So this is pretty cool, courtesy of Business Insider Australia. It's a short video from a company Fastbrick Robotics. There's a housing boom in Australia, which has pushed up demand for bricklayers, who are in short supply. The company is shooting to create a robot that can lay all the brick work for a typical house in three days and at lower cost. Currently, bricklayers make about $600 to $1,000 a day and lay about 300 bricks a day. The robot below can double that in just one hour.
I post this on day three of the Democratic National Convention, from the media tent, where a bunch of Bernie Sanders protestors (including actors Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon) are chanting for even more rules and regulations to slow down the sort of technological progress that makes us richer and better off over time. There was a lot of that last night, too, at the DNC in Philly, with various calls to block free trade and regulate and restrict innovations such as the sharing economy. And of course last week at the RNC in Cleveland, Donald Trump and a bunch of Republicans called for other sorts of barriers to trade, which will slow the rate and quality of innovation as well.
So far at least, a better future always arrives for us in America and the rest of the world. Politics can create a context in which it comes faster or slower, but politics doesn't ultimately stop it from happening. Given the Fortress America mentality regarding trade in both parties (and immigration on the part of the GOP), I'm thinking we may well be heading into a slowdown period. But hopefully not. In any case, I find this sort of video that gives us a glance of possible developments that will free us from doing various sorts of manual labor and give us the opportunity to do other stuff with our time strangely calming. Maybe you will too.
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