Wttr: Console-oriented weather forecast service (github.com)
23 points by saikatsg 1h ago 5 comments
How and where will agents ship software? (instantdb.com)
120 points by stopachka 13h ago 58 comments
Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction
304 boulos 238 7/16/2025, 4:48:48 PM techcrunch.com ↗
Company announcement: https://bedrockrobotics.com/news/introducing-bedrock-robotic...
[1] https://srgexpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/The-cost-of... [2] https://publications.turnerandtownsend.com/international-con...
There are dozens of electrical contractors in my area. But only two that perform work to our standards.
There is only one HVAC company that can meet our standards. Same for all of the other skilled trades.
Our framing crew is the best within a 75 mile radius. Other builders are constantly trying to poach them from us. We keep throwing money at them to prevent them from going to another builder.
Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen. I just fired our main pesticide and herbicide contractor today because they couldn’t get it together.
Of course I had them replaced before I fired them but I had almost 20 options to choose from.
Unfortunately I can’t say the same about all of the skilled contractors.
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rebuilding-construction-tr...
> need for unions
What in the world? This is the exact opposite use case for unions.
Unions help protect workers from single, dominant/ monopolistic employers where workers have no other options and can get taken advantage of. The construction industry is nearly the polar opposite, where there is almost no barrier for entry and the employment space is very competitive, including the ability to start your own business.
Construction unions would be an absolute nightmare.
(typically, union workers go on unemployment during slow periods; this includes electrical linemen/journeymen, automotive, pipe fitters, etc based on first hand conversations with union tradespeople in my examples)
Housing Supply and Housing Affordability - https://www.nber.org/papers/w33694 - April 2025
The Housing Industry Never Recovered From the Great Recession - https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-housi... - December 11, 2024
APM Marketplace: In an uncertain housing market, home builders face a range of challenges - https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/11/26/in-an-uncertain... - November 26, 2024
U.S. Housing Shortage: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once - https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives... - October 31st, 2022
Fannie Mae: The U.S. Housing Shortage from a Local Perspective - https://www.fanniemae.com/media/45106/display - October 2022
The problem with this stat is that the historic data does not support it:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
The supply is just fine, more so with a declining population, how we use housing has changed dramatically.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...
U.S. Housing Shortage: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: that you called out states "While the United States does indeed have a national shortage of affordable housing, every state and city's path to addressing it is relatively unique, and the tools and tactics used to create badly needed new housing supply will have to be tailored."
This is a gross understatement of the issue. The problem is voters. No one will vote in more housing, housing benefits for others or more affordable housing. Because the people who vote own homes and go into the voting booth and protect their own interests and assets: https://www.route-fifty.com/management/2022/08/problem-homeo... . There isnt a law about having to be a landholder to vote but there is a very strong correlation between the two.
Planing and zoning is hyper local, hyper political and very active. This is why mixed use zoning is harder to find, you can't run a garage out of your garage. The is why the "missing middle" is a thing in America. This is why "corporate ownership" of housing wont get fixed (it is a hyper local issue and the people who would show up to vote against it are the same ones whos property prices are being propped up by it).
I mean no large group is a monolith so I'm sure one can find opinions either way among tradesmen. But IMO the problem is so big that it's no longer revenue maximizing for anyone, even the workers. By some measures productivity has actually been declining for construction. If that was good for workers then we should just set them to digging a second Panama Canal with spoons.
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But saying it's unfortunate that you can't just whack anyone at will with 20 people lined up behind them jobless is wishing for a pretty bad situation right? If all your positions were filled by someone with 20 jobless people standing behind them, who would buy the homes you build?
The general contractors know which subs are (currently) good and bad, so their recs are good, but you have to be friendly with them for them to share (instead of taking the project on themselves).
Worked for me, bathroom guy recommended a carpenter that turned out great. Was hoping it was a general thing one could do.
