Bricklayers Think They’re Safe from Robots | Hacker News Reader

Bricklayers Think They’re Safe from Robots

nytimes.com

61 pointswalterbell112 comments

Bricklayers are already a dying breed... workers compensation makes it way too difficult to build many structures out of brick. Most "brick" or "stone" you see in new construction is some prefab panel glued to something.

IMO you'd employ more bricklayers doing trim work and operating the robot than you do now. And we should move away from shitty manufactured wood, glue and toxic treatments.

>Most "brick" or "stone" you see in new construction is some prefab panel glued to something

Prefix that with "In the States".

What countries is brick still popular for primary construction? Japan is wood, China and much of Asia is majorly concrete. Europe?

For personal homes, I think brick is commonly in use in Austria, and other European countries. But the bricks used are quite different from the small bricks in this article. The modern bricks are much larger and largely hollow. These air chaimbers make them lighter and also offer better heat insulation. The bigger size makes them faster to lay.

E.g., something like this: https://www.ziegelwerk-wenzel.de/produkte/w09-425

Brick is by far the most common in the UK. Usually brick outer wall with an insulation gap and an aerated concrete block on the inner wall. Sometimes two concrete blocks if it's to be rendered (stucco?).

Oak wooden frame is sometimes (can be expensive) used but the wooden cladding approach is very rare. That said prefab panels which combine stud work insulation etc are sometimes used. Not particularly commonly but they are quite new. I'd have made pre-fab panels for my workshop but I ended up using brick as the fire rating made building control regulations easier to pass. It took me a long time to lay all the bricks though so I may have made the wrong decision!

Wood tends to rot in the UK, unless it's oak, which is almost - but not entirely - indestructible.

Brick is very popular because there's plenty of clay in the south and parts of the north, and it's relatively cheap and robust.

But it's usually used for smaller houses. There are some pre-WWII brick apartment blocks, but modern apartments tend to use the international standard concrete core and curtain wall approach.

All new builds in N. Ireland are still brick, and I'm presuming the same is true in Ireland and the rest of the UK as well.

Most new houses in Brazil are made of red bricks.

Concrete block are more common for buildings but red bricks are still heavily used.

Historical buildings were usually made of solid red bricks. Then for some reason (maybe new areas being populated with lots of wood), they started using wood for houses.

I've never seen a new house made of wood around these areas.

Yep. My house, and all neighbors around live in brick houses. In my country people have this strange notion from Hollywood movies that if house isn't made from bricks, you can punch though the walls with a fist :) And we also know kid stories about tree piggies.

Even now folks in India (my home country) are always amused when they see an American house being built. They say "it looks like it was built from toothpicks" – and my answer is always "have you actually held a 2x4? Hardly a toothpick."

I'm not sure about the structural pros and cons of wood vs brick, but from what I've seen here in the mid-atlantic, brick is nowadays used more as a decorative outside layer, rather than a superior structure (for homes at least).

A few years ago, a kid on a dirt bike thought he was being chased by the police and cut through a subdivision. He hit something, wiped out and was thrown into the side of a $600k McMansion at 10-15 mph.

The construction was poor and the impact caused the glue holding outside on the house to fail... most of the side of the house fell off.

India

India.

Its just bricks for everything.

Houses in Indonesia mostly use bricks.

Mexico.

Africa

Isn't Engineered wood a pretty big improvement over plain wood?

I'm thinking wooden I Beam joists, LVL, and OSB for sheathing.

lots of concrete molds too. Become pretty popular to pour foundation walls in a brick or stone print.

Bricks are expensive these days, and laying them is an artisan art and skill.

Where I live in California houses are currently erected in days out of cheap wood and cladding. As soon as it is feasible this process will be automated and ways found to construct them more quickly using the cheapest materials.

We recently had some terrible fires where entire subdivisions burnt. Dozens of houses burnt simultaneously yet the trees and cars didn't catch fire. This was due to embers landing on roofs and getting into attics - the houses went up like paper bags.

Making sure the next generation of cheap building materials are fire retardant and robust is a worry given the rush for maximum profit for minimum investment and wealth sharing automation brings.

