So. How about printing your next home? No, not printing the blueprints: printing the house itself.

...using a big robotic type printer.

Yes, there's already a model printer, and they're working on a full size one. Homes, of almost any imaginably useful and artistically satisfying shape, can be built in a day or two. 2800 sq ft homes. In a day or two. Using a LOT less workers.

Txchnologist: Printing a Home.

It can take anywhere from six weeks to six months to build a 2,800-square-foot, two-story house in the U.S., mostly because human beings do all the work. Within the next five years, chances are that 3D printing (also known by the less catchy but more inclusive term additive manufacturing) will have become so advanced that we will be able to upload design specifications to a massive robot, press print, and watch as it spits out a concrete house in less than a day. Plenty of humans will be there, but just to ogle.

...wonder what that will do to the construction industry? And to the skilled craftsmen who are currently employed in those skills? And to the skill-sets of those craftsmen?

We're going to reach a point, sooner rather than later, where robots of some sort are able to do most, if not all, of the work that humans currently do. Cheaper and faster than humans.

What do we do ...when we reach that point ...with the humans?

More specifically, where does the income come from to purchase the output and goods of the 99% robotic printers & factories, when the humans who are the recipients of those goods, have no jobs with which to earn the money with which to purchase those goods?

We're headed for a train wreck. Soon. Much, much sooner than we think.

IF ...if we try and keep the current socio-economic model of the value of human activity.

Something is going to have to give. Dunno what. But something.

Posted by: fairwhether at 07:36 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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