Robotic Nation Evidence

This topic was covered last year in the post Robots and the construction industry, but Discover magazine has just published a new article on the process that provides more details:

The whole-house machine

From the article:

With a soft whir, the contour crafter’s head lays down inch-high extrusions of viscous concrete, one atop another, as a pie-shaped trowel smooths the surface. The head moves at 5 inches per second, which would create a 2,000-square-foot house in 24 hours.

As mentioned in my previous post:

Normally it is good for automation to lower the price of things. In the housing market, however, falling house prices can create some very uncomfortable problems. If house prices fall and home owners are underwater in their mortgages, they are trapped. Everyone has always assumed that home prices will increase in value from year to year, and the leverage that a mortgage provides works well when prices are rising. But if robots and other technologies cause housing prices to fall 25% to 50%, the leverage of a mortgage works the other way and can bankrupt a family very easily. A large number of defaults could ripple through the economy in unexpected ways. It will be very interesting to see what happens as robots begin a rapid infiltration into the construction industry.

The new robot being described here totally changes the house-building paradigm. However, it is just as easy to imagine the development of shingle-laying robots, painting robots, sheetrock-hanging-robots, framing robots and so on, so that traditional construction undergoes the same price reductions. It should be very interesting to watch these developments unfold.