Wooden buildings have the advantage that in an active seismic area they can survive (or let the occupants survive) earthquakes much better than brick. Building codes in California prefer wood pretty much for this reason, even though they are more susceptible to fire. Fires can be controlled, versus having every masonry house in a city fall down simultaneously.

Fires can be controlled, however those looking at ashes year after year question that. Brick homes can be made earthquake proof, up to a point. Lots of concrete and rebar (it can rust) http://www.understandconstruction.com/concrete-frame-structu...

Obviously it's a science and you can't be cheap with cement or rebar. A lot of them went kaput in Iran and Turkey...did not follow code.

A major drawback is that utilities (water, heating, electricity etc ) must be build in. There's no just replacing some sheetrock. But encased pvc probably lasts 100+ years.

There are some brick buildings in the Mediterranean which are seismically resistant. Italy, the birthplace of concrete, is seismically active after all:

https://clay-wienerberger.com/expertise/brick-buildings-for-...

I'm curious as to whether wood-over-brick could allow taller structures than wood or brick alone. Building cheaply in the 50-85 foot range (high-rise regulations kick in above a floor height of 75 feet) is an important challenge going forward and hard to do with wood alone.

It turns out concrete and brick have completely different, almost polar opposite, seismic properties. Here in CA, concrete is what you want a foundation to be made from. We learned the hard way that brick foundations are prone to crumbling.

Brick is certainly strong up to a point, but when it fails, it fails spectacularly.

The latest changes to the international building code include some rules allowing masonry under wood, which is why there's an explosion of midrise apartment buildings in my area at least.

Surely the framing of a home is a very minor part of the total cost of construction at this point in time. My brother is a carpenter and formerly did mostly framing, and it wasn't a terribly high-paid job. He makes a lot more now doing concrete on commercial sites.

All of this is to say that I'm sure yes, I'm sure automation could reduce costs there, but likely the amount of money invested in R&D and then the machines itself wouldn't be worth it to these companies.

I live in an old (1896) house constructed with douglas fir and redwood that is thousands of years old and incredibly dense - it's hard to pound a nail into it. Today's houses are framed with wood that is very 'green', soft and flammable and cladding that is little more than thick cardboard with weathershield on one side.

It seems likely the next generations of materials will be even more ephemeral and designed for speed of construction...concrete seems to be the only material resistant to this, although older concrete is a lot more dense than the mixes we buy today....

If your house burns down, you get to buy another house. Capitalist wins coming and going.

Does any one know why are bricks expensive ? It is just dirt. right ?

Red bricks and other varieties are kiln fired, not unlike ceramics and glass.

Concrete cinder blocks are cured in a mold, as with all concrete.

Adobe is often sun-baked in desert climates, but it's not as practical in other climates.

Cobble stones are hewn from found or quarried rock. Not all rock can withstand all environments, based on frost action and other factors. Graveyards tend to regulate head stone selection for this reason.

So it all really depends on your brick selection, and what will work for where you are, and how much you want to spend.

It's clay, and wood is much more abundant in the US. However, in other places such as the UK, wood isn't abundant, so most houses are made of brick.

The UK has a particular problem with a fungus that attacks lumber, serpula lacrymans aka ‘dry rot’.

Related, we're throwing up so many new houses these days, that the UK brick industry can't keep up with demand:

https://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/uk-brick-ma...

Transporting them is expensive because they're heavy and they're made far away from where the buildings are being built.

if it catches on, that will no longer be a problem.

dirt plus

Reminds me of the folklore of John Henry.

He beat the steam engine in a steel driving competition and was treated as a hero, but died from over exertion. The steam engine continued to work the next day.

Whats the setup time for a robot that lays bricks? If you've ever seen a team of skilled masons/bricklayers build a wall, they're pretty freaking fast at it. I imagine the time to transport/setup/calibrate/etc a robot would eat up whatever performance gains it would have over humans - unless perhaps its a really big job, but how many of those are being built these days?