As a former landscaper, I can tell you that you either aren't taking the time to understand at least one of these professions at all, or simply have some very low standards for good landscaping. It is not a dime-a-dozen field that requires minimal skill, at all, and given all I've seen of GOOD pest control, the same applies, fully. You might have dozens of small contractors out there claiming to be either of these things but knowing little, sure, but those that actually know the technical balances at work and can apply those to what they're doing so that it creates durable results for your building/land/home, are people who need to know quite a few very fine nuances of their work.
I mean, unless you think that constructing external landscapes that soon collapse, flood or fill with dead plants is irrelevant, or have no problem living in a building riddled with rats, mice, cockroaches and easy domicile to all of these pests and sundry.
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Now, there are certificates and other training that most places expect for blue collar workers starting as apprentices.
The days of walking off the street to get an apprenticeship in the trades is over. You'll get one after proving you're not on drugs, can show up, and are willing to do bullshit jobs for minimum wage for a three to five years beforehand.
It is really hard on bodies.
I put on a tool belt as a kid because I didn’t have the opportunity to go to school. It was either learn a trade or fail into the pit of despair that is the hospitality industry.
I’m in the south so we don’t have the benefits of union training.
A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training.
There are massive amounts of monopoly/duopoly interests in construction. Want to build affordable housing? Well if you are taking public dollars, you have to work with certain vendors which are approved and meet certain qualifications. Guess what, only 2 electrical vendors are approved! And so they work together and act as a racket to hold your project hostage unless you meet them on their terms.
Actually had a call today with an exec with one of the largest construction general contractors and this topic of "we can't do XYZ project [e.g. compete in that type of project type... driving costs down through competition] because we hire ABC union labor and it would screw us and our relations with the unions we work with."
Every developer has a war story of getting burned exactly in some way by being beholden to political or labor issues.
This results in higher costs... which ultimately is one of the main issues among others.
But power patterns are the same everywhere and rather than having corrupt corporate bullshit you get corrupt union bullshit. It just might benefit you if you work in the industry and might very much be at the cost of everyone else.
Police unions are the infamous example alongside the teamsters , but almost everyone who’s worked with or for one has stories.
I know someone who works for one and what do you know the people at the top get preferential treatment and there’s all sorts of bullshit going on. It’s still almost certainly better for him but it’s probably not ideal for the projects.
Ignoring cost overruns and hand waving things that fall under “look let’s just let people be people not perfect” you still get a lot of problematic behavior. For example my friend is very good at his job because he was taught by someone very good and as a result has high standards for his work.
This has gotten him targeted because he sets expectations too high which sure feels like a crock of shit.
And that’s just the work related bullshit. There’s still the classics like someone higher up the chain being friends with the right people and throwing others under the bus when they shit the bed.
When it comes to construction you don't even need to involve unions to find corruption. There's all sorts of corruption (or borderline corruption) surrounding zoning laws in most of the heavily populated places in the US and that's in addition to the blatant political dysfunction.
If you want to see it up close and personal, go to any Public Hearing in your city for any new construction of any kind, and watch 100 of your neighbours who have already benefitted from past construction lineup to oppose the prospect of any additional construction for anyone else. It’s not just that it adds a few percent costs, it’s that it drastically reduces the number of projects people even try to build.
Those are not pre-construction costs are they? Massive differences in labor costs described there.
The first was intel analysis software (DOD contract), and the second was in mental health (medicare and state medicaid contracts). In the first case, they even considered hiring a company who exists solely to help other companies navigate the government procurement process.
Indeed. You can get a FedRAMP AWS account pretty easily but I've been told that getting a FedRAMP Moderate environment for production use is a year-long, half-million-dollar project. On top of this you have to continuously deal with the Joint Approval Board (JAB) and Third Party Assessment Organization (3PAO) for any non-trivial changes to information flow or infrastructure. As a kicker the Cost Plus Fixed Fee (CPFF) and Time & Materials (T&M) contracts that are so prevalent in the space mean that your upside is limited and you have to do stuff like get your employees' resumes approved by the government before you can bill for their time.
I don't blame anybody for taking a look at this and saying "not for me".
Do you think they count the items he mentioned in the total costs?
