7 ms·

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 physica

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.
- orliesaurus 5y ago
  Loved reading this post!
- cudgy 5y ago
  Nice story. Tech is not always an improvement. In fact, the more years I live, the less enamored with tech I’ve become due to many examples like this.
  - cseleborg 5y ago
    Couldn't agree more. The smartphone enabled a few very unique scenarios, like car sharing, and made everything else worse. It didn't use to be the case that you had to enter a PIN code, resist distraction from half a dozen notifications and hope you had got the power management right the night before when you wanted to read the morning news, but now that's the norm, just to give one example.
    - iso1631 5y ago
      I don't have notifications, my phone has a fingerprint reader, and I get the news from the radio which turns on at 7am anyway. It might be the norm for you, but it doesn't have to be. Turn off your phone and charge it in the kitchen.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    Same. I used to be absolutely starry eyed about the endless possibilities of digital tech. Now anytime I see computers getting involved where they previously were not, it's just a cost savings measure resulting in a severely inferior product that is just above the threshold of being unsellable. An example that comes to mind is information and entertainment itself. Humans used to curate content for us to consume, but more and more we're being entertained by machine-curated feeds with low quality content. The endless stream-of-conscious format of infiniscrolls and recommendations and 'related' or 'relevant' content is vastly inferior to carefully human-curated hierarchies of information.
    - deleted 5y ago
mstipetic 5y ago
Since when do we account for people’s feelings when deciding to automate something or not?
IkmoIkmo 5y ago
> 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. Why? At the end of the day there'll be two companies offering to build your wall. Human vs Tech-assisted Human (and eventually, robot). If one is faster, more accurate and cheaper, the buyer will choose it. The other will go out of business. It's not about masons embracing this, it's about clients embracing superior outcomes (quality, price and/or time). Eventually the few masons that make the switch to superior outcomes will push the others out of the market. That is of course assuming tech-assisted/robot will actually be better. At the moment it's not in the vast majority of cases. But granting that assumption, I don't think 'satisfying the human experience of a mason' will go into the equation for long. That's not a value judgement, I think building good human experiences is important. I just don't think in the decision making process it'll matter due to inevitable competition.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Broken_Hippo 5y ago
I don't know. You are trading strange things here: Even if you like doing brickwork, is it worth the toll on your body? I've met a lot of construction workers: I've met fewer that are nearing retirement age that are still working - and generally, when they do work, they use the machines while folks who haven't hurt their back, shoulders, and other bits do the physical work. Not everyone needs mastery of something physical and not everyone needs to get "pride" or other positive feelings from work so long as their work isn't horrible and the hours aren't overly long. And I bet there are plenty of folks that would rather babysit this machine than babysit the machine at the fast food place.
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
From a financial perspective, no one cares if the blue collar laborer has a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. We've automated away plenty of jobs out there with little concern about the devices having to be babysat or how the observers feel.
jameshart 5y ago
> 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. This is like complaining that cars did away with the pleasures of horsemanship, or how laser printers have destroyed the pride engravers derived from their work. The history of technology is full of taking hard tasks that people took years to master and therefore derived status and self respect from, and replacing them with machines. People cope.
HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
I remember around 10-12 years ago my son had a birthday party at our house and one of the children's fathers asked how long we had lived here. We told him and he replied "OK, I was pretty sure this house looked familiar: I built your stone fireplace. You have some boulder retaining walls out back, don't you? I built those too." The pride on his face, finally getting to meet the homeowner and show off his work, was amazing. The cool thing about bricks and rock is that those walls will probably be there 100 years from now.
azernik 5y ago
Construction is an economic activity, not a hobby. We generally do not structure our economic activity for maximum enjoyment on the part of the worker, but for lowest price and best quality to the consumer. To the extent that this translates into catering to the worker, it's by way of the increased efficiency allowing higher wages (though, as recent US experience shows, companies can also grab all the productivity gains for themselves).
- octokatt 5y ago
  Perhaps we should structure life differently, to give more power to the worker, instead of reducing a vocation to an economic formula of parts to be sold.

