alt Hacker NewsThis is not representative of what's actually going on, though. It's much more like an artisan carpenter who wants to build houses using bespoke hand-tools and precise joinery. That's great, and there are beautiful works of art created by those skills. But in the last year robots were developed that build homes exactly to spec. The robots work 24/7 and finish entire houses in a few days. That same skilled carpenter is being hired to monitor the robots and check over their work. There is, economically speaking, no place in the process for him to apply his craft. In the time he rips a single board, the robots build the wall. In the time he drives a handful of nails, the drywall is up and the paint is drying. He costs $200/hr, the robots cost $1/hr.
The carpenter is free to exercise his craft as he see's fit, but it's going to take place mostly in his personal workshop, for personal reasons, not to develop homes or run a business in the way he did before.
We can talk for ages about the quality of the robot's work, the maintainability of the resulting home, etc. But it's clear that, at this time, the market and ecosystem are embracing the robots whole-heartedly so those of us used to the old ways are having to rapidly adjust.
Replies
> We can talk for ages about the quality of the robot's work, the maintainability of the resulting home
All of this stuff is so new, and we're supposed to hand wave away quality and maintainability?
Not that tired old parable again. It doesn't hold.
If someone complains they take pride in understanding and designing deterministic processes, you can't reply that this is just like when robots took over manual labor.
No, because it is not manual labor, and robots hasn't taken over. Robots are computers. Robots are deterministic.
A better comparison would be an artisan architect, a blueprint designer being replaced by a special paint splatter, which when thrown against a piece of paper looks almost exactly like a blueprint of an almost completely liveable house. Great! What's not to like? It will allow anyone to design a house.
Good luck with the eventual rugpull. It always happens.
(1) We help you
(2) We undercut you
(3) You go out of business
(4) Your buddies go out of business as well
(5) Prices start rising
Supermarkets, restaurant chains, mathematicians or programmers it makes no difference.
Except the robots actually cost far more than $1/hour, it’s just that the owners have enough capital to operate at a massive loss until the carpenters have largely been replaced. Only then will we learn what the robots actually cost.
Forget robots, what you're describing already happened in the trades. Modern construction techniques are all about lowering the skill required to build a house and standardizing the process so it can be done with minimal training. E.g. drywall and caulk replacing plaster and precise joinery.
You can find example of this in all of the trades. Often, these are also talked about as "safety improvements" - which they sort of are. Given the same baseline intelligence, it's harder to dangerously fuck up plumbing or electrical in 2026 than it was in 1926.
This analogy hinges on the economic argument (that a robot costs 200x less than a human), but far from being an established fact, that notion is more or less entirely based on vague, misleading and exaggerated claims from the token peddlers.
The truth is no one knows how much the robot costs, and we probably won't know until its too late. Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers and redistribute their propaganda verbatim in the way you are doing. Although none of us know for sure, considering R&D, infrastructure capex and externalities, the robots are most definitively _not_ cheap.