Every major project in America has undocumented costs to go along with the miles of red tape. Just look at California's High Speed Rail.
Where I live they wanted to extend the expressway and it was overwhelmingly supported. So why, 6 years later hasn't it happened? The environmentalist sued to get a survey done that took 2 years to find.... no impact. The county commissioners got voted out and now the new ones want certain promises. The company that got the original no bid contract is owned by a brother of a former commissioner so that led to law suits. People sued because they don't want the new exits to be too close to their house. Others sued because they felt the exits would targets towards higher end homes and didn't equally consider everyone. Then you have the demands that we use ONLY AMERICAN LABOUR!!! and ONLY AMERICAN MATERIALS!!! A state representative said they would boycott the expansion unless a certain percentage of his constitutions were hired to do the work regardless of their qualifications. Another said they would block it due to road noise and complaints from his constitutions unless compensation was made.
It goes on and on and each one costs money they don't count in the official budget.
America needs more red tape. Red tape is explicit rules and procedures. In Europe you can make sure your project follows all of the explicit rules and procedures and then you can proceed. Nobody can come and try and stop you because you just say "I followed the rules", and continue.
OTOH in America the rules and procedures aren't explicit. They're embodied in court precedent (like the environmentalist who sued) and in gatekeepers like the county commissioners.
Along with would imply that they are not red tape.
It's an interesting trade off, and getting the right balance is difficult
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/high-speed-rail-califo...
Not including costs post-subdividing like selling the empty lot and tax's.
Obviously the new buyer has building costs, but you might have to demolish the existing house to divide, good chance it was in the middle.
On top of all this is the years to divide the property.
On top of all this you can't then build what you want on the new property.
On top of all this is the years to build on the empty lots.
These all have a $$$ cost.
$240,000 to quickly divide and rebuild high density, no one would care about that cost, that's ~$0.
So the houses you can end up with can't be tight practical buildings, it's $$$$$ for permits and land and time. So this robot will help build mega mansions for single families.
I am off the (not so controversial) opinion that labor should be paid fair wages, but I think it's also fair to use tech like this to multiply labor productivity.
The last piece is the cost of raw materials, which has also ballooned.
[1]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2025/04/04/berkeley-housing-dow...
I live in Wyoming. We don’t have many unions. The cost scourge is still there due to red tape and general fuckery.
I am fairly confident that Europe has a lot more red tape than Wyoming. Yet it's considerably cheaper to build large projects in Europe.
In general that's true, but perhaps not when it comes to construction, especially for large public projects. In Europe, the goal of such projects appears to be to complete the project and have the thing that they're building. In the US, at least as of late, it seems like the goal is to pay various interest groups in money or patronage, and whether the thing gets built or not is only of a secondary significance.
I have a theory that in-house expertise is cheaper in the long run.
I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks utterly stifling construction restrictions are a good thing, yet they seem to exist everywhere.
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/us-construction-has-prod...
`white_collar_automation * robotics_automation = building more, cheaper`
Yes or no: can the USA get a medium sized build done on time and budget comparable to the top 15% worldwide?
There has to be way to kick this problem in the butt. And i think management side has gotta step up
[0] https://www.schemeflow.com/
I remember Louis CK said he had a hell of a time trying to run his own comedy shows so he could offer lower ticket prices for his fans, but because every bit of the theaters were unionized it got really expensive fast and failed. They couldn't even touch the curtains, they had to pay a union guy to stand around all day and his only job was pulling a curtain cord at the right time. Which was some NYC rule.
And that's OK. At the end of the day, labor unions exist to help people and not robots.
People were worried robots were going to take their jobs. Then people were seeing their jobs get shipped overseas. Today, robots are finally taking over what jobs are left.
There are laws for people, but not necessarily for tools.
Say less.
HN used to be a message board to gain better knowledge around certain topics, but seems it more or less has the same armchair dilettantes that plague other platforms.
All of the cost is labor and materials.
That said, the time component of the zoning, permitting etc is very costly due to how real estate projects are funded and evaluated.
How is this not part of the cost of permitting and zoning! If you took those processes out, those financing costs wouldn’t exist.
