{"id":650,"date":"2004-03-12T00:21:30","date_gmt":"2004-03-12T05:21:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/2004\/03\/building-houses-without-people\/"},"modified":"2004-03-12T00:21:30","modified_gmt":"2004-03-12T05:21:30","slug":"building-houses-without-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/2004\/03\/building-houses-without-people\/","title":{"rendered":"building houses without people"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the cbc (i think – in any case, it was a radio program) comes news<\/a> [in the new scientist] of the house-building robot of the future. 2005, maybe. behrokh “berok” khoshnevis<\/a> and yan xiao<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

this could be a big change for habitat for humanity<\/a>. it could also be a lot bigger than exporting geek jobs to india.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

then we have to revisit the concept of “homeless in america”<\/p>\n

update<\/strong> (2005.04.10): this story now covered in discover<\/a> and subsequently slashdot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}