Look at Czinger Automobile and the vertical assembly line concept Kevin Czinger is propagandizing. If you have a car designed for 3d printing, and fiber tubes, you might produce some big portion of a car. However, I tried sesrching the videos of an assembly process of Czinger 21C and did not find any. So it is probably an overassumption (at least) at this point.

Money won't matter. It is very unlikely that society would tolerate some having an obscene amount of land while others don't when individual value addition is zero. AI is about to make everybody equal, equally pointless, and unlike the failed communist attempts at the same, forced equality now is not gonna be an economic disaster.

Okay so I’m big believer in offsite manufacturing for housing and it’s finally starting to take off. If you look into panellised walls, pod bathrooms etc. I 100% believe that will happen in the next 20yrs. I just can’t get my head around how the housing will be a lot cheaper as the main issues killing the cost of housing is the utilities and materials.

Yes but the problem is that there is only a limited amount of resources on the planet and we as humans want unlimited things. For example, if Walmart said tomorrow that food will be free, watch a massive stampede of people grabbing everything and leaving others with nothing. This is why we have a cost mechanism and supply and demand. This is the problem with housing there is only a limited amount of materials and land which is what is stopping everyone from having affordable housing. It’s an unfortunate reality but reality never the less.

Nope. We have a crazy amount of resources. We lack the energy to extract and seperate it. We literally sit on the biggest rock of minerals in the solar system.

People don't need unlimited amounts of anything they ofcourse want it. But if something was unlimited and cheap most people won't use as much. It's like the corporate policy of unlimited leaves, if you give people infinite leaves they actually take less than the sanctioned leaves.

People underestimate how much land there is. Even if we want to limit our total area we can always give everyone more vertical space.

If you build from clay?

We do that with brick and block. It’s still a very expensive refining process unfortunately. See uk housing market. And if you mean getting like dirt from the fields and turning it into clay. Maybe with 3D printing or something but not all dirt is equal and it’s still way off 20yrs for this to be reality.

I see what your suggesting. Your saying if we can find away to extract the materials then the amount of materials is basically unlimited and will bring the price down. That makes sense. but then we’ve still got to solve the utilities and road and sewers costs.

In all seriousness, we'll never see this as a reality. Law makers don't want affordable housing. But, if we're moving to a point in time when AI is humanity's caregiver, why couldn't this happen? A centralized spot where resources are abundant could make it a reality.

I’m actually really socialist. I’m just being realistic. I do believe it will happen at some point. It’s just people saying singularity in 20yrs and we will have unlimited everything and live forever etc. but does anyone really believe that in 20yrs materials to build a whole house will basically be free and we will have ai robots capable of digging up all the roads and installing electric, water, internet and sewers and then connecting all the plumbing and electricity up inside? An ai wouldn’t even know where to begin to dig let alone tap into existing mains and distribute it and the dexterity to do it all.

Labour costs will eventually be zero with AI workers.

Most of this subreddit (I apologize for generalizing) thinks that artificial super intelligence will either be a genie or an oracle.

A genie will just do whatever we ask, without limitations.

"Build me a house on this remote mountain with full power, gas, and running water."

<Genie does nano-fabrication magic and poofs a house into existence.>

An oracle will answer all of our questions, without doing anything itself (imagine ChatGPT times 10,000,000,000,000).

"We need a way to travel independently between the stars."

<Oracle invents hyper-long-range teleportation, and explains in detail how to build it.>

You can forget about 20 years. I wouldn't even say 200 years. You'd have to start anew on a different planet. But let's say that we stick around here. You could set up production to automate. It wouldn't be one single robot, it would be multiple doing different tasks and coordinating with each other.

> It is very unlikely that society would tolerate some having an obscene
amount of land while others don't when individual value addition is zero.

You're describing a communism revolution and the current status quo. People are not going to give up their stuff without mass amounts of violence.

The cost of goods is not directly tied to the cost of production, where you born yesterday? They charge what they think people will pay for it, that's why America has a housing crisis and why insulin is +$1000usd/mo.

