Brian Potter's "Construction Physics" blog has a lot of information about past and current efforts to improve construction productivity. "Where are the robotic

Brian Potter's "Construction Physics" blog has a lot of information about past and current efforts to improve construction productivity. "Where are the robotic bricklayers?"[1] is illuminating, but there is much more in the other blog entries. Many of Brian's other essays go into the detail of various aspects. The whole of them taken together make the following points: every construction project has site differences, materials differences, and requires different mix of workers (so group learning/workflow automation is pointless), with the workers doing a vast array of different tasks with bulky, heavy, and low-value materials, each task being a tiny percentage of total building effort and cost, and there are strict safety, performance, and aesthetic requirements on the product (the building). And there are always surprises. These factors incentivize a tightly regulated, single-project contractual system, great conservatism, and little possibility for whole-system construction innovation to take off. Successful construction innovations are for (parts of) a single task, e.g. nail guns replacing hammers for framing, rather than being a whole-system "house printer"which also prints the required permits from the local authorities. Any attempt to replace humans is going to have to deal with all of that. That article was from 2018. Progress in robotics and AI since then has not been on pace to meet the OP's "widespread in 2028" goal. --- The author uses manufacturing as an example of successful replacement of humans by machines and argues by analogy. As an aside, it's not the shiniest one. Agriculture went from employing around 60% of adults before the industrial revolution to well under 2% today, a 30-to-1 ratio. Manufacturing peaked at around a third of the workforce and is now near 10%, so maybe a 4-to-1 ratio. The more important point is that manufacturing automated by rigorously standardisng inputs, factory operation, and products. In each construction project, the site is different, different materials are used because of different climates and different regulations and different customer demands, there are different logistics, and the customer wants a different-looking product. Manufacturing's automation success is not an appropriate analogy. TL;DR: writers need to get up from their desks and go and look at whatever it is that they're writing about. 1. https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/where-are-the-robotic-bricklayers?s=r https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/where-are-the-rob...