Fairly significant, apparently - you have to put up a scaffold alongside the wall for SAM to work. (And presumably, you need firm, open ground to put the thing on.) And they can't do corners or complex features, so when you hit those you need to either stop the machine or move it to a different part of the project. Headlines say they're 6x faster than normal masons, but that's during a given span of operation; over the course of a day, with overhead, it's apparently more like 3x.

That said, the machines are in field use, since masons are scarce and expensive. You're right about the big jobs, too; they're apparently pretty much limited to sites like universities and hospitals which have lots of big, featureless walls. The Tech Review article about it is much more informative than the NYT one here. [1]

I think this sort of automation worry seriously over-generalizes from factory robots. Robots are spectacular at doing repetitive tasks with nicely-arranged inputs and fixed workspaces. Hence, Amazon warehouses and Ford factory floors. But (as the SAM people admit) outdoor, new-worksite tasks are going to involve way more mixed human/robot tasks.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-t...

Ideally you want a small robot that climbs the wall it builds with a crane follower being fed by brick fetching robots on the ground. If it was done properly you could fit it all on a flatbed and have it cheap enough to be bought by standard building crews.

Yeah, some of these first gen robots seem very stuck in old industrial equipment paradigm. A single Massive lumbering slow robots vs multiple smaller agile robots working together with modern software(e.g. ML/AL).

There is no technical reason why the end user couldn't map out corners and turns in a CAD program. I think it is a physical limitation because the Bot is so large.

It did cross my mind that the one guaranteed "work surface" present when building a wall is the wall itself. I'm curious how the weight situation would work out, though.

On one hand, fresh mortar can clearly support several new layers of brick as a wall is laid. On the other, common estimates suggest a 24 hour wait to reach 60% of final strength. How light would an on-wall robot have to be to work at a steady pace without disrupting the still-drying brick?

The other question, I suppose, is whether the brick-supplying robot makes that redundant. It's either going to need a scaffolding or a cart/flatbed that moves frequently to keep feeding target that moves back and forth, and if you need a ground-supported robot arm right near the wall it might just be easier to do everything that way?

I was thinking that the crane robot would run along the wall behind the laying robot and fetch bricks from robot hovercraft that move pallets of bricks.

The replacement will not be laying bricks but new technologies.

Computers didn't replace human "calculators" by using abacus.

as a counterexample your clothes are stitched with thread, even when automated. Sure the stitching is different but it's still a style that's appreciated.

like thread, maybe bricks have a place still.

I'd absolutely love to see robotic bricklaying give bricks, and along with it brick ornaments, a comeback in medium scale construction. It's the only building material that is getting prettier as it ages. Bricks built both the industrial revolution and the Roman Empire.

3D "printing" walls and entire buildings onsite from epoxy, resins or other raw materials seems the most plausible.

I'm not an environmentalist, but even I would prefer we don't graduate to epoxy or resin for home construction. These things are all petroleum based and I have to imagine they outgas for a long period of time after construction. If they do burn, they will also doubtless emit lots of toxic gasses.

I would prefer 3d printing type automation, but applied to compacted dirt or clay. I love adobe and wish it was more popular. Big thick walls that keep out the heat and the cold seem like a no-brainer, if you can reinforce them to not crush you during earthquakes.

Agreed, although we already have a significant amount of petroleum based products in modern (US, anyway) homes: insulation (more and more styrofoam), sealing wraps, glues over fasteners, flooring, and plumbing. Your basic plywood by weight is a large part resins already, although no idea the makeup.

Maybe automation will make more "organic" building materials more affordable or feasible.

Ahh the glue house.. Fantastic.. I would not live in one. Even though I already do with respect to modern materials.

Just makes me think there's a market for a better brickie robot. The one they show is lethargic and built like a train. Even two robotic arms, working like a human does would be tons more efficient.

(I'd also like to complain about the stupid title, but it's what NYT picked)

Why emulate a human at all? I think that's the main issue. There has to be a better way to lay brick once you get robots involved.

It's probably anticipating corners and arches, but for the majority of bricks this seems quite inefficient. Bricks could be rolling off a conveyor belt in to place.

Conveyor belt doesn't help, as you would still need an arm to take bricks from the pallet and place them on conveyor.

