Construction Firm Balfour Beatty Considers Drone Workers

cagraham writes "International engineering and construction firm Balfour Beatty is considering using drones in order to construct walls and monitor work sites, among other things. Beatty CIO Danny Reeves, speaking at the Fujitsu Forum, said drones could improve efficiency and safety on sites. He also talked of implementing sensors that would monitor worker's stress levels and bodily functions, and notify management when they became less effective, or mistake-prone, on the job."

Comments

And do what with the unemployed?

[Rigel47]

This is all well and good and inevitable but society really needs to think hard and fast about what we are going to do with a future where there are only so many jobs available for people with a shovel or a wrench. It used to be something like 30% of the nation was involved with food production. Thanks to industrialization that's now 1-2%. Even the last bastions of farm work -- fruit picking -- is being inched into by robotics. The farm hands who left the fields and went into the factories are now finding themselves being replaced en masse by sophisticated machines.

In the utopian fantasy the rise of the bots means the people have more leisure time and devote themselves to intellectual pursuits. In the reality playing out they go on disability and other "safety net" programs and lead meager lives of not-so-quiet desperation. As it is there are now more people going on disability than entering the work force. The economics of all this is just disastrous. From the government deficit on down to the generation of kids being raised in food stamp households the situation is untenable. One can only hope we find a path forward that does not involve increasing social decay and civil unrest.

It's a brave new world alright.