With human bricklayers, you can find enough people who have that skill that the pay is low. Here in the US, the availability of illegal immigrants means that the pay is often literally criminally low and you don't have to provide benefits.
Replace those bricklayers with a robot and its caretakers and now you need:
1. Someone with technical training who can keep the bot running happily. Since the technology is new and changing, the available supply of trained people is necessarily low and therefore wages for them would be high.
2. Drivers to get the bot to the worksite. If they stay, they are doing essentially nothing when they could be laying bricks. At that point, the robot is saving you basically nothing. Or they go off and drive for other jobs, but now the logistics of coordinating multiple work sites get harder.
You could argue that robot bricklayers are better for the workers' health. But contractors don't pay health benefits and don't care about that externality at all.
If a contractor gets one of these bots, now they are obliged to maintain it and keep it busy to amortize out the expense of buying it. That puts them in a precarious position of maintainence prices change, the bot company goes out of business, or work dries up.
Meanwhile, labor (until COVID) has been getting cheaper as the gains of the labor movement have been steadily eroded.
It is absolutely no surprise to me that we're still paying people to build brick walls, even without accounting for the fact that bricklaying is a pretty skilled activity.
The cheapest way to automate something is always poor people.This applies even more so in the developing world. Where the vast majority of new construction is happening.
Though it would be interesting to see what the state of construction is like in developed countries that don't have access to a vast pool of cheap immigrant labor. Maybe New Zealand? Northern Europe?
> The cheapest way to automate something is always poor people.
The corrolary to this, if you are a tech nerd who wants to see more automation is: If you want more automation, work to reduce poverty. Support unions, high wages, and other systems that give people the freedom to say no to shitty jobs that robots could do.
Not everywhere in the US has a vast pool of cheap immigrant labor. That's a fairly localized thing.
I'm just outside of Pittsburgh and, I guess I can't say conclusively, but the vast majority of landscapers, construction workers, and other outdoor laborers appear to come from the general local population. It's not like what I hear about California / Texas where hispanic immigrants are disproportionately represented.
Replace those bricklayers with a robot and its caretakers and now you need:
1. Someone with technical training who can keep the bot running happily. Since the technology is new and changing, the available supply of trained people is necessarily low and therefore wages for them would be high.
2. Drivers to get the bot to the worksite. If they stay, they are doing essentially nothing when they could be laying bricks. At that point, the robot is saving you basically nothing. Or they go off and drive for other jobs, but now the logistics of coordinating multiple work sites get harder.
You could argue that robot bricklayers are better for the workers' health. But contractors don't pay health benefits and don't care about that externality at all.
If a contractor gets one of these bots, now they are obliged to maintain it and keep it busy to amortize out the expense of buying it. That puts them in a precarious position of maintainence prices change, the bot company goes out of business, or work dries up.
Meanwhile, labor (until COVID) has been getting cheaper as the gains of the labor movement have been steadily eroded.
It is absolutely no surprise to me that we're still paying people to build brick walls, even without accounting for the fact that bricklaying is a pretty skilled activity.