True. You could also have an unskilled laborer grab two bricks at once and place it on the machine at a rate of 1 brick every 2 seconds or so.

How about baking a ceramic wall (brick or similar) as a whole, perhaps layered like ply? Or at least much larger bricks? Seems bricks and brieze blocks are sized to be carried/laid by hand?

I'm wondering why they are using an arm with a gripper, etc. Quit emulating how a human would do it, and make a machine for laying bricks.

I'm thinking something like a robot with treads, that can move in a straight line (or maybe curves), perhaps at the end of a long boom with a conveyor on it that moves bricks from a central source.

It basically grabs a brick off the end, squirts some mortar down, and lays the brick. Make the bricks shaped in a special way so they interlock better and need less mortar at the edges (they already have bricks something like this; they almost look like lego). Then it rolls to the next brick position.

Once it gets to a certain point, it "crawls up" to the next level, perhaps by gripping the level below with the treads (the mortar will probably need to be some kind of "ultra-fast setting" stuff; possibly more like epoxy than mortar), and lays the next layer, being guided by the last.

I guess I'm just saying this particular brick laying robot looks like it was designed by an engineer who, back at the beginning of heavier-than-air flight, thought an airplane needed to flap its wings to get off the ground...

I imagine something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MKcTbYDP7w except for bricks

Imagine the smallest hexapod that could grab, carry and lay a single brick, then coordinate a huge swarm of them.

Or better yet: imagine the smallest walking/climbing platform that could carry a robotic arm just big enough to take a brick and pass it on, then coordinate many of them into semi-static bucket brigades for bricks and mortar that could form an ad-hoc power grid to solve the battery issue.

The main innovation tasks/requirements would be cheap volume production of the swarm elements and intelligent planner software to automatically derive a work plan straight from the CAD data (or else project setup/customization would be prohibitively expensive). The beauty would be scaling: need to build a bigger structure? Add swarm elements. Need to speed up the schedule? Add swarm elements.

yes that's the one. where do you live? let's create a startup.

Clearly, SAM is a shitty robot. It looks as if it were designed by someone who had no intention of using it to lay bricks.

They're already in field use, and are apparently fine at it. They just do big, straight wall stretches for things like hospitals. The "would lose to master masons who have to put up corners in a speed contest" metric is a bit silly - on non-corner work they're operating 3x as fast as the masons they're alongside. No real risk they're replacing humans, but they do work.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-t...

Since they replaced journeyman masons there will be no new master masons and once all the master masons are dead they'll have to do that corner work too.

Fortunately, they don't seem to have replaced journeyman masons either. Journeymen still do corners and other complex features, they just do it with oversight. Rather, there's a shortage of masons at all skill levels, and so far SAM is only cost-effective as a way to help fill that gap on very large projects.

I'm sure that will change with time regardless, but I don't think it'll be because SAM drove out human expertise.

It doesn't even use two arms to do the job, and is using too much mortar...

It appears to be a standard 6 axis robot arm equipped with a specialist end effector designed to pick, mortar, and place bricks. It's possibly on a linear track to drive up and down the wall too. This is likely far cheaper than designing and building a specialist robot for this one task.

When you see at brick buildings built 100 years ago, it's works of art. It's apparent that amount of attention to detail is just not within range of most brick layers today. Especially when you consider price point.

I'm talking stuff like this: http://www.etovidel.net/appended_files/big/4ea52a818bc08.jpg

BUT, robots can change all that. You can render a wall on PC, with all mosaics and tiles and all kind of super precise stuff, it will produce a complete program for a brick-laying robot, which will then be executed up to a millimetre. And it will also account for ventilation shafts, drainage, internal structures within the wall to decrease weight, increase toughness, heat- and soundproof.

I'd blame Bauhaus (the movement, not the band) for the lack of fancy features on modern-era buildings before I'd blame the bricklayers -- they just do what they're paid to do and modern architecture doesn't call for that level of detail in the brickwork.

And it's such a shame that the radicalism of Gropius got all the attention and imitation when he was surrounded by equally modernist architects who pushed the subtle decorative qualities of brick to new heights. Even Gropius himself is best when he puts brick into the mix.

