building houses without people
from the cbc (i think – in any case, it was a radio program) comes news [in the new scientist] of the house-building robot of the future. 2005, maybe. behrokh “berok” khoshnevis and yan xiao brings us this wonder. and it’s well on its way – from what i’ve seen 2005 isn’t just vapor – even if they don’t quite get all the painting done, it’ll still be a good chunk of a finished house.
this could be a big change for habitat for humanity. it could also be a lot bigger than exporting geek jobs to india.
a random statistic i pulled out of the thin web (credited to the building industry association) suggests that it takes 1100 human-hours to build a typical house. another random statistic says that there were 1,700,000 housing starts in 2004. that’s about 1.87 billion human-hours devoted to building houses in the united states (close enough for blog work). so when this thing does its thing, then this housing-construction market could collapse (we shared something vaguely like this before. 1.87 billion human-hours (that’s 935,000 2000-hour work-years)… say… 408 million (that’s three 8-hour shifts for 10 days, or 240 hours per house).
i’m just speculating, of course. eventually, maybe you just drop this machine off on a worksite with some architectural plans and show up every couple hours with a new truckload of building-goo. given our experience with inkjet printers, i think you can count on paying more for the building-goo (in special, drm-controlled, chipped, patented containers) than for the machine.
then we have to revisit the concept of “homeless in america”
update (2005.04.10): this story now covered in discover and subsequently slashdot