I think that more than physics the bottleneck for this is political (at least in the US). All of the local large projects around me are expensive because of massive amounts of red tape (environmental studies, zoning, planning), and political patronage systems. After the kick backs, political donations, promises to only work 8 hours a day, only use union labor, hire x police officers for y hours in overtime security positions a month, use xyz contractor etc. a small cost seems to be the actual labor and materials. Hell these robots if they work will be made illlegal.
Do you have any evidence or are you just pulling this out of thin air? All sources I can find estimate pre construction costs between 3 and 10% depending on type of infrastructure and where it is (the US according to [1] is on the lower end with 3-5%). To put this in perspective the profit margins on construction projects is 7% according to [2], which also does attribute skilled labour shortages as the main factor behind increasing construction cost.
I work for a home builder. Our single biggest problem is finding and hiring quality contractors that have enough skilled tradesmen.
There are dozens of electrical contractors in my area. But only two that perform work to our standards.
There is only one HVAC company that can meet our standards. Same for all of the other skilled trades.
Our framing crew is the best within a 75 mile radius. Other builders are constantly trying to poach them from us. We keep throwing money at them to prevent them from going to another builder.
Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen. I just fired our main pesticide and herbicide contractor today because they couldn’t get it together.
Of course I had them replaced before I fired them but I had almost 20 options to choose from.
Unfortunately I can’t say the same about all of the skilled contractors.
This. I live in a very different place from you and I'm just a humble homeowner, but contractors here are less than competent and I as a layperson can often do better after reading up on the thing and watching a couple Youtube videos.
I know it's meme tier and horrible when a guy who watched some videos tells the tradesmen how to do their jobs, but unfortunately I often end up being right and prove them wrong.
For example one of the last things I experienced was one of the electricians needed to get a cable through the concrete upper floor, and just couldn't do the calculations on where to drill and ended up drilling into the middle of the wall instead of right next to it.
These kinds of fuckups are constant and the contractors are pretty good at hiding these unless I stand next to them.
I've yet to meet a roofer that could properly do trig to calculate the sloped roof area.
I think it's a mixed bag. I've purchased homes where the previous owner thought they were a wizard at home improvement. One apt example is a dryer outlet that was converted from 14-30R to 10-30R because the homeowner googled the wrong thing and went down a bad rabbit hole. A good electrician would tell you to change the cord on your dryer and that anything else is a code violation.
OK there might be some confusion here on what's meant by "roofer." Roofers as I have always seen the term used means the crew that puts the shingles on.
The roof structure is built by carpenters or framers. Or more likely just delivered as pre-built trusses which are placed on top of the walls.
For a roof built on-site, a speed-square or framing square will include markings for common roofing cuts, hip/valley cuts, etc. You have to know how to use them but you don't really need to understand the underlying trigonometry.
I doubt you meant it this way, but that last bit hits a little rough. It's good that you are able to hire people when you have vacancies, and it's good that you don't have to be at the mercy of some insane rent-seeking because one crew in town has managed to monopolize one of your inputs.
But saying it's unfortunate that you can't just whack anyone at will with 20 people lined up behind them jobless is wishing for a pretty bad situation right? If all your positions were filled by someone with 20 jobless people standing behind them, who would buy the homes you build?
I’m guessing you’ve never hired a general contractor, or any other kind of home contractor for that matter? I’ve hired over a dozen at this point in the 1.5 years of owning my home, and I’d say, of those, about 2 have been any good. The construction and contracting landscape is a trash heap - a straight race to the bottom filled with lies, shoddy workmanship, and illegal labor. I’m suing 2 of mine for bad workmanship/abandoned projects. I do 100% of my own home renovations now, regardless of the cost of time, tools or materials.
Finding people is easy. Finding good ones is hard. You basically have to interview them. Even then you can end up with a slick salesman and garbage crew.
Needed a moving company. One guy shows up sits in my driveway gives me a quote. The next guy walked thru the house and gave me a quote. The third guy shows up opens every closet every cabinet and has a fairly spot on estimate. The first two were off by nearly 30% on weight/cost.
Needed someone to paint the entire interior of a house. One guy pulls a no show on the walkthru and then 3 months latter says I didnt show on time that day (it was already a done job at that point). Second guy goes 'hmm duno maybe X price'. Next guy measures everything has a itemized estimate. I hired the one with the good estimate.
My sister needed some simple electrical work done. 2 guys just handed her a number and an open ended contract. The 3rd guy had an itemized estimate that was lower than the first two because he did the prework.
Had some AC work done. Again with the 3. 1 just random didnt even come out, 1 driveway guy, and 1 who actually looked around and figured it out correctly. Even then I walk out there and the outside unit is installed backwards. I tell them, they puff out on me. I grab the foreman and walk him over with a 'uh there is a small issue here' didnt tell him what. They had to redo 3 hours of work once the foreman saw it backwards. All because the guys he had were willing to do backwards work. The foreman is usually the key. If they give a crap it will be done right.
Trying to have a covered porch added to my current house. So far 2 no shows and totally ghosted.
I wish this was atypical. But it isn't. I have many more.
I'll second that finding a good contractor (or even just a "handy man") as a home owner is very hard. When i moved into my house we had two bathrooms and the kitchen renovated. Not a single piece of plumbing the original contractors touched has made it past 3 years, it's all been replaced. About the only thing that was done correctly was bathroom tile. On the other hand, on my street my neighbors and I have a good hvac guy. They are treated like royalty in my neighborhood because they show up, know what they're doing, and fair.
my father in law who has passed away ran a little independent hvac shop. Just him and another guy, they had more work than they could ever handle and he could have grown to at least a 10-15 person shop but chose to work by himself. In southern US climates HVAC is def. a career option, however it's hard physical work that will slowly destroy your body. heh Not unlike how SWE is hard mental work that can slowly destroy your mind.
edit: i miss my father-in-law very much, he could do anything. he replaced the floor in a pier and beam house while living in it. Just think about that for a moment, how do you replace a floor? that's what holds up the walls and the walls hold up the roof...
I have tried exactly this, and it does not work. Nobody who did direct work ever had recommendations for peer workers. They just don't care. Most subs work directly with generals and not each other that much.
The general contractors know which subs are (currently) good and bad, so their recs are good, but you have to be friendly with them for them to share (instead of taking the project on themselves).
Like the parent, I haven't found that's true at all. Most people doing residential work on houses work either on their own or in very small teams. They spend their time working on houses, not networking with other tradespeople. They might have a few people they work with regularly, but it's not a deep network.
Much better is local whatsapp groups where people who've hired good people can make recommendations. Those are a trove of good information.
We are at the mercy of one crew. Over 150+ jobs in my company are all at the mercy of that one framing crew that has ~30 people. If we lose them, we'd have to scramble like crazy to find a replacement.
I have guys in Brownsville, TX that I could fly in and put up in hotels to get us through a tough spot, but that would cost a lot of money. And I'd love to encourage them to all move up here to Alabama with their families, but the current political climate has them afraid to do so.
Edit: I'm not saying I wish I could fire anyone I want at any time. I'm saying that it stinks that I literally have no other options for the other trades. So I'm forced to stick with the subpar options.
I'm not sure what's it like in the GP's area, but here I'm happy there are landscapers and other contractors who aren't part of the builders teams. There's lack of people available for odd jobs and for example it was hard to find a painter who wasn't busy with new houses. Unless it's a pathological situation on the market, those people are not idle/jobless. There needs to be a good mix of both.
The post doesn't mean there are 20 unemployed people, but that there are 20 interchangable pest control contractors who all do an adequate job, and so the one they fired was easy to replace.
Appreciate you highlighting the need for unions. Hopefully the skilled trades shortage persists indefinitely, otherwise they’d be treated just as you mentioned: disposable and interchangeable. The scarcity is the only thing protecting these folks at the moment.
What in the world? This is the exact opposite use case for unions.
Unions help protect workers from single, dominant/ monopolistic employers where workers have no other options and can get taken advantage of. The construction industry is nearly the polar opposite, where there is almost no barrier for entry and the employment space is very competitive, including the ability to start your own business.
Construction unions would be an absolute nightmare.
Construction unions do great across European countries.
