Do you think the insurance risk to your friend's company would be mitigated by automating parts of the labor? I've always wondered where a construction company would stand on this topic. On the one hand, there's a fear of replacing the human labor, especially when you have close relationships with your employees and they have a specialized skillset or trade. On the other hand, it seems like workers compensation and accident insurance are really substantial costs and appreciable risks for these companies.
The amount and skill that exists in high end construction is crazy. Not just in the individuals but also how they work as a team. Also how few people are qualified and want to do the work. Half of his team are undocumented Mexicans that have been with him for over a decade. I won't even get into the risks and costs associated with that.
The work is hard, physical, requires precision and attention to all sorts of details while being creative and getting up really early in the morning.
Just to give you an example of how not automatable it is. $37,000,000 home that the entire building is clad in a bespoke red aluminum paneling that the architect designed. It doesn't fit in a repeatable pattern and each panel is between 3x4 and 12x7 feet. They need to be hung with a tolerance of less than an eighth of an inch on a cantilevered split level structure with some odd pitched faces. Any drift in the assembly will mean a later piece will not fit correctly and you might not find out until the end. If say a single piece got maybe dropped or run over by a work truck it will have to be custom replaced at a huge cost because the panels were made in batch, also this would effect the overall timeline of completion. The contracts you take with a job like this sometimes come with bonuses for finishing early and penalties for delays. The process to even get to build them is highly competitive as well.
Just to get this on the wall involves coordination to make sure everything is true and to spec as it gets to the skinning. Every variance effects your adjustments for hanging the clad. Sometimes with your own guys involved in the internals and sometimes you depend on workers you have nearly no control over. Either way you have to deal with and adjust.
All of this has to be done without trampling the feeder roots just under the soil of the 250 year old oak tree in the middle of the job site because it's irreplaceable and a couple desire paths can kill it inside a year after the job is over, cutting off 80% of the work area you have access to.
I'm not saying you can't automate a job like this, but we are so far away from being able to. It is possibly on an infinite horizon in skilled human labor.
I would agree that the finish work, cladding, drywall, etc are definitely the hardest part of the construction automation problem. And maybe they never get solved entirely, especially things like the red aluminum panel example. In some sense, the uniqueness of the project is central to its value as an architectural statement. And uniqueness doesn't jibe well with our current approach to robotic automation.
There are a few intermediate tasks that may be doable with autonomous machines. Framing and concrete come to mind because they are tasks where lots of heavy stuff has to go to the right place in a repetitive arrangement.
So maybe a highly bespoke job like a multi-million-dollar house doesn't have any tractable tasks for automation. But a skyscraper might. Or at least, I'd like to think so.
Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective and awareness of the topic with such a substantive and vivid example.
I think there's definitely a mint to be made in making the hardest of it easier. I think that's the only way we keep building higher and more interesting.
If you make that tool though, it just becomes another hammer and the guys like my friend will still sit at the same risk level to use the new hammer in ways people haven't seen. He definitely wants your automation, but only so they can increase dynamism. I suspect that his job will always hold a static high risk and I find that kind of awe inspiring as a bit jockey.
Nothing about his work force is "illegal", they are undocumented. Anyone who works in the field also works with a considerable amount of people in a similar position in the same roles.
The "house" I described is an amalgamation of several.
I guess I would say to that "bored" person, go fuck yourself. There are plenty of other people to track down, harass, and get your target completely wrong on the internet. /b/ is thattaway.
