Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car. Sometimes you have to lay down every row of bricks differently with a ton of unplanned (or unplannable) things to account for, because the electrician might work while you lay your brick etc.
Not that you cannot automate whole houses and sell them off the shelve for cheap (see prefabs), it just isn't something that could be done at a site where your brickbot 2000 has to share the job both with the workers whose jobs it replaces and with people from non-brickbot-2000-educated workers from different companies.
> Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car.
But aren't many of them? May be country specific, but in the one I currently reside there are tons of neighbourhoods that were built at once, 1000 homes+. In the US I've seen areas like that too. I can easily imagine a robot puts down the basics, and the individual tweaking is done later by hand.
For me this feels like robotics operating at the wrong layer of abstraction. It's like those old tomorrow's world programs where they show the robotic helper diligently sweeping the floor with a grass broom.
In car manufacturing robots are used to bolt and weld together stamped metal panels, this feels more like someone designing a robot which would be given a flat sheet of metal and using hammer and dollies forming the complete panel to be attached to the car.
In short, if we ever see a major change to automate housing construction I expect it will also come along with significant changes in construction methods.
The change is already there, prefab build techniques lead to construction companies keeping everything in-house - from crane operators to plumbers. The building is split into parts that can be built in-house and then assembled on-site - the aim is to have the structure with a roof on it as quickly as possible, since that makes you more independent of weather for finishing it. Especially for warehouses and facotries it's really impressive.
It's the difference between trying to take the factory to the site and just taking the parts to the site.
Also, as far as I understand, 3D-printing concrete does not give you any way to construct larger buildings, where you need pretensioned and reinforced parts...
You would need to build a tent like scaffolding that you can still work in, e.g. with a crane. That would be a non-trivial thing to design, put up and maintain, especially if it has to withstand stroms without damaging the building etc.
It is simpler to just put the house there quickly.
In many ways this is what much of prefab is. Building is carried out offsite by robots, and humans just assemble panels onsite. However, this reduces the adaptability of the building, increases transport and storage costs and complexity, and creates new issues (apparently prefabs can be at higher risk of fire).
Construction is one of those things where the process is much less regular and perfectly-repetitive than outcomes would suggest.
This is a great way to build out when your city is growing like mad. I think China and Russia have seen and still see a lot of development like this.
Eventually you end up with a dense city when you need to upgrade or replace a building in a constrained environment (think NYC or London or Tokyo), you have very different limitations and technology.
After WWII there was a big boom in houses made that way in the United States too but then homebuilders were able to get legislation passed so that "a small manufactured house is disfavored because it’s mobile like a vehicle but it is also required by law to be mobile like a vehicle" and the problem for them went away.
Are the factories mobile and/or relocatable to reduce transport costs; and/or are the neighbourhood location requirements somewhat specific (e.g. flat stable land, good road access etc)?
You rarely get to build a new neighbourhood here, often it's renovation work done on already built areas. Building a whole new block all the time is simply unsustainable.
Not that you cannot automate whole houses and sell them off the shelve for cheap (see prefabs), it just isn't something that could be done at a site where your brickbot 2000 has to share the job both with the workers whose jobs it replaces and with people from non-brickbot-2000-educated workers from different companies.