A suprisingly interesting old-school / new-school comparison of brick wall construction:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=p5qVxAoKwbE

Isn't it likely that many of the plain utilitarian brick buildings built 100 years ago have been abandoned, demolished, or simply faded into the landscape background, leaving us to take notice of the large, important, ornate brick buildings?

The house I live in is almost 100 years old, structural brick, and while it's a nice home, it's not by anyone's stretch an ornate work of art.

>> it's works of art

nah, some brick houses standing here from before 1900 are anything but art: unskilled farmers pulling up 'something'. Still standing though. And no, these sine-wave walls are not by design, ask my grandfather;)

Yes, and this is not done because....?

Humans are still the chaper option. Except when the bricklayers are in shortage and the demand for brick building is not going down.

It is not done until it is.

An article with some more (past and present) "state of the art":

https://www.theb1m.com/video/a-short-history-of-bricklaying-...

using adhesive (for thermal blocks) removes a lot of the variables, to have thermal efficient structure the smallest (thinner) the junction layer is, the better, and as a matter of fact various kind of adhesives are already replacing mortar in construction sites, with precision ultimately depending only on dimensions of the bricks used.

I think they are right, at least for a long time.

I'm not a luddite, but every time I hear people talk about how everything from laying bricks to flipping burgers to landscaping will quickly become automated I have the following thought:

Humans are amazingly versatile, and amazingly cheap.

If I'm making, say, peanut butter, automation makes sense. I'll put up millions of dollars to leverage large-scale automation technologies (mixers, conveyors, etc) because of volume and consistency.

The smaller the scale, the better advantage humans have, and will for a long time.

Even if a burger-flipping robot existed today, it wouldn't have a great ROI compared to the ongoing cost of labor. A restaurant just doesn't make enough burgers for automation to be cost-effective yet. That is why most automation has occurred at centralized points of supply chains, and why a patty that enters a McDonalds is already the product of automation.

Someday, small scale automation technologies will have reached a low enough price point, and an effective versatility that we won't need humans to lay bricks or flip burgers. My bet is that occurs when the components (including software) of such a robot become commoditized and modularized far beyond what they are today.

Even if a burger-flipping robot existed today . . .

Sorry, I had to point it out; the burger flipping robot does exist (though, I don't think this really takes anything away from your point):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43343956

I'm sure the next “better” McDon't will just microwave burgers prefab'ed many kmiles away.

It is a new tool, not any sort of replacement. There is much more to brickwork than laying bricks. Show me a robot that can crawl under a house to fix a cracked brick, or one than can shovel a trench without breaking something.

Why aren't they using shims and jigs? If you want to line it up right, make sure you have the right amount of mortar in the right place, etc, put a jig around it with some shims. It's the easiest way to build anything precisely that has to be done over and over again.

That might be the easiest way for a novice to do it, but would it be the fastest for someone who has experience?

Oh sure, someone who's an expert may do it faster without a jig. But we don't need more expert bricklayers to lay 9 bricks a minute, we just need more bricklayers. By using jigs you simplify the process and make it easier to perform by less experienced people, and make the process more reliable, which reduces waste, which increases efficiency, which brings down cost, and improves quality.

If you have the wrong amount, consistency or distribution of mortar, the jig won't fix it.

If you have the right amount, consistency and distribution of mortar, the jig won't do anything :)

So you build a jig to apply mortar. You scoop in an excess of mortar, pack it, press it, and what's left is just the right amount. Apply it into the space you want to lay the brick. Remove jig, maybe using a trowel to help if the mortar sticks a bit. Another jig holds the brick and fits it into place at the right position and placement with the right pressure.

Now you have two jigs to place, remove, and clean[1] for every brick you lay. And you'll need to adjust your jigs or have extra sets to lay half bricks, window sills, leads and corners. The greenest of apprentice bricklayers would be running circles around you with their trowel, level, and string.

1. It's not easy to keep a tool clean of mortar unless it's a simple flat blade like a trowel. Mortar will get in any crevice, dry, and then wet mortar sticks to it becoming that much harder to clean. An easy heuristic to judge the skill of a mason tender (assistant) is how clean their shovel is.

