Obsolescence of Labor in Automated Housing Assembly

Abstract

We are currently facing both a housing shortage, affordability crisis and a labor shortage globally. As of June 2022, there are 300,000-400,000 unfilled construction jobs in the U.S. market which contributes to a lack of housing stock for purchase further increasing the already high price of housing. There is also a general anxiety that new automation technologies, machines, robots, artificial intelligence, etc. will replace human occupied jobs. However, these advancements in automated building assembly present a path forward amidst construction job vacancies and increased demand for efficient housing. Over the past 70 years, manipulators, and tools to enhance human capabilities have been developed to perform difficult, repetitive, or dangerous tasks such as working with radioactive materials or the mass production of goods. In 1971, John Bollinger and Xavier Mendoza published their dissertation, Location Orientation Manipulator: A Physical Tool for the Study of Kinematics of Assembly of Building Structures, under the supervision of Konrad Wachsmann. As a critical development of automation in architectural building assembly the LOM, or Location Orientation Manipulator, laid an agenda for future automated building assembly machines. Automation and construction’s semi-automated mason, SAM, FBR’s Hadrian X, and ETH Zurich’s In Situ Fabricator continue to advance automated building assembly closer to the elimination of some human labor in the construction effort. Automating housing assembly can allow for the production of affordable housing more efficiently, of better quality, and more safely than traditional means of construction requiring extensive human labor.