are least appropriate for (repetitive uncreative/boring work) and freeing them up for the "hard/creative decisions" aspect that humans are better at. > largely unpopular > workers lose control over their job This might be unpopular among workers; not sure, other worker might prefer it. At least, if this requires fewer workers to lay brick, either the demand is such that it can still meet worker supply, or workers suffer (from lower wages or unemployment). But this is irrelevant - barring union influence, it's not the workers that get to decide. If the job is to "babysit machines" you either refuse the job, or you don't - so long as people take the job, they will grow.

d--b 5y ago

The construction industry is full of these "convenience" tools. If you had a working human-sized robot that could just lay some bricks, pretty sure everyone would use it, even if it didn't do the angles or whatever. The problem must be somewhere else: setup time is too long, too many constrains or whatever. It's not that the edge cases are not handled, it's that the main case is not handled well...

sandworm101 5y ago
>> robot that could just lay some bricks How often does that actually come up in modern construction? We don't really do brick buildings anymore. Bricks are generally only a façade, a decoration, rather than the structure of a building. They have to look great because that is now their job. They have to fit between other decorative features and adapt to curves and non-perfect angles. Previous edge cases are now a daily norm. I say that the robot brick machine is already common. Those trucks that pump concrete into forms are the automated brick layers. This is an important point for all robotics. It is always very hard to build a robot that can directly replace a human. The way forward is to build a robot that gets the job done using different means. The human "dishwasher" was replaced by a machine that does the same basic task but via very different means. The concrete pumping robot now creates solid walls faster than any team could ever lay bricks.
- MaxikCZ 5y ago
  I do not know where you live, but I can speak for Czech republic (mid Europe): basically all houses are made by layling bricks. Its not "the" small brick, it typically range 10-50 cm in depth, which is its shortest dimension. Sure, theres ytong and such, but that too is essentially a big brick. Module or wood houses are absolute minority here.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    In north american, hand-laid bricks are just to expensive. It is far cheaper to build wooden forms and fill them with concrete. Bricks are then stacked as non-structural decoration on the outside of the concrete or wood walls.

JacobDotVI 5y ago

Would you not consider a power drill a "partial robotic system"? Is this a situation where once something is useful it switches from being a "robot" to just a "power tool" and so "robots" are a kind of endless frontier?

raptor99 5y ago

I was confused at first; I thought you were talking about self driving vehicles, or cooking robots, or practically any "automation" that has to interface with the chaotic, random, and analog, real world. Hmm.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

I build robotic cells, specifically industrial manufacturing automation. They are definitely designed for the main workflow; they handle the most common exceptions gracefully but when something rare happens they just throw a fault back to the operator. The response from users (operators, engineers, customers) is overwhelmingly positive. Quality of parts increases, quantity of parts increases, cost of operations decrease, quality of life seems to increase for all involved. My mantra is "People are bad at being robots. Robots are bad at being people." Just yesterday, I worked on a cell that's automated the placing of small seals in a plastic assembly. For the past 8 years, for 12 shifts per week, there's been a person sitting at a dial table that indexes every 2.5 seconds. They were responsible for placing a tiny part in a magazine with a buffer of about 20 parts, a really fast operator could work ahead and have 30 seconds to stand up and shake their wrists out or take a drink, and then sit back down to place parts. Now, a robot pours the seals out and picks them up automatically; there's still an operator around monitoring stuff like the amount of talc powder on the seals, the quantity of parts in all the hoppers, running pressure tests every couple thousand parts, adjusting speeds and pressures of the multitude of actuators, and generally optimizing the cell. They can use their human analytical and decision-making work because they're not tied down clumsily using their fingers to grab a seal every 2.5 seconds; the robot does that mechanical function without complaint. The robot cannot refill hoppers, it cannot sense when new parts are contaminated with moisture that won't feed through the machine, or when a nipper is getting dull; outfitting it with sensors and algorithms to attempt those more complex processes would not be a productive endeavor. People use tools because tools are useful. Scope and adjustability are critical; when a tool takes over the entire process and gets in the way, that's a bad thing, but a good tool is far better than no tool at all.

spyckie2 5y ago
I didn't expect this comment to get this much discussion, I should have been clearer. In the context of automation, the "robotic revolution" has already happened between the 4 industrial revolutions - basically, robots exist en masse already, we just don't call them robots. The majority of manufacturing and processing is already hyper optimized to only needing a few overseers to make sure the machines are running smoothly. When talking about the automation revolution, I think it's important to make the distinction between robotic tooling and autonomous robotic systems, even though they evolve from each other. The difference is when humans interface and at what abstraction humans can operate it on. Generally, tooling is constrained to an individual's output. Robotic augmentation is in it's own category as well (human activities being enhanced by machinery). Tooling is extremely useful, still has a lot of future potential and I don't mean to undermine work on new tooling. Just - usually when we look at robots, especially with the buzz around deep learning, we set the bar for problem solving at the level of autonomous construction because we assume, sometimes incorrectly, that optimizing our current tooling yields little efficiency benefits relative to the former.

samstave 5y ago

Why does the robot have to handle all the "edge cases"??? That seems really stupid to think that the robot must be able to build the whole thing or it's useless. Just have robots put up large, long, straight walls. Have a separate one for curves, or a special one that only handles corners etc... Or have a robot that just preps the brick with correct amount mortar and hands the brick to the human for placement, maybe there is an aligning contraption (doesn't have to be a robot)...

rualca 5y ago

> If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the decision making part of the job for humans. The key part is that, much like what humanity got from washing machines, automating some parts of the process is enough to have substantial savings in both cost and turnaround time, which also reflects in cost. > If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the decision making part of the job for humans. I'm not sure this "all or nothing" train of thought makes sense. Shipping containers were a terribly simple solution that covered only a very specific aspect of a logistic chain but it was enough to revolutionize international trade. Washing machines only focus on one specific task but they revolutionize economical and even social aspects of society. Heck, a crane only lifts weights up or down but it radically simplifies operations to the point of being indispensable. Why should the value added by a brick-laying robot be any different?