Robots won’t save us

In the U.S. alone, we need to build 7M housing units for some 16M Americans, put 100s of billions of dollars of government funding to work to fix our crumbling infrastructure, invest in electronics manufacturing and transition to clean energy (or make humans a multi-planetary species in case Earth becomes uninhabitable).

The solutions to all of these challenges depend on construction being carried out on a massive scale.

But robots are unlikely to be coming to our rescue. Of course, semi-autonomous masons and painters, drones, exoskeletons, rovers etc can all augment the skilled work of humans. But the chances of fully autonomous craft robots clocking into job sites in any helpful time frame are slim.

Just ask Chat GPT...

So even the robots don’t think they’re going be the fix for our skilled labor crisis in time. As an industry (and species), we should plan and act accordingly.