Any company that can take advantage of workers will do it, no need for "dominant/ monopolistic".
There is a reason why security measures that put the workers life at risk are almost nonexistent on countries where unions hardly have a presence.
No helmets, no eye protection, no masks when dealing with chemicals, bending metal bars with bare hands, no protection shoes, hopping into a ladder alone,....
>Construction unions do great across European countries.
Do not know about your country - but over here the construction sites are full of people who couldn't even write the word union (mostly Asian countries like Philippines, Nepal, etc.)
Germany, and yes if I go to southern countries, Portugal my home country, alongside the other ones, there is a certain flexibility between the law, unions, and what actually happens at the construction site, unless someone does a complaint to the respective goverment authority responsible for checking worker conditions.
I can also add that Scadinavian countries, and UK tend to be similar to Germany.
Naturally all of them have black sheeps that ignore good work conditions if they can manage to, that is why work inspections are also a thing.
I mean what happens is skilled workers from poorer countries (Croatia in my case) move to richer EU countries, then we have nobody to perform construction - and now we have issued work Visas for 5% of the population basically. And you see newspaper stories of these people basically being treated like slave labor (crammed in small apartments, completely dependent on the visa provider, often abused). Just a few days ago there was another story about an immigrant worker being raped by her employer - also an immigrant that was just done serving his previous rape sentence. And plenty of stories of these people not being paid for months, documents being held, etc.
The unions have no standing because theres nobody left to be a part of the union - most people already left for Germany/Switzerland/etc. So Germany is just riding on the EU migration for now - but considering population dynamics - that's a short wave.
> Any company that can take advantage of workers will do it, no need for "dominant/ monopolistic".
What a nonsense thing to say. This is not an opinion most people, and certainly not most economists, would agree with. It's a foundational pillar of regulated free markets.
Moreover in this instance, construction companies are not some sprawling international megacorps, they're locally oowned and operated.
A pillar of free-market models, sure. But economics is built on a stack of spherical-cow assumptions that don’t really hold up in the real world.
Of course an employee theoretically has total freedom to leave an abusive employer and go somewhere else. But do they have time to search for jobs while working full-time? What if their employer makes them work mandatory overtime? If they don’t have time to search while working, can they afford to be unemployed for a few months? What if their employer threatens them or discourages other employers in the area from hiring them?
It would be great if competition made unions unnecessary, but it doesn’t.
> What in the world? This is the exact opposite use case for unions.
Trade unions tend to have a large focus on training and skill building. Yes they make firing people harder but the flip side of unions can be increasing the average quality such that firing due to quality or skill is less often necessary.
If I have need 10 people and I have a choice between two looks. Pool A is harder to fire and costs more but has a 95% competence rate. Pool B is easy to fire and costs less but has a 70% competence rate.
Setting any contractual rules aside I’m going g to find myself firing from pool B more often, and it is easy to attribute all of that to the rules that make A harder to fire. They are easier to fire (component of variance), they are more likely to be bad (component 2), and because they are easier to fire in going to be more likely to fire than coach for quality (component 3).
Scarcity also creates automation and efficiency pressure. You either get more of that human resource, or you make it so you use less of it, productivity increases also allow for the resources used to make more money without increasing project costs. This is also a very boom/bust industry, so the 2008 bust washed a lot of people out, especially juniors who would be experienced seniors today. A union is not going to protect labor from a building bust, they will stop hiring and the pipeline stalls.
There is a housing shortage of between 3.5M and 12M units; there will be no bust for at least the next decade, as housing production rate dropped substantially after the 2008 global financial crisis and did not recover.
(typically, union workers go on unemployment during slow periods; this includes electrical linemen/journeymen, automotive, pipe fitters, etc based on first hand conversations with union tradespeople in my examples)
U.S. Housing Shortage: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: that you called out states "While the United States does indeed have a national shortage of affordable housing, every state and city's path to addressing it is relatively unique, and the tools and tactics used to create badly needed new housing supply will have to be tailored."
This is a gross understatement of the issue. The problem is voters. No one will vote in more housing, housing benefits for others or more affordable housing. Because the people who vote own homes and go into the voting booth and protect their own interests and assets: https://www.route-fifty.com/management/2022/08/problem-homeo... . There isnt a law about having to be a landholder to vote but there is a very strong correlation between the two.
Planing and zoning is hyper local, hyper political and very active. This is why mixed use zoning is harder to find, you can't run a garage out of your garage. The is why the "missing middle" is a thing in America. This is why "corporate ownership" of housing wont get fixed (it is a hyper local issue and the people who would show up to vote against it are the same ones whos property prices are being propped up by it).
There is so much work for skilled tradesmen that they would rather see more automation so they can take more jobs. Even many unions, e.g. carpenters' unions, think this way.
I mean no large group is a monolith so I'm sure one can find opinions either way among tradesmen. But IMO the problem is so big that it's no longer revenue maximizing for anyone, even the workers. By some measures productivity has actually been declining for construction. If that was good for workers then we should just set them to digging a second Panama Canal with spoons.
This is a little bit tangential to the conversation but I was wondering how you find the best skilled contractors? Do you use Google maps like everyone else and look at the ratings? Or is it information you glean by trial and error over time? Or do you check in with trade schools to see who their best graduates are? Or perhaps something that I haven't mentioned?
Mostly from people at supply houses and lumber yards. They know how to tell if a contractor is good or not.
Or if we catch wind of a good contractor doing great work for another builder, we'll go inspect their work and then try to get them to jump ship and work with us.
Trade school information won't help us any because we're hiring contracting companies. We don't hire individuals unless it's for something specific that can be handled by one individual like kitchen installs.
Highly skilled tradesmen are often like really good lawyers. Just because they're good at their craft doesn't mean they'll necessarily be good at running their own contracting business (or law firm).
So being a successful contractor really boils down to being able to properly manage your skilled labor (and keep them content) while also keeping things on budget and following the critical path.
The single most common mistake I see with most contractors (and most all small business owners in general) is the fact that they think "hey, I own this business, therefore I should be the highest paid person here." So they don't take care of their labor and they end up losing them to someone who will take better care of them.
They think that they own the business so they must provide the most value to the company and should earn the most. That's rarely the case in real life though.
When I was a contractor out on my own, there were plenty of times when I was paying some of my employees more than I ever took home. The President of the company I work for now isn't the highest compensated member of our team.
Framing is skilled, but landscaping and pest control are unskilled? Are you living in a well framed house overrun with mice and a terrible yard?
I've done some framing. With a communicative foreman and a straightforward building design I did not find it that hard.
If performing quality framing was so easy, I imagine I’d have less trouble finding folks who want to earn $125k+ per year to do it for me.
Instead I just have a group of ~30 Guatemalans who do it while I listen to my American friends and neighbors complain about immigrants “taking all the jobs.”
I'm a layperson and this touches on my greatest fear about hiring contractors, that I'm not able to quickly enough determine who does meet the quality standard or even what the quality standard should be for a given job. How are average people supposed to navigate these things? I suppose I would just ask Claude/ChatGPT these days but there is surely a lot of tribal knowledge that they don't have.
And chatgpt is going to pull the data from an random UK website when you are in the US and vice-versa, and will augment it with knowledge from its model that come from a reddit thread from 2010 written by an italian plumber.
I saw that on the DIY Uk subreddit where people were confused because ChatGPT was answering question using american standards. It's really hard to answer questions based on regional tribal knowledge.
Apparently a good source are the tradesmens shop? THey might know their customers? Word-of-mouth?
Well yeah you've practically done the same thing that's been done with software where juniors need education plus three years of experience for their first job so you have no juniors.
I think the difference is that the pipelines for becoming a junior software developer are well-documented online, where the pipeline for being a "Junior Developer" in the trades is generally accomplished by calling and walking into places and asking for a job still.
Not accurate, even slightly. You might get hired as a gopher and spend 5 years trying to do other work if you just blunder in without training or skills.
Now, there are certificates and other training that most places expect for blue collar workers starting as apprentices.
The days of walking off the street to get an apprenticeship in the trades is over. You'll get one after proving you're not on drugs, can show up, and are willing to do bullshit jobs for minimum wage for a three to five years beforehand.
nah, i went from apprentice to lead installer in under 3 years, there is full training programs for the trades, but you will most likely get injured out before retirement so a lot of people won't even go that route. Until the trades are capped at 30 hours a week, you're going to injure out most of your workforce.
