Tower To Be Built By Flying Robots

Zothecula writes with an excerpt from an article in Gizmag: "The FRAC Centre in Orléans, France will for the first time host an exhibition to be built entirely by flying robots. Titled 'Flight Assembled Architecture,' the six meter-high tower will be made up of 1,500 prefabricated polystyrene foam modules. The installation involves a fleet of quadrocopters that are programmed to interact, lift, transport and assemble the final tower, all the time receiving commands wirelessly from a local control room."

Comments

Cost benefit ratio

[MichaelSmith]

I wonder if it would have been cheaper to make every component a flying robot and just have them assemble themselves.

Re:Cost benefit ratio

[MichaelSmith]

I am inspired by the idea of fractal robots. Basically you mass produce robotic building materials and broadcast plans for structures to them. Doors and windows could be created in a building as required by the building materials. As the technology matures the robots may acquire intelligence. I imagine a future where lonely swarms of bricks roam the countryside looking for sleeping homeless humans to build houses around.

Re:Cost benefit ratio

[artor3]

Presumably, you have to pay someone to lay those bricks. If you can make a $2 brick that lays itself, you might start getting close to parity. Not that I think we're there yet, but it is cool to think about.

Re:Two centuries of job destruction

[HiThere]

*Today's* Robots and software cannot sufficiently deal with malicious human actors.

There are lots of jobs that today’s robots and software can't handle. That doesn't tell you much about tomorrow's. Or the day after tomorrow.

If society doesn't adapt to this, things will get brutal. You want a "Butlerian Jihad"? This is the way to get it. The Luddites weren't being unreasonable, they were fighting to keep the jobs that their survival depended upon. Popular history tells the story the bosses used, but the facts are there if you dig them up.

Did you ever hear about the riots caused by calendar reform when the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian calendar in Britain? Guess what those were about. "Give us back our 21 days!" meant that the landlords charged everyone nearly an extra months rent. THAT's what those riots were about. It wasn't people being silly and superstitious, as I was taught in grade school. Whenever you hear of mobs of upset people being "silly and superstious" throughout history, if you check carefully you will usually find that the story has been corrupted, and they were protesting a vile injustice being committed upon them. (They didn't always pick the right target. Scapegoating is common. But they [nearly?] always have an actual injustice that they are protesting.)

This business of requiring that everyone have a job when the decent jobs are disappearing is a catastrophe waiting to happen.