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.

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?).