Uh no. Our culture and society have told folks to go to college for so long like it’s their only chance for success.
I put on a tool belt as a kid because I didn’t have the opportunity to go to school. It was either learn a trade or fail into the pit of despair that is the hospitality industry.
I’m in the south so we don’t have the benefits of union training.
A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training.
>Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen.
As a former landscaper, I can tell you that you either aren't taking the time to understand at least one of these professions at all, or simply have some very low standards for good landscaping. It is not a dime-a-dozen field that requires minimal skill, at all, and given all I've seen of GOOD pest control, the same applies, fully. You might have dozens of small contractors out there claiming to be either of these things but knowing little, sure, but those that actually know the technical balances at work and can apply those to what they're doing so that it creates durable results for your building/land/home, are people who need to know quite a few very fine nuances of their work.
I mean, unless you think that constructing external landscapes that soon collapse, flood or fill with dead plants is irrelevant, or have no problem living in a building riddled with rats, mice, cockroaches and easy domicile to all of these pests and sundry.
There are massive amounts of monopoly/duopoly interests in construction. Want to build affordable housing? Well if you are taking public dollars, you have to work with certain vendors which are approved and meet certain qualifications. Guess what, only 2 electrical vendors are approved! And so they work together and act as a racket to hold your project hostage unless you meet them on their terms.
Actually had a call today with an exec with one of the largest construction general contractors and this topic of "we can't do XYZ project [e.g. compete in that type of project type... driving costs down through competition] because we hire ABC union labor and it would screw us and our relations with the unions we work with."
Every developer has a war story of getting burned exactly in some way by being beholden to political or labor issues.
This results in higher costs... which ultimately is one of the main issues among others.
That sounds fishy, yes, electricians do need licensing, but as long as they (as in individuals or small companies) have the correct certs, I don't see why you couldn't substitute one with the other.
Doubtful. People get starry eyed at the idea of unions and I get why. Employees need more protection.
But power patterns are the same everywhere and rather than having corrupt corporate bullshit you get corrupt union bullshit. It just might benefit you if you work in the industry and might very much be at the cost of everyone else.
Police unions are the infamous example alongside the teamsters , but almost everyone who’s worked with or for one has stories.
I know someone who works for one and what do you know the people at the top get preferential treatment and there’s all sorts of bullshit going on. It’s still almost certainly better for him but it’s probably not ideal for the projects.
Ignoring cost overruns and hand waving things that fall under “look let’s just let people be people not perfect” you still get a lot of problematic behavior. For example my friend is very good at his job because he was taught by someone very good and as a result has high standards for his work.
This has gotten him targeted because he sets expectations too high which sure feels like a crock of shit.
And that’s just the work related bullshit. There’s still the classics like someone higher up the chain being friends with the right people and throwing others under the bus when they shit the bed.
It's worth pointing out that these issues vary by the union. As with any type of organization some will be better than others. I don't think being anti-union is the right answer but rather pushing for systemic changes that would curb various problematic behaviors.
When it comes to construction you don't even need to involve unions to find corruption. There's all sorts of corruption (or borderline corruption) surrounding zoning laws in most of the heavily populated places in the US and that's in addition to the blatant political dysfunction.
Sure but I think one of the huge issues is size and the simple fact that the union is by definition NOT pro country/greater good/citizen but pro Union member.
So yea when some CEO golden parachutes out with all the money we’re all rightfully pissed, but people weren’t thrilled with jimmy hoffa or state mandated monopolies that just don’t give a fuck either.
In my city the power company will just tell you to fuck right off no matter what your schedule was for opening your business, no matter how important you are. Hope you can handle your building being built 1+ months behind because “nah fuck you” while the government head makes a million + a year.
Scaling these things so they don’t fall to corruption and graft is very very hard.
Meh chicken/egg. Giving people organized power is proven over and over again to lead to problems. It’s why we have political science and centuries of “how do we stop everyone from saying fuck it and killing each other”
The police having a state mandated monopoly on violence only adds to the problem but the core issue is still there, and it’s hard to do checks and balances that just don’t erode to either regulatory capture, rampant bureaucracy, over efficient streamlining, or more often than not some mix of all three
That 7% is for the projects that actually happen. This misses all the projects that don’t when start because they don’t pencil due to the phenomenon that the original poster mentioned.
If you want to see it up close and personal, go to any Public Hearing in your city for any new construction of any kind, and watch 100 of your neighbours who have already benefitted from past construction lineup to oppose the prospect of any additional construction for anyone else. It’s not just that it adds a few percent costs, it’s that it drastically reduces the number of projects people even try to build.
Construction costs are not the only costs relating to development and redevelopment. Financing and project risk are also quite significant. Issues that push back the start of construction vastly increase financing costs, and increase construction costs. A delay in getting a permit, or a stop work order because of an environmental lawsuit runs up the interest payments on the loan used to purchase the real estate, as well as increasing the impact of inflation, delaying the revenue, and impacting trades’ schedules, all of which reduce the ROI of the project. These are just some of the issues caused by delays.
But how often do those things actually happen, and is it a substantial enough difference to actually affect the cost of building housing at a fundamental level? Remember that houses have more than tripled in cost this century in most places. A few percent is not going to substantially affect something that has increased in price 340%.
I’m curious if this is an example of survivorship bias though. I don’t have any data, but I can easily imagine lots of projects not getting built at all due to zoning laws or the red tape cost being too high.
I've worked for two companies who would have done business with governments but ended up refusing to do so because the regulatory burdens exceeded the value of the contract.
The first was intel analysis software (DOD contract), and the second was in mental health (medicare and state medicaid contracts). In the first case, they even considered hiring a company who exists solely to help other companies navigate the government procurement process.
> The first was intel analysis software (DOD contract), and the second was in mental health (medicare and state medicaid contracts). In the first case, they even considered hiring a company who exists solely to help other companies navigate the government procurement process.
Indeed. You can get a FedRAMP AWS account pretty easily but I've been told that getting a FedRAMP Moderate environment for production use is a year-long, half-million-dollar project. On top of this you have to continuously deal with the Joint Approval Board (JAB) and Third Party Assessment Organization (3PAO) for any non-trivial changes to information flow or infrastructure. As a kicker the Cost Plus Fixed Fee (CPFF) and Time & Materials (T&M) contracts that are so prevalent in the space mean that your upside is limited and you have to do stuff like get your employees' resumes approved by the government before you can bill for their time.
I don't blame anybody for taking a look at this and saying "not for me".
Honestly do you not think what he is saying isn't true?
Do you think they count the items he mentioned in the total costs?
Every major project in America has undocumented costs to go along with the miles of red tape. Just look at California's High Speed Rail.
Where I live they wanted to extend the expressway and it was overwhelmingly supported. So why, 6 years later hasn't it happened? The environmentalist sued to get a survey done that took 2 years to find.... no impact. The county commissioners got voted out and now the new ones want certain promises. The company that got the original no bid contract is owned by a brother of a former commissioner so that led to law suits. People sued because they don't want the new exits to be too close to their house. Others sued because they felt the exits would targets towards higher end homes and didn't equally consider everyone. Then you have the demands that we use ONLY AMERICAN LABOUR!!! and ONLY AMERICAN MATERIALS!!! A state representative said they would boycott the expansion unless a certain percentage of his constitutions were hired to do the work regardless of their qualifications. Another said they would block it due to road noise and complaints from his constitutions unless compensation was made.
It goes on and on and each one costs money they don't count in the official budget.
That's not red tape. That's politics. Europe is notorious for red tape, yet can do large transit projects for an order of magnitude less cost than America can.
America needs more red tape. Red tape is explicit rules and procedures. In Europe you can make sure your project follows all of the explicit rules and procedures and then you can proceed. Nobody can come and try and stop you because you just say "I followed the rules", and continue.
OTOH in America the rules and procedures aren't explicit. They're embodied in court precedent (like the environmentalist who sued) and in gatekeepers like the county commissioners.
