CypherGhost wrote:

As I watched a Super Target being built near my office, I wondered why they were laying bricks by hand. Surely this repetitive job could be automated by some sort of giant robot scaffold?

This brick laying robot takes the idea a step further.

Its important, when you think about automation, to think about it in economic terms rather than in technological terms. The fundamental issues is whether the robots are more or less expensive than the wages of the brick layers.

In Japan, you see a lot of robots because they don't have a lot of immigration nor do they have a lot of teenagers, and so they don't have a lot of people to fill the kinds of jobs you'd pay minimum wage for.

In China, on the other hand, you have an economy that is still developing and so there are tons of people who'd kill for a job at any wage, and so a lot of construction gets done in old fashioned ways with fewer tools and automation (and safety protection) than you see in the west. The people are cheaper than the machines.

In the US, we're somewhere in the middle. We have a sophisticated economy, but we have more teenagers than Japan and a healthy supply of immigrants.

That means that the amount of robots that you have is a matter of government policy. Asimov wrote about labor unions competing against robots, but thats not science fiction. Its actually happening in America today, whether people realize it or not.

This is really the other side of the immigration debate that people don't understand. Everyone agrees that the status quo is unacceptable. You cannot have people living in your society who aren't allowed to be there. You must either change their legal status or you must kick them out. What people don't understand is the roll they play in the economy and the costs associated with kicking them out...

RE: MAKE: Blog: Robotic brick laying system ensures light and airflow to plants