Construction is one of the hardest industries to bring new technology into. In the United States, building codes are handled county by county.
Astounding but increasingly routine feats of construction in China & the Middle East are embarrassing to watch from my vantage point in the United States. A lot can sit empty for years, waiting on permits, barricaded to keep the “unhoused” from pitching tents.
Foreign successes are often dismissed as labor exploitation, which we would never do. Enlightened Americans are protecting our children from laying bricks so they can have important careers as lawyers, vibe coders and OnlyFans creators. Our homes are built by all kinds of totally not exploited immigrant construction workers.
Oh, wait, I guess they all got better job offers from the countries where they were born. So long and thanks for all the homes.
I sometimes fantasize about lawyers displaced by AI getting busy building homes. That’s probably even less likely than the OnlyFans stars picking up the slack. The only conceivable ways to build in the world’s richest country are to import people; import robots; or import people to build robots to build everything else. Which sounds better to you?
A couple years ago, I was visiting Indiana. I think I might be the first VC who ever went to Indiana. I met a team that created an ingenious way of building adobe mix homes.
You’ve seen these terracotta looking homes in the Southwest, but they could be built most anywhere. They have great thermal properties and people love them. The main reason they aren’t built more often? Too much labor.
Imagine turning the lot into an arcade style claw machine. The thing picks up a handful of adobe mix; basically some clay, straw, sand, dirt and then places it precisely to build a wall. The drone has a kind of Theragun attachment that it uses to go smooth up the sides of the walls.
Terran Robotics autonomously sculpts the Earth itself into the homes we have always wanted. Better homes made of the stuff naturally laying around. A couple guys and a drone can show up on site and build a home this way. Extremely low cost for labor and materials.
All this means more, better, cheaper homes that we’re really going to need when the immigrants come back.