That’s literally the definition of red tape! How do politicians have this kind of power to stop the projects? Because there is a county/city/state law that grants them this power. It’s literally part of the procedure! In other words, some part of the process is not defined beyond “the council member has veto power for any construction in their district” (hello NYC!).
As a result, the whole process is not deterministic and ill defined due to red tape.
this stuff needs to be made illegal.
If state gives approval to build stuff according to spec, then nobody should be able to block, unless there is major deviation from spec
In many countries that's basically how it works. You file for permission, hand in all the paper work, maybe have a hearing or a period where the public can bring concerns, and once the project is approved it can go ahead and is very difficult to stop. But doing it that way means the approval process now has to capture all the nuances, bloating the process. Big projects go a lot smoother, but small projects nobody would care to object to become more expensive
It's an interesting trade off, and getting the right balance is difficult
> promises to only work 8 hours a day, only use union labor, hire x police officers for y hours in overtime security positions a month, use xyz contractor etc.
Those are not pre-construction costs are they? Massive differences in labor costs described there.
Where I am it's $90,000 - $240,000 to subdivide land from one to two.
Not including costs post-subdividing like selling the empty lot and tax's.
Obviously the new buyer has building costs, but you might have to demolish the existing house to divide, good chance it was in the middle.
On top of all this is the years to divide the property.
On top of all this you can't then build what you want on the new property.
On top of all this is the years to build on the empty lots.
These all have a $$$ cost.
$240,000 to quickly divide and rebuild high density, no one would care about that cost, that's ~$0.
So the houses you can end up with can't be tight practical buildings, it's $$$$$ for permits and land and time. So this robot will help build mega mansions for single families.
I think this is true, but even after a construction company works through all the approvals the sheer cost of construction is insurmountable. A big part of this is obviously (sometimes union) labor. This happened recently in NIMBY-HQ Berkeley as interest rates crept up [1]. Pre-approved construction sites are sitting empty.
I am off the (not so controversial) opinion that labor should be paid fair wages, but I think it's also fair to use tech like this to multiply labor productivity.
The last piece is the cost of raw materials, which has also ballooned.
In general that's true, but perhaps not when it comes to construction, especially for large public projects. In Europe, the goal of such projects appears to be to complete the project and have the thing that they're building. In the US, at least as of late, it seems like the goal is to pay various interest groups in money or patronage, and whether the thing gets built or not is only of a secondary significance.
My university has an auto shop for this very reason - at a certain size, it makes more sense to care for your own fleet than it does to contract it out, even though the auto fleet peeps have approximately zero overlap with educational goals.
In the best case they certainly would help workers be able to afford the homes they built though. My friend was telling me today that his grandfather came out to California to work as a farm hand, and used that income to buy a home in the area. Imagine doing so now.
I really wish people would be more specific when they complain about "red tape." I think a lot of people just use red tape as a generalization that means "every government rule and formality that I don't like." Exactly which "red tape" is adding how much cost to projects? Arguers should enumerate them and explain why each cost is unnecessary.
That is a lot of work. It is easy to complain about 'red tape', but ever single line is there for a reason. So the real arguement is what isn't good enough to be worth the cost. I don't want a building to fall, but I also don't want inspectors to insists on additional bracing where the isn't even a stress point (which I have seen)
More than just red-tape there's whitecollar processes in pre-construction that take months. Just estimating the cost of each subtrade is a process currently done by hand on blueprints (what I work on automating).
`white_collar_automation * robotics_automation = building more, cheaper`
Tech can help with the politics as well. More construction would happen if it was technologically possible for it to be so fast that major projects could be finished in a single election period.
There is red tape and certainly there are planning bottlenecks, but the GCs already deal with this. Once a project is funded and started, an established GC will move quickly to execute on projects. Also - some states (CA in particular) have an absurd amount of red tape. If you go to states like Texas, it's much easier. Robotic tools are pretty common already (machine guidance for bulldozers, remote ops for excavators, mine trucks), so there's good precedent. We view our machines as tools for people to use, and given the labor challenges, have a ton of customer interest as a result.
Pre-fab is illegal in a lot of places too. Pre-fab is for the poors! Houses in this neighborhood must be assembled on site by lumber by a team of expensive humans from raw lumber, not at a factory churned out by the hundreds, shipped on site on a truck, and quickly put together.
Like yeah, typical pre-fab, where it's legal, is going to go into a trailer park or something, but nothing says pre-fab has to be cheap and crummy. Why are we still cutting lumber on site?
I believe SchemeFlow [0] is working on solving some of these problem, particularly with the insane reporting requirements. But of course, that still leaves the unions...
The unions will use their government connections to force the job to exist even if it doesn't need to be. They'll figure out a way to get a union driver sitting in an fully autonomous truck for some invented safety checkbox
I remember Louis CK said he had a hell of a time trying to run his own comedy shows so he could offer lower ticket prices for his fans, but because every bit of the theaters were unionized it got really expensive fast and failed. They couldn't even touch the curtains, they had to pay a union guy to stand around all day and his only job was pulling a curtain cord at the right time. Which was some NYC rule.
> The unions will use their government connections to force the job to exist even if it doesn't need to be.
And that's OK. At the end of the day, labor unions exist to help people and not robots.
People were worried robots were going to take their jobs. Then people were seeing their jobs get shipped overseas. Today, robots are finally taking over what jobs are left.
> At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
My FIL spent 30 something years as a union carpenter and for about 15 of that was teaching underprivileged kids carpentry and finding them job placements while rebuilding national parks.
That union did just fine for America, it's better off for it having existed.
The 5 days work week, the paid holidays (in the country where they exist), and rights on the place of work wouldn't have been obtained without all the struggles of the working class in the past century, by striking and unionizing. They literally made the world better for everyone (except the people owning companies)
To wargame the a rebuttal to this, the red tape might be circumvented just because there aren't rules to govern robotic work. You can fully agree to only use union labor, to only have humans working 8 hour days, or to only use certain contractors for hired work, simply because these systems aren't human operated (likely they will be early on, but you could spin it as this).
There are laws for people, but not necessarily for tools.
> the time component of the zoning, permitting etc is very costly due to how real estate projects are funded and evaluated
How is this not part of the cost of permitting and zoning! If you took those processes out, those financing costs wouldn’t exist.
Last time I did the math, San Francisco’s permitting process financed at going rates meant a price floor of over half a million dollars for an apartment. That’s before we’ve even built anything.
No, it's worse because the costs are diffuse and so harder to predict and manage.
The delay induced costs are not the only negative impact. During permitting the muni will often make varrious cost adding demands that they have no basis in law or good engineering to make, but unless you're willing and able to take on more years of delay (and potential litigation costs) you have to go along with them to appease them.
And, of course, every opportunity for a subjective call allowing a disruption is a opportunity for corruption.
Maybe! But it still does not comport with the original post that I replied to which said that permitting etc are the major driver of cost of any construction project. It is not.
I don't think a construction companies bank account cares about whether money is going to the time component or the physical act of going to city hall to apply.
Also remember there are frivolous lawsuits, CEQA type laws (which was recently overhauled atleast in California), NEPA on the federal level which most people roll into the cost of permitting/zoning. This is no meme, this component is huge.
When permitting (etc) delays your project for N years, and materials and labor now cost that much more, that drains your bank account. Sure, maybe you got some return on your money, but many times that won't be enough to cover the increase in cost.
That's not to say some amount of review isn't appropriate, but excess review (wherever the line is) seems to be just a way to discourage building by process nightmare, when there's no other way to do it.
I've also seen a lot of things where variances go to those who have the patience to play politics, which often ends up being pretty inequitable. And then there's the times where permit issuers aren't consistent; request X get told to do Y, update your permit to request Y, get told to do X, etc. Or my favorite, ask to do A, get told to do expensive thing B to prep, do B, then get told A will not be permitted anyway. Typically, there's no recourse for these things either.
The carrying cost of land is very low compared to any overall project.
The issue is that extended timelines drive down the IRR and add risk which is not the same as being expensive to carry.
> All of the local large projects around me are expensive because of massive amounts of red tape
This just isn’t true. There are projects that could be happening but aren’t because of red tape, but no, a project that’s happening is spending a tiny portion of its capital on red tape.
