It's Bruce Sterling's "Distraction", realized. Look for labor unions to dig in, hard, against this technology, just as West Coast longshoremen went on strike to protest new technology at US ports. It's the new offshoring. By the end of 2005, robots will be able to construct a one-story, 2,000-square foot home on site in a single day. Efforts to automate the building process are based on a technology known as Contour Crafting, a layered fabrication process controlled by computer. In effect, this technology will enable homes and other structures to be "printed out" from computer design software, much as ink jet printers produce documents from word processing software. Where's your wall? |