Artificial Intelligence, or AI, isn’t just coming to industrialized construction; it’s already here. It can do work as benign as writing text descriptions of floor plans and rendering files, or it can be a game changer when it comes to the factory automation cost equation.
When I first saw the 2004 American science fiction action film I, Robot, starring Will Smith, I believed that robots could get to that level at some point, just not in my lifetime. I was wrong, completely wrong.
A few months ago I binge-watched a Netflix Series called 3 Body Problem. In it, there’s an illuminating observation made by an alien race about technology acceleration. The aliens noted that while humans have existed for more than 100,000 years, it took them 90,000 years to discover agriculture and to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers. However, it took just 10,000 more years for humans to evolve from farmers to industrialists, and a little less than 200 years after the start of the Industrial Revolution to develop atomic power. Just 50 years later, computers were driving the information age. The point is that technology is hurtling forward at warp speed — and it will only get faster. That includes offsite construction.
Tech skeptics often compare offsite construction to auto manufacturing. In 2015, for example, Ford spent $3 billion developing the new F-150 and the automated production processes used to assemble it. Relatively speaking, that was easy. The F-150 has fairly limited variations, the factory robots can be taught every precise move needed to place, weld, or install each part, and each variation can be sold in 49 states.
Homes are more challenging. Every state, as well as many cities and towns, has its very own variation of the I-codes. And when was the last time you saw a car or truck built out of warped and waned wood? We humans haven’t made the construction of our homes an easy process to mass replicate.
But what if an AI-driven robot could sense if a 2×4 was warped, and crown it in the correct direction? What if it could determine that a stud was split and cull it from the build of the wall assembly? And what if you didn’t have to teach any of that to the robot, but it learned and did it all by itself?
This technology is coming, and once it’s developed, you won’t need three technicians standing by a wall table to fix and rework problems. That will leave the factory with more capital to deploy for robots and automation. We may even be able to follow Moore’s law and double the speed and sophistication of homebuilding technology at half the cost going forward.
Of course, there’s also the question of whether we can use AI to design homes. We can, but design poses a different problem. Most American consumers still fundamentally want their homes to look like those they grew up in, and, in fact, homes today look a lot like they did a few centuries ago, at least on the outside. That’s what the consumer buys. We have most of what was in the Jetson’s home; we just don’t want to live in a structure that looks like the Jetson’s home.
Despite these challenges, I believe that in the very near future technology acceleration will lead to homes that are designed and built faster and better with AI. Will we have failures along the way? Of course we will. And some of them will be expensive failures. But the homebuilding game board is changing under our feet every day.
Winston Churchill once said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” That’s apropos for AI in homebuilding and I for one, am enthusiastic about the future!
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