Last time I did the math, San Francisco’s permitting process financed at going rates meant a price floor of over half a million dollars for an apartment. That’s before we’ve even built anything.
This is not the same as costing a bunch of money.
The delay induced costs are not the only negative impact. During permitting the muni will often make varrious cost adding demands that they have no basis in law or good engineering to make, but unless you're willing and able to take on more years of delay (and potential litigation costs) you have to go along with them to appease them.
And, of course, every opportunity for a subjective call allowing a disruption is a opportunity for corruption.
Also remember there are frivolous lawsuits, CEQA type laws (which was recently overhauled atleast in California), NEPA on the federal level which most people roll into the cost of permitting/zoning. This is no meme, this component is huge.
[1] https://libertylensecon.substack.com/p/unlocking-americas-in...
[2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
That's not to say some amount of review isn't appropriate, but excess review (wherever the line is) seems to be just a way to discourage building by process nightmare, when there's no other way to do it.
I've also seen a lot of things where variances go to those who have the patience to play politics, which often ends up being pretty inequitable. And then there's the times where permit issuers aren't consistent; request X get told to do Y, update your permit to request Y, get told to do X, etc. Or my favorite, ask to do A, get told to do expensive thing B to prep, do B, then get told A will not be permitted anyway. Typically, there's no recourse for these things either.
Of course it is, why would you think the land and other capital can be held for free?
The issue is that extended timelines drive down the IRR and add risk which is not the same as being expensive to carry.
> All of the local large projects around me are expensive because of massive amounts of red tape
This just isn’t true. There are projects that could be happening but aren’t because of red tape, but no, a project that’s happening is spending a tiny portion of its capital on red tape.
What's more, the fear of doing this has basically staved off all but the most brave companies, or giant conglomerates that can buy land cash, which is the most predictable byproduct of excessive regulation at a local level like this.
[1]: https://jerseydigs.com/american-dream-owners-default-on-1-2-...
[2]: https://www.axios.com/local/phoenix/2023/11/08/one-camelback...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/y2ein5
"The issue is that extended timelines drive down the IRR and add risk which is not the same as being expensive to carry."
Confusing statement, the IRR is low and the risk is high because the carrying cost is unknown (and unbounded).
In New York and San Francisco? And it's not just land, it's keeping all the environmental reviews and neighbourhood associations on board. It's delays in pre-selling, or, if you're pre-sold, customer service to impatient buyers. It's constantly redrawing plans because a community member wants an offset 3/8ths of an inch further so their petunias don't catch shade.
Again, these costs add hundreds of thousands of dollars to each and every apartment built in San Francisco.
> This just isn’t true
What are you responding to? The quoted text isn't mine.
Unless you know the loopholes.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...
And if one asks Claude.ai , one gets this:
Bottom Line: US infrastructure costs are dramatically higher than Europe - often 10-30 times more expensive for transit projects, with subway construction in NYC costing $3.2 billion per kilometer compared to just $100 million per kilometer in cities like Madrid.
I suppose only once the boomers die out will we have a chance of course correcting incuriosity. I actually remember many years ago some of the justices at the supreme court got real uppity when examples were brought up from other countries (forgive me i forget the case name).
Well, we've seen what happened without the red tape, when people were free to do whatever the fuck they wanted, and the results often aren't pretty. Sometimes, they were deadly, and occasionally we are reminded of why it might not be a good idea to just let the "free market" do what it wants [1].
Red tape doesn't just appear out of thin air, it appears when politicians are so pissed off about the "free market" that they actually find it worthwhile to do their goddamn jobs for once.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de...
The red tape is literally on whether barn owls in Downtown Mountain View will be hurt by an apartment building. This is not a serious consideration and is blatant NIMBY value capture and should be stopped and removed.
What's more, if you don't build that apartment downtown, expect real environmental damage when wild flora and fauna is paved over to build another exurb and highways to connect it all AKA the last 50 years of North American housing policy
You mean most of the built environment of New York City?