I think you're right, but there's still potential for iterating over the jigs until they are more efficient. The robot in the video of the article seems to me like the same sort of large crude machine that predated the compact sewing machine. It took quite a long time for them to improve on it, but it worked, and now very few industries sew by hand.

Bricklayers are probably safe from a robot that can perfectly replicate human bricklaying skill. What they're not safe from is whatever machine-built module that can be easily assembled by unskilled labor on site replaces brick walls.

So what are we going to do with the people who get displaced by robots? They still need money to buy food and house their families.

Those brick layers (the human ones) look happy and healthy.

You are correct. We should commission a study on brick layers.

Maybe the secret to long term health and happiness lies in mortar work.

Next up: voluntary labour camps where unhappy desk workers can go lay bricks to gain better life satisfaction. Learn the same techniques used by real blue-collar workers! $20,000 per team for a weekend retreat. For an extra $2,000 an ornery foreman will come out of his trailer every two hours and yell at you to get off your ass.

Considering there are already places where one can learn hands-on the operation of large heavy equipment - your idea doesn't sound all that far-fetched, and might actually be profitable.

I did this in Las Vegas. https://digthisvegas.com

I think $500 is too much if you have to pay for it personally, and I also feel gross about paying to do other people's "job", but goddamn it was fun.

It's hard to take your work home and easy to measure so not much opportunity for politics to creep in.

Robots and humans alike are due for unemployment with our move towards pre-fab and additive manufacturing.

So the prefab parts are just going to put themselves together in the factories? Then walk themselves to the job site? And erect and inspect themselves?

> So the prefab parts are just going to put themselves together in the factories? Then walk themselves to the job site? And erect and inspect themselves?

This is "blue sky" thinking - but what if, just imagine - the bricks were each a robot?

That is - your house is a robot you live in. Maybe it could even reconfigure itself as needed. Complete science fiction at the moment, and may never be practical - but who knows?

I get what you're saying though - there'll always be some kind of jobs for humans - but they might be the low-hanging, anyone can do them type of jobs...

Maybe stuff more like this[1]?

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUdnrtnjT5Q

But a 'robot' built that house... Didn't you say prefab would put robots out of business?

Prefab robots with delivery infrastructure put local robots out of business.

"Off-shore robots are stealing our jerbs; maintain me, puny human. EOL" /robot

Thanks for the sarcasm; we’re talking about brick-laying robots.

What a bizarre turn of phrase that bricklayers are "safe" only if they continue to engage in their profession, which comes with a substantial risk of injury.

Of course bricklayers will be safer when robots are able to build houses. Then bricklayers will be able to stay home and do as they please.

How have we come to think of the challenge of automating the matter of the universe as within our reach, but the challenge of seeing each other as viable individuals defined by something other than a "job" as unattainable?

Oh come on, commuting comes with a substantial risk of injury. People doing work aren't victims, they are moral agents making informed decisions to pursue larger goals.

Of course - I love work. But I also don't think that it makes sense, in a world of automation, to continue to define people by their work. There is no risk of being "unsafe" just because our species has figured out a way to train robots to do what was once your job. That's really ill thinking; the future is much brighter than that.

"There is no risk of being "unsafe""

I would say the risk of being homeless because a robot means I can no longer afford my home means there's a risk of being "unsafe".

I'm not sure how to make my point more clearly - that's exactly the part to which I'm objecting.

Being without a job is not without risk either.

"Then bricklayers will be able to stay home and do as they please."

How? They won't be able to pay their mortgage/rent, and so be forced out onto the street.

"but the challenge of seeing each other as viable individuals defined by something other than a "job" as unattainable?"

Given this political climate, there isn't any will to help people who have been automated out of a job.

because you need money to live and a job is the primary means of earning money.

I mean, I know that. I get it.

My point is: if we can think so far outside the box as to imagine a world where the matter around us literally moves to achieve our will, can't we also imagine a world where this precept no longer holds?

Tell Congress that.

Congress hasn't acted to automate the world; they won't act to fix the economic model either.

It's not up to Congress. It's up to us.

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