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...

Decius wrote:
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...

I think we need to kick out all of the illegal immigrant robots. If you weren't manufactured on American soil, what makes you process than you can come here and consume America's energon cubes for free? Line up for assimilation, get a green chip or a temporary client cert, and pay your credits like every other robot!

Yes, your "fundamental point" is what I'm getting at. I'm surprised that robots are still more expensive than humans for so many applications.

I know that the McDonalds near me pays up to $14/hr because the rich snotty teenagers here don't want to work at McDonalds and the immigrants have to travel from far away.

The McDonalds is open over 6500 hours a year. It just blows my mind that there is still a person hired to flip hamburgers. It's not like it (or brick laying) is a computationally difficult task. I can understand figuring out which end of my sheets in the pile on the floor goes on which end of the bed is a tad harder, but bricks and burgers come stacked neatly and follow the same repetitive process over and over again.

Then again, if stores follow the customer-can-do-it-themselves model of airline check-in kiosks and self-checkout lanes, maybe we'll be flipping our own burgers in the future?

Granted, the articulated general-purpose robot in the photo is expensive, but many purpose built robots (like Roomba, the pool cleaner, or the lawn mower) are not.