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.

orliesaurus 5y ago
Loved reading this post!
cudgy 5y ago
Nice story. Tech is not always an improvement. In fact, the more years I live, the less enamored with tech I’ve become due to many examples like this.
- cseleborg 5y ago
  Couldn't agree more. The smartphone enabled a few very unique scenarios, like car sharing, and made everything else worse. It didn't use to be the case that you had to enter a PIN code, resist distraction from half a dozen notifications and hope you had got the power management right the night before when you wanted to read the morning news, but now that's the norm, just to give one example.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    I don't have notifications, my phone has a fingerprint reader, and I get the news from the radio which turns on at 7am anyway. It might be the norm for you, but it doesn't have to be. Turn off your phone and charge it in the kitchen.
- eloisius 5y ago
  Same. I used to be absolutely starry eyed about the endless possibilities of digital tech. Now anytime I see computers getting involved where they previously were not, it's just a cost savings measure resulting in a severely inferior product that is just above the threshold of being unsellable. An example that comes to mind is information and entertainment itself. Humans used to curate content for us to consume, but more and more we're being entertained by machine-curated feeds with low quality content. The endless stream-of-conscious format of infiniscrolls and recommendations and 'related' or 'relevant' content is vastly inferior to carefully human-curated hierarchies of information.
  - deleted 5y ago

mstipetic 5y ago

Since when do we account for people’s feelings when deciding to automate something or not?

IkmoIkmo 5y ago

> 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. Why? At the end of the day there'll be two companies offering to build your wall. Human vs Tech-assisted Human (and eventually, robot). If one is faster, more accurate and cheaper, the buyer will choose it. The other will go out of business. It's not about masons embracing this, it's about clients embracing superior outcomes (quality, price and/or time). Eventually the few masons that make the switch to superior outcomes will push the others out of the market. That is of course assuming tech-assisted/robot will actually be better. At the moment it's not in the vast majority of cases. But granting that assumption, I don't think 'satisfying the human experience of a mason' will go into the equation for long. That's not a value judgement, I think building good human experiences is important. I just don't think in the decision making process it'll matter due to inevitable competition.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Broken_Hippo 5y ago

I don't know. You are trading strange things here: Even if you like doing brickwork, is it worth the toll on your body? I've met a lot of construction workers: I've met fewer that are nearing retirement age that are still working - and generally, when they do work, they use the machines while folks who haven't hurt their back, shoulders, and other bits do the physical work. Not everyone needs mastery of something physical and not everyone needs to get "pride" or other positive feelings from work so long as their work isn't horrible and the hours aren't overly long. And I bet there are plenty of folks that would rather babysit this machine than babysit the machine at the fast food place.

x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago

From a financial perspective, no one cares if the blue collar laborer has a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. We've automated away plenty of jobs out there with little concern about the devices having to be babysat or how the observers feel.

jameshart 5y ago

> 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. This is like complaining that cars did away with the pleasures of horsemanship, or how laser printers have destroyed the pride engravers derived from their work. The history of technology is full of taking hard tasks that people took years to master and therefore derived status and self respect from, and replacing them with machines. People cope.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago

I remember around 10-12 years ago my son had a birthday party at our house and one of the children's fathers asked how long we had lived here. We told him and he replied "OK, I was pretty sure this house looked familiar: I built your stone fireplace. You have some boulder retaining walls out back, don't you? I built those too." The pride on his face, finally getting to meet the homeowner and show off his work, was amazing. The cool thing about bricks and rock is that those walls will probably be there 100 years from now.

azernik 5y ago

Construction is an economic activity, not a hobby. We generally do not structure our economic activity for maximum enjoyment on the part of the worker, but for lowest price and best quality to the consumer. To the extent that this translates into catering to the worker, it's by way of the increased efficiency allowing higher wages (though, as recent US experience shows, companies can also grab all the productivity gains for themselves).

octokatt 5y ago
Perhaps we should structure life differently, to give more power to the worker, instead of reducing a vocation to an economic formula of parts to be sold.