>How are you suppose to just get concrete, mdf board and wood etc mined and refined cheaply on site? 90% of sites are fields?

Although the chemical synthesis of concrete & wood is possible, I'm guessing he's probably referring to alternative synthetic materials superior to traditional building materials. That's the direction you would want to go if energy and labor was super cheap.

Exactly how things are done now isn't the only way to do them. There are much better materials possible via materials & chemical engineering, but they're thoroughly uneconomical due to energy/labor costs.

I don't agree with his assessment, unless he's talking about the scale of land ownership he has in the sticks.

This makes the most sense to me. Got any suggestions on the utilities problem?

No I hate communism. People who are currently calling themselves communist are deluded and can't see that power is the problem and not money. This is capitalism but the whole world and everyone in it are capitalists with equal share and AI is the working underclass. :P

I can 100% see this happening just not in 20yrs sadly

Altman is right...to some degree. I do eco-construction and you can definitely build a well insulated house with local raw materials (adobe, clay, compressed earth brick, straw). No concrete or fancy material though. Electric system could be 3d printed in the future and directly integrated in the structure.

Oh really? This is interesting. Have you got any suggestions on the utilities issue?

We could use hemp and dead wood to 3d print basic furnitures.

Unfortunately, it would take the deconstruction of our current system. It doesn't matter what 'ism' you subscribe to; they all work if they aren't infected by corruption. It is possible to draw merit from each teaching/lifestyle.

Some forms of housing can be dobe exactly this way, harvest the raw materials on site and process them to a solid building material right there. Take a look at the work of Nader Khalili, specifically Ceramic Houses . I've wanted to try one of his fired structures fir a long time, however the area I live in doesnt have the right ratio of energy:cement costs to make it all that economical. Might still do it just because.

Given abundant robot labor, I expect the largest component of costs will be the cost of energy and raw materials.

That can mean much cheaper goods and services in general, that's an important part of his $1200/month UBI idea. While you can count on the labor part being cheap, it's not a given the raw materials will be a lot cheaper. There will be massive demand for materials as people spread out from cities, even with massive increase in raw materials production with cheap robot labor. The labor part of installing utilities may not be a prob, but certain equipment you're just not going to make onsite. The most expensive things will still be those made in other people's factories. You just can't hope to be 100% self-sufficient and live a technologically modern lifestyle, even with robot labor.

Right okay I understand. Do you actually believe we will get ai robots in 20yrs capable of installing waters main etc? It just seems such a complex task for a robot.

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Maybe mud brick houses?

As a residential builder myself, I’m very interested to see what the next 20 years holds. I’m 49 now so this is pretty much what I have left to work.

North too. I live in the UP of Michigan and it’s basically southern Alabama with warmer coats.

I have worked with both housing and tech. I believe he must be thinking of nanobot equivalent robots, or other small bots which can gather resources and synthesize materials. I can see how in some possible future this could be done with the foundation and overall structure, but have a harder time understanding plumbing, electrical.

Go far enough into the future and anything is possible, I guess. Sounds like Sam was vague enough to allow for these far out possibilities. Either that or he lacks even the most basic understanding of how to build housing.

I’m a cost controller. It’s interesting isn’t it. Look into offisite manufacturing. Thats where it’s realistically going right now and might interest you.

Yeah I’m glad that people in the know can see where I’m coming from. It’s just so complex isn’t it.

Maybe? But if it is it will likely be one of the last things automated. General purpose robotics that are humanoid or can do all the same tasks as a human are likely the most complicated to make. With that being said no one truly knows where AI and therefore robotics will be in 20 years and it's definitely possible.

I wouldn't worry about job security though, if that were to happen we would likely have had UBI or something for a long while due to other mass automation (trucking, manufacturing, generative design, creative, etc...).

Even if you can't make everything on site, the cost of shipping and resources will still be just the cost of those robots and energy (which would also be built up by robotics and if we had that level of robotic production it's likely that fusion has been built out so energy would be near free), and then the cost to make those robotics would also be the cost of the robots that built them.