It mostly appears when politicians force law-enforcement not to punish bad actors for so long that society requires them to punish everybody so that the bad actors will go away.
I won't link to it here, but it seems someone uploaded it to archive.org (most likely illegally).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Tokyo_(film)
Caterpillar, John Deer, etc. already have remote operation vehicles. And a lot of provisions on what types of kits can be retrofitted onto their equipment without violating their terms/warranties.
I'm sure this is already something they've taken into consideration, but it seems like this will be more focused on partnerships with existing OEMs rather than selling add on kits to current fleets.
Seems like that is a pro not a con. An exit scenario
It's the kinda startup that may be able to pivot easier than others.
Management may invest many years developing some new key technology on the side but when it comes to actually taking the market, it's hard to focus on two areas at the same time.
Not sure on this one. The company likely has it's own vision but I've thought for a while that a swarm of small electric rubber tracked earth moving vehicles (small enough to fit one or two in a tradies van?) could work longer hours due to being much quieter. For larger jobs you put a single person in a small tower on overwatch and run it 24 hours a day.
This'd give you a somewhat scalable approach from small residential jobs to somewhat larger jobs while not competing against the incumbents directly and allowing you to work out the kinks. Then if it makes sense later, you build bigger machines with hopefully better battery technology.
Ultimately though, for proper big jobs, you need proper big tools. Maybe a partnership or "exit strategy" works.
Though maybe I've played too many RTS games like Supreme Commander...
Sounds ripe for disruption, then.
If a startup demonstrates promise, VC money will flood in. Then it's just a balancing of economics. Is the new VC-backed method cheaper? If so, the incumbents will lose market share relative to the value prop.
disclosure: I work for jonh deere but am not speaking for the company. The above is all I feel I can say on the subject
24/7/365 large fleet operators that move a billion tonne of ore per annum and alter the spin balance of the planet by a detectable amount.
Pages such as https://www.riotinto.com/en/mn/about/innovation/automation are out of date and don't do justice to the extant of and demand for grand scale semi autonomous mining and construction equipment.
BBC coverage of one site and mining automation: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgej7gzg8l0o
There's a large yet to be built copper project in the US that has autonomus mining plans in the economic technical report.
https://resolutioncopper.com/mining-method/
https://resolutioncopper.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/RTRC...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_Copper#Reactions
Will be neat to see where this goes. But I'm reminded of some Amazon guys that were supposed to revitalize the supply chains. My memory is that that didn't work out so well.
This isn't somehow a new industry because some Waymo engineers decided to make a company.
This may be an instance of companies not having enough capital or talent to fend off new entrants.
Talent will flock to the new and exciting. The place where they can get the bigger exit and work with the coolest people.
A newcomer in the heavy equipment space will have similar challenges and advantages. Funny enough, a lot of heavy equipment works very similar to cars with their CAN (and other) Buses for control and feedback.
Yes, Tesla was valued more for potential growth. But it was also the kind of potential growth that I'm not sure is viable outside of consumer spaces.
If you have numbers on this, I'm game to see them. Just because I find it hard to believe doesn't mean I think it is impossible.
https://publications.turnerandtownsend.com/international-con...
It is completely idiotic to kick people out for smoking weed on their own time. And then you wonder why you have trouble filling these positions. People use drugs and have since before humans were human, get over it.
For example look at how detailed the structure and weld arrangement is for modern cars, vs. back when robots only just started to take care of the frame welding on the assembly line.
Or how optical HDMI cables are affordable because they use fully automated UV-cure-resin-glued fiber alignment straight from the cable end into the optoelectronic chips, without needing optical connectors or any other human-labor to get the light path connected up. That's how they manage to do it the conceptually easiest way: amplifier->laser->fiber->photodiode->amplifier, and repeat for the 4 high-speed pairs. Also handing the low speed communication channel separately with just normal wires as signal degradation isn't an issue for that.
Or for example 3d printer infill: that's something no one would do manually in such a way, but if it's just automated it's quite desirable/efficient.
App rental e-scooters: they rely on automation to organize even when parked "pretty much anywhere they're not gonna block traffic", and as such become relevant for even short trips.
