5 ms·

Let’s take city infrastructure or parks. There is a ton of concrete projects. Enclosure fencing instead of wood panels. Garages…vertical parking spaces..stadi

Let’s take city infrastructure or parks. There is a ton of concrete projects. Enclosure fencing instead of wood panels. Garages…vertical parking spaces..stadiums..steps/stairs etc.

aristofun 4y ago
Yes, but did you analyze the costs? I wonder where’s the profit here
- jelliclesfarm 4y ago
  This reminds me of what I hear in small scale Ag all the time when a need for agtech is presented. Of course, exploitation of dirty and repetitive manual labour is going to be cheaper. Of course, burning through natural resources to keep jobs is always going to be cheaper than creating systems that don’t go obsolete or making sure we spend money to renew resources. At this point in our civilization, we have to ask … what IS the point of new technology? Is it to better improve our world and make leaps? Or use technology to support an artificial construct called ‘money’ that accumulates in few hands. Time to free technology. It should work FOR us. Instead we are gaslit into believing that it is something that we serve. When we consider profit motive for everything, tech becomes a collar that makes workers out of almost all of us.
  - aristofun 4y ago
    I am all in. But the market doesn't care about these sentiments if you can't compete with status quo.
    - jelliclesfarm 4y ago
      Wrong. Only the market that exploits labour. For example, I just finished reading the article about WeldingDroid in Norway: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/denmarks-weldingdroid-automate-welding-tanks-used-food-grouleff https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/denmarks-weldingdroid-automat... : Denmark's WeldingDroid to automate welding of tanks used in food production in Norway Citing profits to continue exploiting cheap labour in lieu of installing new technology doesn’t happen everywhere. Slavery in plantations was profitable. Nobody can justify it today. And yet there are supporters of minimum wage and dangerous jobs just because it’s not institutionalized slavery. This here is the key: [..]Faced with rising wage costs and increasing prices of both raw materials and freight, not to mention a widespread shortage of qualified welders, many manufacturing businesses around the world are experiencing a pressing need to improve their efficiency and profitability. In this situation, giving the qualified welders at a workplace the option to automate low-profit operations and focus their efforts on more profitable jobs makes a real difference, [..]
      - toast0 4y ago
        Your article starts with a caption of > Automation reduces costs, improves quality, increases turnover, and reduces the amount of static work. (Where turnover here is presumably the British English definition meaning sales of goods and not the American Engish definition meaning employees leaving) When technology lowers costs, increases quality, reduces time to manufacture/install, or otherwise improves the product, then technology is likely to be adopted in manufacturing or construction. Not a lot of people are hand hammering roofs or hand screwing decks, because nail guns and power drills lower the cost and improve the quality of the result. If 3d printing buildings was faster, cheaper, more reliable, or resulted in better quality than other alternatives, people would pay attention. Until then, what's the point outside of R&D or enthusiasm? From what I've seen, 3d printing buildings is currentlt mostly slower, more expensive, less reliable, and results in a poorer quality product than other options; although maybe it's not always worse in all aspects against every other option; if you had me construct a building, I'd be pretty slow, even if using a flatpack kit, but if you get someone decent or a team and have a functional supply chain (which is not always a given), then it'll go pretty fast.
        jelliclesfarm 4y ago
        I am not talking about existing optimization in construction industry. I am talking about lack of recreational and improved infrastructure for cities and rural communities because it is entirely lacking. Why would construction crews work in rural communities building a park when the same labour is needed to build high density apartment blocks as Union paid jobs. We will have better towns and nicer infrastructure if we utilized technology. It almost seems to me that there is an elitism to tech that feels like ‘poorer’ communities has no need for cutting edge technology. Same thing happens in Agtech where there are agbots for three billion dollar produce but no one thinks of simple automation for developing nations growing food to export to richer countries. Because..‘let them labour’?
        toast0 4y ago
        > Why would construction crews work in rural communities building a park when the same labour is needed to build high density apartment blocks as Union paid jobs. Most construction companies select work based on their capacity, the requirements of the job and the pay. A crew that works on high density housing likely has too much capacity to accept a park building job. A smaller crew would be appropriate. Some crews might be able to split up and send some people to build a park, depending on their schedule, transportation time, equipment availability, willingness to pay, etc. 3d printing buildings still needs a crew of some sort to operate the machinery and supply its inputs, and there would be a limited number of machines, which would probably be concentrated on the highest dollar value jobs they could do. It's the same thing with Ag. Automation has capital costs, so you're going to start where the labor costs are highest, and do developing nations later. Of course, if you dropped off a big western Ag machine to run a large farm in pick your country, the next complaint would be about neo-colonial resource extraction. When labor is cheaper than automation, labor gets the job --- it's the same in developing and developed nations, it's just the (economic) cost of labor and the availability of capital is so different.