It's not just carrying cost, it could be the full A&D cost, so you're paying the loan on the mortgage without being able to build anything. That's huge and has sunk major projects around me. This happens, literally all the time [1][2][3], all around the country.
What's more, the fear of doing this has basically staved off all but the most brave companies, or giant conglomerates that can buy land cash, which is the most predictable byproduct of excessive regulation at a local level like this.
> carrying cost of land is very low compared to any overall project
In New York and San Francisco? And it's not just land, it's keeping all the environmental reviews and neighbourhood associations on board. It's delays in pre-selling, or, if you're pre-sold, customer service to impatient buyers. It's constantly redrawing plans because a community member wants an offset 3/8ths of an inch further so their petunias don't catch shade.
Again, these costs add hundreds of thousands of dollars to each and every apartment built in San Francisco.
> This just isn’t true
What are you responding to? The quoted text isn't mine.
Is there a reason you're pointing out San Francisco and New York in particular? Is it because we both know they're by far the most absurd instances of this problem and quite obviously unique in how absurd they are?
It all started in San Francisco and New York, but now the disease has spread everywhere. Frankly the disease was always there. Millennials trying to buy houses en-masse over COVID is what exposed it.
Nobody notices it because it's nationwide (and to a certain extent worldwide) and it's a city-by-city policy issue [1][2][3]. But it's the same issue everywhere, over-indexing neighborhood preferences to slow down and kill construction projects behind a permitting process.
I don't know what point you think you're arguing against.
I am not denying permitting exists and it slows things down. The original point was that this is a major contributor to cost of construction, which it's not. They specifically said "a small cost seems to be the actual labor and materials [compared to permitting etc]"-- this is absolutely not true. It is not even close to reality in the US.
Here you're just pointing out two facts:
1) Permitting exists (and slows things down)
2) We have a housing shortage
No argument there! But what you are failing to do is demonstrate that (1) is the major driver of (2).
The actual drivers are the cost of well-situated land, cost of labor, and cost of materials. This is evident in ANY actual budget from ANY actual construction project.
Add to that the fact that large scale homebuilders are petrified of creating a 2008-style oversupply so they've been chronically underbuilding since then -- and will continue to do so regardless of permitting reform. This is evident in the housing starts compared to population growth since the GFC.
Actually 70% labor and 30% materials, on average. You will never believe that some times contractors propose to do curtain wall as alternative to masonry because pre-fab stuff actually a lot cheaper.
Yeah if it was legal instead of technical hoops buildings would be flying up in unincorporated parts of Mississippi or Alabama. There's a huge difference between states when it comes to codes and enforcement
Politics certainly adds layers of cost, but it doesn’t change the fact that budget overruns almost always stem from unpredictable, non‑political variables, sudden material price hikes, weather delays, labor shortages, or subcontractor disputes.
> a small cost seems to be the actual labor and materials
Say less.
HN used to be a message board to gain better knowledge around certain topics, but seems it more or less has the same armchair dilettantes that plague other platforms.
So tired of this lazy take. The large projects are expensive because they are large, difficult, and require planning between dozens of different companies and contractors. Do you work in the construction industry? Or do you build "apps"? Real building requires literal blood and sweat and affect ecosystems and communities. It's going to be expensive and it should be.
Bottom Line: US infrastructure costs are dramatically higher than Europe - often 10-30 times more expensive for transit projects, with subway construction in NYC costing $3.2 billion per kilometer compared to just $100 million per kilometer in cities like Madrid.
Kinda ironic that Europe is seen as the very definition of bureaucracy and red tape by many Americans, when this sort of data shows it's actually quite efficient
Point 9 is funny (although not funny in reality)... Americans have NIH syndrome basically.
I suppose only once the boomers die out will we have a chance of course correcting incuriosity. I actually remember many years ago some of the justices at the supreme court got real uppity when examples were brought up from other countries (forgive me i forget the case name).
Transit costs are a small fraction of "construction". I agree our transit development costs are insane though this has a lot more to do with America's very strong concept of property rights (and the weaponization of other apparatus to defend property rights) than simply "red tape." I.e. it's more political than bureaucratic.
No it doesn't. Any publicly funded construction is rife with tons of additional regulations designed to limit (but sometimes perpetuating) corrupt contracting, and transit projects in particular have very unique needs around land acquisition.
Even still, the linked website doesn't really seem to say permitting is a major driver. And it certainly doesn't dwarf labor and materials.
> massive amounts of red tape (environmental studies, zoning, planning)
Well, we've seen what happened without the red tape, when people were free to do whatever the fuck they wanted, and the results often aren't pretty. Sometimes, they were deadly, and occasionally we are reminded of why it might not be a good idea to just let the "free market" do what it wants [1].
Red tape doesn't just appear out of thin air, it appears when politicians are so pissed off about the "free market" that they actually find it worthwhile to do their goddamn jobs for once.
This is a red-herring. No one is suggesting loosening laws on whether a building will stay standing.
The red tape is literally on whether barn owls in Downtown Mountain View will be hurt by an apartment building. This is not a serious consideration and is blatant NIMBY value capture and should be stopped and removed.
What's more, if you don't build that apartment downtown, expect real environmental damage when wild flora and fauna is paved over to build another exurb and highways to connect it all AKA the last 50 years of North American housing policy
It mostly appears when politicians force law-enforcement not to punish bad actors for so long that society requires them to punish everybody so that the bad actors will go away.
Law enforcement can only act when laws are broken, that's the point. And building codes, zoning codes, that kind of stuff isn't a matter for law enforcement aka police unless someone gets seriously hurt or killed anyway - but if what happened was legal, it's considered an "act of God".
I'm the CTO and one of the founders of Bedrock. I was very pleasantly surprised to see the excitement from this crowd! Happy to answer any questions about us (and will look through the comment threads here). We're looking for really really awesome MLEs and software engineers, so if you're interested take a look at our careers page https://bedrockrobotics.com/careers
This is more of an open-ended question, but do you think there will be a sure in traditional (non-software) engineering demand, as well as software engineering in more of a hands-on hardware context?
Are you planning on having these robots work collaboratively alongside humans? Or something more complicated like only driving near humans to start with but digging near them being a longer term goal?
Small piece of feedback: It takes far too much scrolling to get to the list of open roles. Maybe that's deliberate, so you know your applicants are truly serious about working for you, but I could see a lot of potentially highly-qualified candidates just dropping off due to plain annoyance.
to add to this, hijacking default scrolling behavior is such a massive no-no and super freaking annoying. it's also problematic for accessibility reasons.
i had to look up whether stuff like mini excavators use control-by-wire/CAN bus or if the controls are actually mechanically operating valves, to determine how hard it'd be to just throw a lil computer connected to the CAN bus to autonomously operate equipment. it seems like newer and nicer models are control by wire, and older ones have joysticks and pedals that directly open and close hydraulic valves.
i looked this up in a "cost of humanoid robot" versus just doing a retrofit on a computer/actuators on older equipment. i think even in the actuator approach, adding 12 electronically controlled hydraulic valves to replace the human actuated valves is still gonna be cheaper than a humanoid robot
Humanoids will be amazing when they get here, but I think there are a lot of challenges between now and then - hardware alone is very challenging - add a ton of sticky mud and it’s going to be complex even if the software works.
I read your careers page out of curiosity. It's like all software and equipment (what I interpret from "hardware"). Shouldn't you also hire some structural engineers and similar?
We’re mostly focused on the AI and software side of things. There are many great manufacturers for the machines themselves. We have amazing hardware engineers, so if we need to do structural work for our parts, we will. At the moment it’s not core.
One big barrier I haven't seen mentioned is all the OEM competition they are going to face.
Caterpillar, John Deer, etc. already have remote operation vehicles. And a lot of provisions on what types of kits can be retrofitted onto their equipment without violating their terms/warranties.
I'm sure this is already something they've taken into consideration, but it seems like this will be more focused on partnerships with existing OEMs rather than selling add on kits to current fleets.
It’s only a pro if Bedrock has some sort of advantage that the existing companies don’t and can’t easily get. Without some sort of innovator’s dilemma-type situation, they’re likely to be crushed (into gravel).
> One big barrier I haven't seen mentioned is all the OEM competition they are going to face.