If you have an unsupervised robot that lays bricks for you to build up a house, you can get away with smaller bricks (and thus a lighter/cheaper machine needing a smaller crane to lift up/out of higher floors), than if you need a human to supervise it.
Smaller machine if slower means more machines, meaning cheaper production of the machines due to scale.
Auto-feeders for nail guns in construction means more smaller nails as placing 3 in a row takes barely longer than just 2. Especially if the nail gun could, say, run like an optical mouse and automatically trigger at a configured spacing while dragged along a surface with the trigger held down.
What if we could bring massive infrastructure projects down from the billions to the millions? Wouldn't that be a great thing for all of society?
What if we could build new power plants, connect all cities with HSR, rebuild all our old bridges, add thousands of new skyscrapers, and do it all under budget?
Think about what steel did for society. Automated construction is the next highest order step function change. It'll be insanely good for society.
Directly, there are few if any jobs that are not getting done due to lack of HSR today.
Indirectly, people project a ton of benefits to having HSR.
That's all to say I want advancements in jobsite automation desperately. But it's WAY harder than people from other domains think. Imagine driving on a road while you're also building it while others are doing both around you too...
These folks seem to be concentrating at the moment on excavation which (without looking) if I recall is already a pretty active and developed in terms of automation. But get out of the ground and you hit some pretty big issues pretty quick. To get a sense, heres's one of my go-to articles when people wonder about jobsite automation...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/where-are-the-robotic...
But like all real world optimization problems, better solutions based on the specific nature of the inputs are usually possible.
In the case of construction scheduling, relationships are the most likely route to optimization. You can dig all night long, but if the plumber does’t show up in the morning to lay pipe, your schedule is not improved and the plumber shows up in the morning at your job site because of the long term business relationship across many projects instead of some other jobsite.
[I practiced architecture in the past. Everything takes as long as it takes].
Civil engineering is already a field where the very largest projects are done by humans planning and building the roads and bridges for the robots to move in (such as things rented from Mammoet [1] with extra control systems), but it does require significant human oversight (typically a metaphorical red button).
It's all very one off and specific, and given how big those projects are that seems unlikely to change. The manufacturing of suburbs though would be a whole different ballgame.
[1] Specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-propelled_modular_transpo...
To build a commercially successful autonomous bulldozer requires building a commercially successful bulldozer. That’s hardware and hardware is hard. Probably harder than the autonomous part because bulldozers are a century past the proof-of-concept era.
My cynical take is this is financial engineering more than construction engineering. YMMV.
Wouldn't it only be necessary to put a "robot" in the driver's seat of any existing dozer?
None of these things are susceptible to "AI" and other such automation. We have had prefab construction for decades.
Deforestation is usually bottlenecked by major multi-million dollar equipment, not hourly unskilled laborers
Operating hours are the least of logistical hurdles for most projects. Schedule coordination dominates and the critical path can only move as fast as the slowest element on it.
* Construction sites are smaller in footprint
* They’re more easily covered in sensor networks to support autonomous operations
* They’re typically controlled-access environments, which reduces potential interruptions to automated routines
* Since they have higher risk profiles than public infrastructure, the expectation is that workers will be more aware of autonomous operations and any deviations before they cause serious harm
Honestly, I’d wager closed-site autonomy takes off before anyone nails national or global self-driving on existing infrastructure.
For construction sites, on the other hand, you could (more) easily automate things like dump trucks or material transports using preprogrammed routes and manual triggers when something is done or needed. Then you can iterate on those systems to add more capabilities, more automations, more integrations with other equipment.
Kind of like how tractors have iteratively improved over time because they benefit from a lot of the same limitations as construction sites. At least that’s my thinking on it.
I just don’t think that a single solution will cover the full suite of construction site machinery. Scaling will be tough. But as you said they will be printing cash in the meantime.