Let’s take city infrastructure or parks. There is a ton of concrete projects. Enclosure fencing instead of wood panels. Garages…vertical parking spaces..stadiums..steps/stairs etc.

aristofun 4y ago

Yes, but did you analyze the costs? I wonder where’s the profit here

jelliclesfarm 4y ago
This reminds me of what I hear in small scale Ag all the time when a need for agtech is presented. Of course, exploitation of dirty and repetitive manual labour is going to be cheaper. Of course, burning through natural resources to keep jobs is always going to be cheaper than creating systems that don’t go obsolete or making sure we spend money to renew resources. At this point in our civilization, we have to ask … what IS the point of new technology? Is it to better improve our world and make leaps? Or use technology to support an artificial construct called ‘money’ that accumulates in few hands. Time to free technology. It should work FOR us. Instead we are gaslit into believing that it is something that we serve. When we consider profit motive for everything, tech becomes a collar that makes workers out of almost all of us.
- aristofun 4y ago
  I am all in. But the market doesn't care about these sentiments if you can't compete with status quo.
  - jelliclesfarm 4y ago
    Wrong. Only the market that exploits labour. For example, I just finished reading the article about WeldingDroid in Norway: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/denmarks-weldingdroid-automate-welding-tanks-used-food-grouleff https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/denmarks-weldingdroid-automat... : Denmark's WeldingDroid to automate welding of tanks used in food production in Norway Citing profits to continue exploiting cheap labour in lieu of installing new technology doesn’t happen everywhere. Slavery in plantations was profitable. Nobody can justify it today. And yet there are supporters of minimum wage and dangerous jobs just because it’s not institutionalized slavery. This here is the key: [..]Faced with rising wage costs and increasing prices of both raw materials and freight, not to mention a widespread shortage of qualified welders, many manufacturing businesses around the world are experiencing a pressing need to improve their efficiency and profitability. In this situation, giving the qualified welders at a workplace the option to automate low-profit operations and focus their efforts on more profitable jobs makes a real difference, [..]
    - toast0 4y ago
      Your article starts with a caption of > Automation reduces costs, improves quality, increases turnover, and reduces the amount of static work. (Where turnover here is presumably the British English definition meaning sales of goods and not the American Engish definition meaning employees leaving) When technology lowers costs, increases quality, reduces time to manufacture/install, or otherwise improves the product, then technology is likely to be adopted in manufacturing or construction. Not a lot of people are hand hammering roofs or hand screwing decks, because nail guns and power drills lower the cost and improve the quality of the result. If 3d printing buildings was faster, cheaper, more reliable, or resulted in better quality than other alternatives, people would pay attention. Until then, what's the point outside of R&D or enthusiasm? From what I've seen, 3d printing buildings is currentlt mostly slower, more expensive, less reliable, and results in a poorer quality product than other options; although maybe it's not always worse in all aspects against every other option; if you had me construct a building, I'd be pretty slow, even if using a flatpack kit, but if you get someone decent or a team and have a functional supply chain (which is not always a given), then it'll go pretty fast.
      - jelliclesfarm 4y ago
        I am not talking about existing optimization in construction industry. I am talking about lack of recreational and improved infrastructure for cities and rural communities because it is entirely lacking. Why would construction crews work in rural communities building a park when the same labour is needed to build high density apartment blocks as Union paid jobs. We will have better towns and nicer infrastructure if we utilized technology. It almost seems to me that there is an elitism to tech that feels like ‘poorer’ communities has no need for cutting edge technology. Same thing happens in Agtech where there are agbots for three billion dollar produce but no one thinks of simple automation for developing nations growing food to export to richer countries. Because..‘let them labour’?
        toast0 4y ago
        > Why would construction crews work in rural communities building a park when the same labour is needed to build high density apartment blocks as Union paid jobs. Most construction companies select work based on their capacity, the requirements of the job and the pay. A crew that works on high density housing likely has too much capacity to accept a park building job. A smaller crew would be appropriate. Some crews might be able to split up and send some people to build a park, depending on their schedule, transportation time, equipment availability, willingness to pay, etc. 3d printing buildings still needs a crew of some sort to operate the machinery and supply its inputs, and there would be a limited number of machines, which would probably be concentrated on the highest dollar value jobs they could do. It's the same thing with Ag. Automation has capital costs, so you're going to start where the labor costs are highest, and do developing nations later. Of course, if you dropped off a big western Ag machine to run a large farm in pick your country, the next complaint would be about neo-colonial resource extraction. When labor is cheaper than automation, labor gets the job --- it's the same in developing and developed nations, it's just the (economic) cost of labor and the availability of capital is so different.