Construction Sites Will Become Like Automated Manufacturing Factories #emtechdigital

Andrew Anagnost is the President and CEO, Autodesk.
He discusses using AI to improve construction and many other jobs and industries. Automation and Imagination: Designing a World for 10 Billion People.

Andrew sees other industries catching up to the automation that has existed in manufacturing. He sees the automation of the construction site as being one of the earliest adopters of this new wave.

The first step is machine assisted collaboration.

The various ecosystems will have to adapt. The regulatory ecosystem and the licensing ecosystem.

Over a 20 year period there will be an evolution to a more complete and black box form of automation.

Andrew gave a recent talk about the new wave of automation. He shared his perspective on automation, the changing nature of work, and how technology can unlock opportunities to do more, better, with less negative impact on the world.

SOURCE- Live reporting by Brian Wang of Nextbigfuture.com at EmTech Digital 2019. Youtube talk from Autodesk University Keynote

8 thoughts on “Construction Sites Will Become Like Automated Manufacturing Factories #emtechdigital”

  1. Today, automation of all processes is a very important part of business. This minimizes a lot of manual work and increases efficiency. The only thing worries me is the loss of jobs, since everything will be automated. But, due to the fact that the number of vacancies is increasing, this situation does not threaten. There is an application that allows you to control and manage tasks “https://fluix.io/industry-construction

  2. For pipes, yes. For constructing the hospital otherwise…?

    There’s also more being done in modular construction now in factories, because of scarcity of labor forcing construction firms to finally do what they should have started doing 30+years ago.

    In China, they can quickly build entire skyscrapers by assembling pre-manufactured modules. Broad Group, I believe. Brian has written extensively about it. But Broad Group ran into vested interest obstruction even in China.

  3. As a pipefitter I saw more and more automated orbital welders doing welds faster and better than any of us. On of the last jobs I had before I retired was to fuse the plastic PVC for plumbing in a hospital. It was done by a computer. It’s coming and coming fast.

  4. I have been in a trade union over 54 years (72 year old) but even I can see the writing on the wall.
    It’s funny but when you tell people their job will be replaced by a robot the inevitable response is “Oh sure, everybody’s else’s job will be replaced by a robot. But a robot could never do mine”. 🙂

  5. They still use blueprints. Well, they are drawn by software, but they still print them out at many sites. I interviewed with a start-up that was trying to digitize everything. Besides blueprints, spreadsheets and everything else is printed and kept in file cabinets in those ‘office foreman trailers’ and re-print them whenever there are changes, for crying out loud. I learned such how much in the Dark Ages construction still is.

  6. He sees the automation of the construction site as being one of the earliest adopters of this new wave.

    Then he’s totally clueless about the subject matter he talks about. If that wasn’t the case, then he would have said instead: construction site as being one of the last adopters

    The Construction industry has been a total fossil when it comes to adopting technology/automation. Farming is more way ahead of it…and the productivity gains delta between the two since the 1950s has widened so significantly it is embarrassing. In fact, productivity in construction HAS DROPPED in the last decade and half, for crying out loud.

    And what little productivity improvements that has gone on happened in the commercial/industrial building sectors or overseas or by people who openly violated housing codes to build their homes on their lots.

    Why do you think such polymath invention geniuses like Buckminister Fuller, Jacques Fresco and such got their start mostly by trying to tackle housing construction bottlenecks? It was where the most productivity and quality gains were, that’s why. Going all the way back to the 1940s.

    Hello, just using shipping containers as the basis of pre-fab modules is superior in cost and quality than what goes on today at housing construction sites.

    The good news is that since this sector his hyper-ripe for huge disruption, when it finally does occur it will be it’s own mundane mini-Singularity for those involved.

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