Dry stone construction is incredibly durable -- it doesn't rely on mortar which can weather away -- but it is limited by needing to reshape stones to fit together tightly (often by making flat surfaces). A human stonesmith can look at a handful of stones and find one which is close to fitting in the necessary spot; but a computerized system could scan thousands of stones and build tightly-fitting stonework with minimal need for reshaping.
> Bedrock is “upgrading existing fleets with sensors, compute, and intelligence that understands project goals, adapts to changing conditions, and executes work around the clock,”
I can also imagine this applying to all kinds of mining too, where there's already all the heavy equipment to mine and transport resources and we're just turning it into a robot so they don't have to employ a human anymore.
I wonder how that problem could be solved. Could something along the lines of warranty and service indemnification work, maybe?
But really, an acquisition by the OEM might be the only way to make this work in the long term?
Plug in your own longevity and uptime assumptions, but if that roof-mount kit costs on the order of $50k, it seems viable.
And then an explosion of underground bunkers and volcano lairs.
And an $80M round sounds sane these days
Wouldn't the value of their target market be the pay of operators (~$30/hour)?
Second, all the prep work before actual construction costs the same regardless of the size of the home. Its profitable for builders to build large homes (cheaper per square foot) and sell them at a premium.
Third, zoning laws that make anything thats not a SFH mostly illegal to build.
Fourth, manufactured homes are illegal in most areas.
Finally, The building codes are localized to each county, there is no federal/state building code.
As long as these perverse incentives exist, costs are not going to come down.
Jumping straight to autonomous operations seems expensive/hard.
Eg. if bricklayers could talk to their machine the way we can with coding agents, and say “yep, wall here please, check the blueprints to confirm how high and where the holes for the windows go”, retired & injured tradespeople could choose to come back. Less injuries means cheaper insurance & better margins. People could work in multiple parts of a site by supervising several robots, and not be exhausted at the end of the day. The list of benefits to individuals and the industry is long.
If legit construction robots were a thing they'd be primarily trained on assembling the most automation friendly cladding systems instead of wasting time laying bricks, incidentally why brick fell out of favor.
Ironically a lot of construction robot explorations has been bricklaying / mason bots, but that's because laying bricks is computation and mechanically simple repetitive task not because it's an efficient building system. The benefit is we'll probably be able to build with bricks/masonry cheaper, the caveat being it will probably be relative more expensive relative to automation optimized building systems.
Lots of remote jobs (pipelines etc) could be done with robots and satellite internet.
If the maintenance and recovery teams can also be robots, suddenly lots of big projects could get done in very hostile environments.
> adapts to changing conditions
The real play here is starting a business that specializes in getting construction equipment unstuck from the mud.
Seems sensible a project. $80m raised also seems a sensible amount. And the guy has a background in this field. Good luck
There are a ton of jobs that should be automated like working in an Amazon warehouse. Automation can go one of two ways: it can make all of our lives easier or it can displace the workforce and suppress the wages of those who remain so those are the very top can have $250 billion isntead of $200 billion.
Those displaced will be told to find new jobs and that will work for a time with considerable personal hardship for those affected. We've seen the impacts of this with manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas from the Rust Belt, for example. But at some point we'll start to run out of jobs for people to go. And then things will get very, very bad.
I imagine a distant future where food is grown with automation, houses will be built that way, robots will pick up the trash and so on. This will leave people to find more meaningful pursuits. But this will require the ultra-wealthy to share and history has taught us that this will get bloody.
Instead we'll face a future where companies will fail because there simply aren't customers because nobody can afford anything.
I welcome less labor intensive constructions but construction is a significant (~20%?) sector of the economy. The potential for negative impacts from such mass layoffs is enormous.
and as others have mentioned: there's a ton of cost built in that really comes down to corruption and overcoming NIMBYism.
As long as the bills are paid then most people will be happy to not go to traditional work, but instead do more interesting/ of value to the community work.
"As long as the bills are paid" is the key point. They won't be because people will be out of a job with no safety net
What is more enjoyable, working on the language and database dictated by work, or whatever tech he wants to use.
As long as a person gets out of bed and does a days work doing something productive in some way, it doesn't matter that it's not traditional work.
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