Not sure on this one. The company likely has it's own vision but I've thought for a while that a swarm of small electric rubber tracked earth moving vehicles (small enough to fit one or two in a tradies van?) could work longer hours due to being much quieter. For larger jobs you put a single person in a small tower on overwatch and run it 24 hours a day.
This'd give you a somewhat scalable approach from small residential jobs to somewhat larger jobs while not competing against the incumbents directly and allowing you to work out the kinks. Then if it makes sense later, you build bigger machines with hopefully better battery technology.
Ultimately though, for proper big jobs, you need proper big tools. Maybe a partnership or "exit strategy" works.
Though maybe I've played too many RTS games like Supreme Commander...
If the missing ingredient is not some secret technology that only few of these old players have, they are probably too busy with their existing business.
Management may invest many years developing some new key technology on the side but when it comes to actually taking the market, it's hard to focus on two areas at the same time.
> Caterpillar, John Deer, etc. already have remote operation vehicles. And a lot of provisions on what types of kits can be retrofitted onto their equipment without violating their terms/warranties.
Sounds ripe for disruption, then.
If a startup demonstrates promise, VC money will flood in. Then it's just a balancing of economics. Is the new VC-backed method cheaper? If so, the incumbents will lose market share relative to the value prop.
To the parent posters point though, those manufacturers are holding outsized control over what can be retrofit to their machines, so to disrupt them, you have to make your own machines. Working on and owning heavy equipment myself, I of course have looked at it and thought there's a lot to improve, but at the the same time, I don't really see where the big brain Silicon Valley + venture bucks ethos can be applied to the space, it would be a long and slow grind of doing mostly straightforward mechanical engineering and supply chain/vendor agreements to build something like a bulldozer, just to enter a near impenetrable market due to many existing sunk costs and long relationships between buyers and the existing manufacturers.
my understanding is that the barrier to entry in this space isnt manufacturing the equipment, but rather having a large dealer network for people to use for service and repairs. my impression is that people largely buy whatever has a nearby dealer for this reason. and these dealer connections are more and more important as they make it more and more impossible to work and maintain the equipment as an individual
Venture hasn’t managed to make a dent in Nvidia despite massive investments.
Maybe they aren’t as powerful as you think outside the comparatively trivial “build
some software” markets. Hell even in networking, compute and storage there are only three or four real success stories in the last two and a half _decades_.
The manufactures are aware of monopoly laws and will give you the 'key' to put your own thing on and even sell it - for a 'reasonable fee' which may be six figures and proff you will care about safety. Universities have got the key for student projects (under nda)
disclosure: I work for jonh deere but am not speaking for the company. The above is all I feel I can say on the subject
CAT, Deere are both doing very interesting things with older autonomy techniques. Deere has acquired several companies, and partnered with others to bring in talent from outside. CAT has worked with outside companies (notably Trimble, Topcon) for key technologies when it makes a big difference. Both are awesome companies, but not AI/ML companies at the core and it'll take a lot of work for them to get there. I think this is very much like the self driving world 10 years ago where OEMs tried very hard to become software companies, but ultimately Cruise and Waymo were the ones that executed.
Neither Cruise nor Waymo seems to be profitable yet, and the jury is still out on whether they will win the market. They may be the MySpaces (or the Fiskers) of autonomous driving.
I'm an architect. Well really now an architecture professor who (elevator pitch) writes computational tools to implement sophisticated geometries in advanced fabrication...
That's all to say I want advancements in jobsite automation desperately. But it's WAY harder than people from other domains think. Imagine driving on a road while you're also building it while others are doing both around you too...
These folks seem to be concentrating at the moment on excavation which (without looking) if I recall is already a pretty active and developed in terms of automation. But get out of the ground and you hit some pretty big issues pretty quick. To get a sense, heres's one of my go-to articles when people wonder about jobsite automation...
Construction is dominated by scheduling. The high bit of construction scheduling looks a lot like job shop scheduling and job shop scheduling is NP Hard. To the degree that is true, there are no generic optimization algorithms.
But like all real world optimization problems, better solutions based on the specific nature of the inputs are usually possible.
In the case of construction scheduling, relationships are the most likely route to optimization. You can dig all night long, but if the plumber does’t show up in the morning to lay pipe, your schedule is not improved and the plumber shows up in the morning at your job site because of the long term business relationship across many projects instead of some other jobsite.
[I practiced architecture in the past. Everything takes as long as it takes].
This is tangential, but I recommend Katsushiro Otomo's (of Akira fame) dystopian take on large-scale automated construction, the short movie Construction Cancellation Order, part of an anthology known in the west as Neo Tokyo[1], released in 1987 (Akira was released in 1988).
I won't link to it here, but it seems someone uploaded it to archive.org (most likely illegally).
This to me vibes with the world of manga Blame by Tsutomu Nihei. In it large automata, have been building the mega structure long after biological humans are gone. The structure already encompasses the moon, and they are still building. Cool concept, which goes well together with the architecture background of the author.
I didn't think open field construction was hampered by the humans in the loop? Quite the contrary, I was under the naive impression that the heavy machinery was already largely doing the vast majority of the work. Even when operated by a human.
Will be neat to see where this goes. But I'm reminded of some Amazon guys that were supposed to revitalize the supply chains. My memory is that that didn't work out so well.
CAT and others (hyundai, hitachi, john deere, kubota, komatsu, etc) are already exploring this sort of automation (and have been for at least a decade).
This isn't somehow a new industry because some Waymo engineers decided to make a company.
There have been a handful of residential venture backed bricklaying and extrusion concreting robotics startups that I am aware of but they've had trouble with outputs not meeting builsing standards, interupting other tradespeople workflows on construction sites, being difficult to adapt to new site conditions and ultimately a hard sell to customers - no one wants to be a guinea pig test site for what is likely the biggest purchase of their life.
I think it's similar to Tesla entering the automotive world. The existing automakers had some moats, but they also had a lot of legacy responsibilities and liabilities that Tesla did not have (existing warranties, lawsuits, recalls, parts stock, maintaining support for old vehicles in various internal software systems, updating software on old vehicles when age related problems arise, retiree pensions/healthcare, etc).
A newcomer in the heavy equipment space will have similar challenges and advantages. Funny enough, a lot of heavy equipment works very similar to cars with their CAN (and other) Buses for control and feedback.
I mean... Tesla still makes up a minority of vehicles out there. And without government investment, they almost certainly would not have made it to where they are, now?
Yes, Tesla was valued more for potential growth. But it was also the kind of potential growth that I'm not sure is viable outside of consumer spaces.
Are you serious? Building a good excavator is almost certainly more than just having the material. Similarly, knowing how to deal with the earth will have more than a few curves based on the composition.
It is not easy to find on demand trained operators that are willing to relocate in an instant to whatever forgotten by god construction site you set up for months.
I find this hard to believe, to be honest. The capital costs of the machinery is already such that paying a premium to relocate someone for the duration of the construction is almost certainly not the bottle neck for most construction jobs?
If you have numbers on this, I'm game to see them. Just because I find it hard to believe doesn't mean I think it is impossible.
This report isn't looking at open field construction, though? It literally highlights the most expensive cities to build in. I'm not surprised that it is expensive to keep skilled labor in places where they will be in very high demand.
There are companies (like Kiewit) that specifically hire and pay (a lot more) to incentivize their employees to travel. It's a really really hard job and many people burn out. The travel is brutal.
The worst is that it’s not even semi-permanent move. You go to the site, you work for some months then you need to move to the next. If by accident you have a family then guaranteed they cannot follow you and you will be seeing them only sporadically.
It is if you aren't adverse to training people and living with lower productivity for a few months as they learn. The biggest obstacle to becoming a heavy equipment operator is finding someone willing to put you in heavy equipment without already being an experienced heavy equipment operator. And the machines cost enough money that someone can't afford to just go buy their own excavator and practice, even really old used equipment that leaks fluids and can't run more than 20 minutes without overheating can cost 6 figures, especially if you also need a truck and large equipment trailer to move it. And even if someone likes the job and gets past those obstacles there are other restrictions, like drug usage, that keeps many people out of the business. You went home and smoked a joint last week but this week something broke or went wrong? Well you better hope they don't fear any liability because they will drug test you, fire you, and black list you to shed all liability.
