Robots could cost Australian economy 5 million jobs

@ reno - I agree. Bespoke services will grow. Mass production via robots will give a strong base but people want different as well as cheap. As the "cheap" continues to use less and less labour, we will increasingly use more and more bespoke.

 

You miss the point col even if you can have a robot built house you still need to do all the things ive mentioned by hand. Did i mention the fencing ? Or blocks that have bad access or are sloping . : robots are not taking over the building game anytime soon

 

Again, compare the number of people spending $10K+ bespoke suits vs <$1000 suits.

My dream is to own a bespoke suit

 

There's lots of intermediaries not just 100% bespoke. Base model versus upgrade options on cars is one example. A basic suit but with "after market" tailored hems etc. Over time the quality of the base model has improved while the cost has plummeted and most people don't buy the cheapest available. In reno's example you can renovate your bathroom once every 10 years instead of once every 15 years. By moving to cheaper shipping container buildings you can afford to add more space or higher quality (ie bespoke) fittings. At the end of the day anything that are produced by factories using robots need to be consumed so it is essentially an issue of what do people do to distribute the cheaper mass produced goods. In extremis it could go the way of the Jetsons whereby machines at home create your own goods and we all just need to work a hour a day to obtain them.

 

Oh, I don't know...

Sure, there are lots of things that only a human can do (right now), but what happens when that concreting bot improves to the point where it can print an entire apartment complex and the unfinished shells cost $25,000 all up? Are there that many people out there who'd still pay hundreds of thousands of dollars extra to bugger around with builders and architects adding nooks and windows to a human-built house? Or is an off-the-plan/off-the-software home at an 80% discount good enough?

Installing a pool? That's basically just a hole in the ground. Pretty easy for a robot to dig a hole to a given set of dimensions. Pretty easy for another bot to come along afterwards and spray concrete all over the sides.

Tiles and pavers aren't exactly rocket science either: take tile from Bin A, press into wet glue at grid position X.1, take tile from Bin A, press into wet glue at position X.2, etc.

And not to say that building for disabled people is a robot plot to enslave humanity, but have you noticed how so many buildings nowadays (virtually all of them actually) are accessible to small, wheeled devices about a cubic meter in size? If the robot vacuum cleaners that have been around for about a decade now can navigate their way around your house, it won't be that difficult to scale up and make bigger bots that can carry heavy building materials and integrated tool kits around a construction site.

There are robot lawn mowers that can be programmed with a grid of your garden and they'll wander about cutting grass all by themselves. At ~$1500 for a decent one, they're probably a lot cheaper than hiring a gardener. No doubt they'll soon be able to figure out whether the grass actually needs cutting by some combination of rainfall or moisture sensors and "eye" cameras with image recognition software to figure out how tall the blades of grass are. Stay tuned for a companion bot that will run around and pick up all the dead tree branches and kid's toys on the lawn before the mower bot comes along and runs over them.

Or what about this: you design your new house on your tablet computer by picking from a series of modular rooms. Your modules (structural frame welding bot) are built in a factory (concrete printer bot), complete with bathroom tiles, colour scheme (spray paint bot), light fittings, power outlets and cable runs (articulated arm bot), tagged with a QR code (etching bot) for identification and orientation, loaded onto a robot truck that drives itself to the building site, unloaded by another bot and moved into position by a robot crane. Presumably the keys to your new house will be cut by a robot, put into an envelope by a robot and delivered to you by a drone as well (or you could just get access via a reader for your fingerprint or iris which you'd have already used as conformation for the order for your new home).

All of this technology exists already. Nobody has put it together into a streamlined process yet, but it's nothing a bunch of motivated engineers couldn't figure out how to do.

 

But salaries will go much further than they do today because the automation results in higher productivity at lower cost thereby lowering the cost of the final product. (Assuming competitive free market).

The problem in a nation like Australia is how is all the debt going to be paid off and all the promises going to be kept if the value of money goes up instead of down like it does today? Right now, by encouraging ever-increasing inflation and money-printing the government is trying to hold back progress and at the same time is making things harder for many Australians as a result.

Deflation, baby. I predict it will actually be a much more pleasant world than the current inflationary environment. We just need to get rid of our debt and entitlement problems.

 

I think your first line said it all ..."Oh i dont know ". Its nice to dream Thats where changes start . Too much youtube & futuristic movies for you methinks .

 

They're defintely changing building designs to suit a low-labour future.

For instance, I beleieve there's a hospital on the Gold Coast that has "0" confined spaces. All electrical/plumbing/AC conduits etc are accessible without a confined entry permit or any of the dangers and problems associated with maintaining systems in confined spaces.

 

Bord there is a big price and labour difference between bespoke and tailored adjustments in both labour and price. Tailored suits are much cheaper and still 90% factory produced.

 

Well people better ring their local member and ask for the "Age of Entitlement" back because otherwise it is a return to subsistence farming for this nation's non political class.

 

Yay all that extra free time for those that put their money into these robots.
They can now even do something else while the robots do the past work, yay more production yay lower prices.

 

And those bad cars!
All those horsemen losing their job!

 

They even change buildings themselves, instead of massive they make gaps in the construction modules as to reduce their weight and reduce the need for steel / material and thus the cost.
And that's not easy, because then there is limited space available to put the modules together along strong enough connections, and insulation isn't supported everywhere anymore allowing it to bend, and eventual entering water in the gaps has to be drained off, and the drain holes can block due to dirt, causing the modules to semi permanently have the added weight of the water. Which can also get frozen and cause problems.
One may wonder how far they can drive this. As for now, they seriously underestimated the consequences that re-add to the supposedly dropped cost.
Everything has pros and contras. For ex easily accessible circuitry is usually less protected and more prone to damage. For ex, they moved the electrical cabinets from some distance from street, usually with some bushes around, towards street. Sometimes so close to street that they're hit by turning trucks. After some time (and repeats) they started to place concrete poles in front of them. Result: both pole and cabines damaged, and truck more. What will the end cost be of these drawbacks, relative to the saved costs?

 

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Not running it right for who is the question

 

WTF is with all the pidgeon english all of a sudden?

 

Thats a great idea & should be made mandatory except for elevators (which is impossible ). Sometimes asthetics have the last say & make it a nightmare to service or repair

 

Birdbrains ? :

 

Studies show that tractors and combine harvesters have thrown 200,000 horse-drawn ploughmen out of work in Australia since mechanisation began.