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

Bodily ? - Boss - I need to pee now !

[burni2]

Boss: Can't be, your bladder is only 85% filled, you must give 120% !!

Brave new Odity

Ahh, predicting the future...

[Anonymous Coward]

What we envisioned: Man overseeing the construction robots doing their elaborate dance.

What we got: robotic sensors collect every bit of observable data, so that the man can be put into good use with highest efficiency.

Re:Ahh, predicting the future...

[hairyfeet]

The bigger question is how long are we gonna keep this broken system we call capitalism? Like it or not Star Trek had it right in that once the tech reaches a certain point capitalism doesn't work and I'd argue that for the majority we are already there.

Lets face facts, the entire basis of capitalism, trading labor for capital, is already dead. Like it or not the true moral of John Henry was that you could work yourself into a grave and still not beat the machine because it never gets tired, never hurts or gets sick, doesn't take bathroom breaks, it will work 24/7. Its quite obvious that we are already reaching the point that the majority simply isn't required to work as their labor is worthless when compared to the machine. Hell we are already at the point that corps like Walmart and Mickey D's have their wages paid by the government in the form of aid, why? Because if they had to pay a living wage they could just replace the workers with machines and end up better off, less errors, better performance, the human will always be at a disadvantage compared to the machine. You could replace the entire staff at a Mickey D with a modern computer controlled assembly line and it would run like Swiss watch, the people just aren't needed.

We have already seen the "just educate the masses herpa de derp" is a failure, the massive student loan defaults drive a stake through that particular lie, so what to do? I would argue the only thing one CAN do without having massive revolts is to simply pay the masses not to work, just as we pay farmers not to grow, because like it or not we are quickly reaching a point where the tech has made us humans obsolete.

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.

Re:reminds me of the story "manna"

[femtobyte]

The main part of the economics that don't make sense is trusting a secretive technocratic savior, wielding trillions of dollars of resources, to actually give a shit about helping out all the low-level peons who initially funded the system. It's an extremely elitist vision, that, by people's parents handing over investment money to a small cabal of technological geniuses, their kids will be handed a post-scarcity utopia on a platter --- instead of the wealthy technocrats simply joining forces with the rest of the oppressive oligarchy, laughing at the suckers who gambled away their children's futures on promises of technology serving the people rather than vice-versa. The story provides a well-founded criticism of the use of technology/Taylorization to enslave the masses, but the solution offered (post-scarcity salvation handed down from a technocratic elite) is absurdly prone to failure (i.e. the typical pattern that a technocratic elite will be just as self-serving as any other authoritarian elite handed control over human society).

Re:reminds me of the story "manna"

[maxwell demon]

Except that if you look closer at it, the utopia isn't a real utopia. If you don't follow the rules, you get re-educated ... where did I hear something like this, again? Ah, right, from communist countries. Where people really did not enjoy their re-education. And you get an operation which essentially gives the system complete control over you (the system can control your body for you, cut off your sensory perception and inject arbitrary artificial perceptions. And it is installed operatively, so you cannot just remove it. And apart from the word of a single person (who itself has that system implanted, so how can you trust that person, or even that you are really speaking to the person herself, for which you also have nothing but her word), you have no guarantee that it really will work for your best.

So why would this be set up? Well, to deal with the potential trouble makers, of course. The narrator of the story has several times tried to leave the zone she has to remain in. She's clearly someone who might cause serious trouble sooner or later. So she gets the control system implanted. Like all the other potential trouble makers. And to make sure they don't resist it, they get told this nice story about the Australian paradise. When they notice that they have been tricked, it is too late: They already have that system implanted in their head (and also, they have to remove something from the brain to install it; what function does this removed part normally perform? Maybe something related to critical thinking?).

Not really

[rsilvergun]

because you're ignoring the core problem he's discussing because he didn't name it: idle capacity. The wealthiest Americans have 40% of their net worth in cash. They're not investing. They're grabbing all the wealth and grinding the US economy to a halt. If anyone calls them on this and suggests we use the gov't to address the idle economy they're shouted down with cries of "Theif!" and "Deficits!".

Basically, we have enormous idle capacity in our economy and it's getting worse because we're racing to give ownership of everything to an increasingly small number of people, and these people can't possible use that idle capacity. No matter how greedy you are there's only so many hours in the day to buy stuff with...