What about caffeine? Tobacco? Refined sugars? Pain killers? Are you going to pay for people to do nothing for 6 months while they wait for an injury to heal and stop taking painkillers? Why are you not regularly drug tested for your job and fired and blackballed from the industry if it comes up positive?
It is completely idiotic to kick people out for smoking weed on their own time. And then you wonder why you have trouble filling these positions. People use drugs and have since before humans were human, get over it.
If you can automate efficiently enough, you can build far finer structures.
For example look at how detailed the structure and weld arrangement is for modern cars, vs. back when robots only just started to take care of the frame welding on the assembly line.
Or how optical HDMI cables are affordable because they use fully automated UV-cure-resin-glued fiber alignment straight from the cable end into the optoelectronic chips, without needing optical connectors or any other human-labor to get the light path connected up. That's how they manage to do it the conceptually easiest way: amplifier->laser->fiber->photodiode->amplifier, and repeat for the 4 high-speed pairs. Also handing the low speed communication channel separately with just normal wires as signal degradation isn't an issue for that.
Or for example 3d printer infill: that's something no one would do manually in such a way, but if it's just automated it's quite desirable/efficient.
App rental e-scooters: they rely on automation to organize even when parked "pretty much anywhere they're not gonna block traffic", and as such become relevant for even short trips.
If you have an unsupervised robot that lays bricks for you to build up a house, you can get away with smaller bricks (and thus a lighter/cheaper machine needing a smaller crane to lift up/out of higher floors), than if you need a human to supervise it.
Smaller machine if slower means more machines, meaning cheaper production of the machines due to scale.
Auto-feeders for nail guns in construction means more smaller nails as placing 3 in a row takes barely longer than just 2.
Especially if the nail gun could, say, run like an optical mouse and automatically trigger at a configured spacing while dragged along a surface with the trigger held down.
Do you know how much California High Speed Rail is over budget?
What if we could bring massive infrastructure projects down from the billions to the millions? Wouldn't that be a great thing for all of society?
What if we could build new power plants, connect all cities with HSR, rebuild all our old bridges, add thousands of new skyscrapers, and do it all under budget?
Think about what steel did for society. Automated construction is the next highest order step function change. It'll be insanely good for society.
It is not lack of knowing how to build rail that is keeping HSR over budget and never finished. It is lack of will. Largely driven from lack of direct need.
Unrelated apart from the words "rock" and "construction": I wouldn't be surprised if we see dry stone construction becoming very practical thanks to advances in computer vision and robotics.
Dry stone construction is incredibly durable -- it doesn't rely on mortar which can weather away -- but it is limited by needing to reshape stones to fit together tightly (often by making flat surfaces). A human stonesmith can look at a handful of stones and find one which is close to fitting in the necessary spot; but a computerized system could scan thousands of stones and build tightly-fitting stonework with minimal need for reshaping.
An interesting thought, im pretty wary on most automated construction techniques, but dry stone construction does seem like a good fit for automation. It needs to be done before any other construction is really done and takes a decent chunk of time even for a team of humans so not a lot of people or other things going on around the area or in the way. There are still some issues that need experimentation. You can go 99% of the way with fairly simple imaging, but that last 1% can be tricky and usually requires tactile sensation and probing and pushing on stones to get a rock solid fit, but perhaps the actual technique/style of stone fitting would alleviate that last bit.
This feels more plausible for long-term success than Waymo for a number of reasons:
* Construction sites are smaller in footprint
* They’re more easily covered in sensor networks to support autonomous operations
* They’re typically controlled-access environments, which reduces potential interruptions to automated routines
* Since they have higher risk profiles than public infrastructure, the expectation is that workers will be more aware of autonomous operations and any deviations before they cause serious harm
Honestly, I’d wager closed-site autonomy takes off before anyone nails national or global self-driving on existing infrastructure.
The flip side is that they work with a lot more degrees of freedom (a car has just steering and speed to adjust), very diverse machinery and a ton more exceptions that need to be handled frequently
True, but they have more freedom to attack low-hanging fruits and build capabilities in order of ease. With a self-driving car, there’s not a whole lot of iteration allowed - you have your capital to do R&D, but eventually investors expect that car to drive on public roads without incident or support, something nobody can do at the moment.
For construction sites, on the other hand, you could (more) easily automate things like dump trucks or material transports using preprogrammed routes and manual triggers when something is done or needed. Then you can iterate on those systems to add more capabilities, more automations, more integrations with other equipment.
Kind of like how tractors have iteratively improved over time because they benefit from a lot of the same limitations as construction sites. At least that’s my thinking on it.
There are btw modern tractors that can drive autonomously on the fields. You configure the GPS coordinates of the field and the tractor can do various routes and patterns through the field on it's own. You're just not allowed to leave the wheel alone with current laws.
Definitely they can keep slicing the problem and deliver viable solutions within the boundary specified.
I just don’t think that a single solution will cover the full suite of construction site machinery. Scaling will be tough. But as you said they will be printing cash in the meantime.
Civil engineering is already a field where the very largest projects are done by humans planning and building the roads and bridges for the robots to move in (such as things rented from Mammoet [1] with extra control systems), but it does require significant human oversight (typically a metaphorical red button).
It's all very one off and specific, and given how big those projects are that seems unlikely to change. The manufacturing of suburbs though would be a whole different ballgame.
Apparently the providers recognize that there is significant growth in the complexity of control systems, and so there is a lot of fishing around for R&D funding on that side, however, being classic physical hardware people they severely undervalue the contribution software at that level makes.
Most of the actual planning and execution work is done by the usual big civeng consultant companies in a very globalized manner.
I could see this really accelerating strip mining or deforestation in places where there either isn't a lot of local opposition or there is a favorable regulatory environment. It makes me wonder if Tinto is an investor.
Think of any construction that's remote though. Especially infrastructure. Wouldn't it be cool if a bunch of excavators could just work all day and night to dig that trench, move that huge amount of dirt from one place to another? I feel like there are lots of situations where automation could be done.
At the scale where automated earth moving equipment makes economic sense, those restrictions often won’t apply. Highway construction and other vertically integrated projects are where this potentially makes sense.
Operating hours are the least of logistical hurdles for most projects. Schedule coordination dominates and the critical path can only move as fast as the slowest element on it.
I'm skeptical of the plan to provide a "kit" that can be put on arbitrary construction vehicles. I think Cruise tried something similar with personal vehicles and quickly learned it really could only build a system for a specific vehicle. There are tons of complexities associated with mounting of sensors and interfacing with the vehicle specific control systems.
Not saying it can't be done, but I wouldn't be surprised if the company has to pivot to supporting a subset of their goal and then gets bought out by some larger company to work on their line of construction vehicles.
It might be easier to collaborate with an established producer of a specific vehicle and create a partially custom vehicle from the same "car platform".
It is not. These companies are actively hostile to this sort of thing and with good reason: muddy liability in a context where people can be injured, maimed, crippled and killed.
The “add on” thing belongs in he list of tarpit ideas. Watching Cruise and Ghost Automation flail about for years vaporizing cash trapped on this idea was like watching a comedy.
The wasted time and money in construction comes entirely from two places: a small percentage of crooked builders (and their local council mates), and the bureaucracy that is trying to protect the citizens from same. Big brother puts in a lot of hoop-jumps standards and supposed checks and balances that end up creating massive delays and costs for the consumer, but the actual standards (while usually quite sensible) are easily sidestepped by the crooked builders, so the war continues, and the overhead constantly increases with the usual expansion-only government regulation ratchet.
None of these things are susceptible to "AI" and other such automation. We have had prefab construction for decades.
There are already so many specialized machines in construction. When I was a kid I thought we needed exo-skeletons. Then I watched modern construction happen and realized we already have all these wild Bobcat like machines doing all the heavy lifting that humans have done in the past.
I guess it's cheaper to use a computer to drive a Bobcat than a human driver. But I wonder if the cost is worth the loss in immediate knowledge and speed. There's no way a computer is going to be faster than a human while also being safe. So I have my doubts.
> Bedrock Robotics is focused on developing a self-driving kit that can be retrofitted to construction and other worksite vehicles
> Bedrock is “upgrading existing fleets with sensors, compute, and intelligence that understands project goals, adapts to changing conditions, and executes work around the clock,”
I can also imagine this applying to all kinds of mining too, where there's already all the heavy equipment to mine and transport resources and we're just turning it into a robot so they don't have to employ a human anymore.
So, comma.ai but for construction. That's pretty cool. Although as another user mentioned, right to repair/modify is likely the worst in heavy equipment.
I wonder how that problem could be solved. Could something along the lines of warranty and service indemnification work, maybe?
But really, an acquisition by the OEM might be the only way to make this work in the long term?
Once they have the whole stack vertically integrated, you could just contract out the job to them entirely? If the excavator breaks, that's their problem, they'll bring another, you're paying for results not equipment.
At first, yes. Longer term, self-driving construction vehicles will likely change the entire market - perhaps similar to how self-driving passenger cars would change that market. Vehicles will be designed differently and consumption-based business models would potentially make up a larger part of the market. Investors are probably see that opportunity.
It is about safety but you can put up a fence and then only allowed trained people inside. Which means you can say if you get killed it is your fault and the courts will back it (ask a lawyer for the books of fine print)
From the imagery, they seem to be focused on earthmoving. Some cursory googling indicates an excavator operator can cost on the order of $1000/day (to the end customer, presumably less to an owner-operator). For some loose context, a slab-on-grade warehouse project I was distantly involved with a couple years back budgeted some $3.5M of sitework (includes other things than just earthmoving), which was about 10% of the total construction cost.
Plug in your own longevity and uptime assumptions, but if that roof-mount kit costs on the order of $50k, it seems viable.
To build a commercially successful autonomous bulldozer requires building a commercially successful bulldozer. That’s hardware and hardware is hard. Probably harder than the autonomous part because bulldozers are a century past the proof-of-concept era.
My cynical take is this is financial engineering more than construction engineering. YMMV.
I wonder what fraction of the hardware goes into hosting the human operator and into ensuring their safety. How much hardware cam be optimized away when there is no longer a human operator?
What’s interesting here isn’t just the move from self-driving cars to construction, it’s how Bedrock is betting that autonomy will take off faster in industries where safety, labor shortages and cost pressures already demand it.
I love science fiction, so I could imagine decomposition machine where dented car goes in and buckets with rubber/plastic/steel/copper/aluminium/glass come out. Identify materials and cut them piece by piece should be doable. Identifying individual greasy parts and removing them maybe in 25 years.
Is this a scenario where offshore operators doing remote equipment control would be 90% as good as a US union worker for 15% of the price and could work in shifts 24/7 (e.g. for mining operations)? Sensor + control data would be great training for future AI.
Jumping straight to autonomous operations seems expensive/hard.
The hard part with remote and automation is you often are in mud. Local humans are still much better able to run the edge of getting stuck. and if you do get stuck local help is needed to get unstuck.
There’s a startup not far from me working on remotely operated construction machines. They explicitly are targeting terrestrial as well as space operations, but I would be curious if the communication latency to any reasonably close celestial object would require autonomous operation.
I'm assuming for stuff like mining and oil fields most of the cost is having people on site to service the equipment, not just operating the equipment. You need the robot that can service the other robots, and then the robot that can service itself.
I was thinking the same thing but the cost of an equipment operator isn't that significant compared to the expense of running and especially maintaining these machines, and if teleop incurs more maintenance cost or efficiency loss due to clumsier operation, it's definitely a step in the wrong direction financially.
First, real estate in US designed to be the sink for excess money globally gained by nefarious means, sell and make the money clean.
Second, all the prep work before actual construction costs the same regardless of the size of the home. Its profitable for builders to build large homes (cheaper per square foot) and sell them at a premium.
Third, zoning laws that make anything thats not a SFH mostly illegal to build.
Fourth, manufactured homes are illegal in most areas.
Finally, The building codes are localized to each county, there is no federal/state building code.
As long as these perverse incentives exist, costs are not going to come down.
Looked at the linkedIn career paths in the profiles.
Nobody there worked in construction before this.
They may have hired some domain experts, but i doubt they will get it together.
Especially, as automated construction has very little to do with "copy human" constructors and replicate and all todo with abstract the environment away and get it done. Meaning, you will want classic autonomy with excavators and trucks and concrete trucks - until you have poured the base plate for a house.
Then the best approach still is, to have basically a factory for pre-built components and assemble them on site. The "doing constructor things" with machines on site- does not scale.
Eg. if bricklayers could talk to their machine the way we can with coding agents, and say “yep, wall here please, check the blueprints to confirm how high and where the holes for the windows go”, retired & injured tradespeople could choose to come back. Less injuries means cheaper insurance & better margins. People could work in multiple parts of a site by supervising several robots, and not be exhausted at the end of the day. The list of benefits to individuals and the industry is long.
If legit construction robots were a thing they'd be primarily trained on assembling the most automation friendly cladding systems instead of wasting time laying bricks, incidentally why brick fell out of favor.
Ironically a lot of construction robot explorations has been bricklaying / mason bots, but that's because laying bricks is computation and mechanically simple repetitive task not because it's an efficient building system. The benefit is we'll probably be able to build with bricks/masonry cheaper, the caveat being it will probably be relative more expensive relative to automation optimized building systems.
Machines will need humans, for sure. The question is how many? For instance, there is a company using printing technology to build homes in Austin, Texas. The target number of workers needed to operate the "printer" is 3, down from 10. So on the positive side, the remaining 3 workers will have a better work environment, maybe the costs of building houses will go down a bit, etc. In the other hand, 7 workers are no longer needed. My point is that the gains in efficiency will come with some winners and, in my humble opinion, many losers. And that will only help to downsize the middle class even further. Don't get me wrong, from a scientific/technological point of view, I am looking forward it. But I am concerned with the social impact in the long term.
Definitely echo the concerns about bureaucratic red tape (looking at you, California high-speed rail fiasco) that kind of environment makes innovation in infrastructure extra hard. Still, there's something compelling about Bedrock’s approach if they can genuinely deliver a system that adapts in real-time to the complex nature of construction sites. The big question is whether they can win through retrofitting existing fleets or by locking in tight partnerships with OEMs, adding to that the competition is going to be pretty tough
Automation will break the back of capitalism. That's a good thing. But it's going to get very bad before that happens.
There are a ton of jobs that should be automated like working in an Amazon warehouse. Automation can go one of two ways: it can make all of our lives easier or it can displace the workforce and suppress the wages of those who remain so those are the very top can have $250 billion isntead of $200 billion.
Those displaced will be told to find new jobs and that will work for a time with considerable personal hardship for those affected. We've seen the impacts of this with manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas from the Rust Belt, for example. But at some point we'll start to run out of jobs for people to go. And then things will get very, very bad.
I imagine a distant future where food is grown with automation, houses will be built that way, robots will pick up the trash and so on. This will leave people to find more meaningful pursuits. But this will require the ultra-wealthy to share and history has taught us that this will get bloody.
Instead we'll face a future where companies will fail because there simply aren't customers because nobody can afford anything.
I welcome less labor intensive constructions but construction is a significant (~20%?) sector of the economy. The potential for negative impacts from such mass layoffs is enormous.
and as others have mentioned: there's a ton of cost built in that really comes down to corruption and overcoming NIMBYism.
i think the obvious cognitive dissonance is mostly fueled by denial. it's acceptable for them to believe that the dirty blue collar people will fall on hard times. also they don't want to believe that white collar jobs will be lost because you can't use the "teach the coal miners to code" meme-think on it. turns out reality can be a little counter-intuitive sometimes. sometimes it can even be different from what you see on TV! wow!
As long as the bills are paid then most people will be happy to not go to traditional work, but instead do more interesting/ of value to the community work.
Oh please, the billionaires who control these things aren't going to share the wealth with the people they put out of work. They're going to suck as many of us dry as they possibly can
"As long as the bills are paid" is the key point. They won't be because people will be out of a job with no safety net
I feel like most people who got into programming because they liked it (rather than for money) feel this way. I certainly don’t wanna be solving the same problems over and over again.
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