If robots build robots which can then build everything else including general contractor work (aka general purpose robotics) without the need for any human bottleneck then you start this absurdly powerful compounding growth trend that drives the effective cost of anything to near 0. The only limits would be land and raw materials. Land could be optimized if labor is effectively free by building vertically (vertical farms, lab grown meat, etc...). Raw materials could be mined from asteroids if we have said level of full automation and fusion propulsion driven reusable spacecraft (it's unlikely we would do this otherwise since the cost to get said materials is prohibitively expensive compared to just mining them on earth).

So could a robot at one point become general enough to do all the work of construction? Of course it can. will that happen in 20 years? No one knows. Should you be concerned? Probably not since at that point the whole economy would have to be rewritten and well we'd have plenty of abundance for everyone.

I will thank you. I’m seriously looking to get a leg up here instead of just pounding nails another 20 years. Any information is greatly appreciated.

Messaged you

I'm not sure if you know this. But as of right now there are companies that can 3d print entire homes (3bed 2 bath) for 30k. I would personally take that over any fancy house made by people. Pretty soon once we get to full Ai controlled bots, you will be able to pay Jeff Bezos 10k to build you a fully customized home made entirely by robots that amazon supplies all the mats for.

> It's like the corporate policy of unlimited leaves, if you give people infinite leaves they actually take less than the sanctioned leaves.

Nah. Offer up something "infinite" that has some sort of value and it will be stolen and hoarded in minutes. Your analogy is awful and only works because the workers want to impress their boss.

Cool I can't wait for the future where I can live in a mud hut.

What has value when it's supply is infinite or cheap.

I’ve seen this and it’s a great idea. But it don’t fix the planning permission, land, utilities, road and sewers costs which is what brings the price right up

I have no PhD in economics, but it seems to me that Altman will say anything to attract new investors. What he says doesn't make sense to me either, and he might not really believe it himself. Anyway having lots of personal robots like in a science fiction story won't be feasible for decades. IMO you can have several self-driving cars and simple robots but nothing capable of replacing skilled workers.

Currently Deep Learning systems are static, meaning that they are trained once and their parameters don't change. IMO that is not good enough. More realistic spiking neural networks are small because no one is that interested in them yet. Spinnaker in Manchester can simulate about 8 millions synapses. Spinnaker 2 that TU Dresden is building is ten times larger, but as I said they have a small budget. If they receive billions and with a bit of luck other things improve, we could get 80 billion/trillion simulated synapses or more. Not enough for a full simulation of a brain but maybe good enough for some of Altman's proposals.

It's actually pretty cool.

I think we won't really know timings until after ~2027(Intel's target) when zetta scale compute starts to come into economic reach. If you tried to build that with today tech, you'll need around 20 nuclear power plants to power it.

The possible futures are wide open.

The Economics of Automation: What Does Our Machine Future Look Like?

The only difference between lead and a pencil and diamond is the way the atoms are configured. With trillions and trillions of low cost nanobots at our disposal we'll be able to recreate any material we need. That's probably not until the 2030s though. The solution to housing now is building up with robots doing the labor. Go on YouTube and type in 57 stories in 19 days. We already have the technology to mass produce luxury high rises. Every floor is typical so it wouldn't be hard to train them even without AGI. For now humans will still be needed to connect the mains but with AGI happening likely within a few years, humans will be free to enjoy our lives. This won't happen one day but gradually over the next few years. We should immediately drop the work week to 32 hours if not 24 so people can focus on bettering themselves and spending more time with their kids, friends and family. It's as simple as governments passing a law that says companies have to pay time and a half after 32 hours work week, and then eventually 24, etc to allow for a gradual evolution to the new paradigm. There's a lot of stressed out economic wage slaves out there and we need to start undoing the damage caused by this system ASAP.

I think raw materials might not be needed anymore if we can recycle everything. At some point we will have to treat industrial materials like biology, they will have an ecosystem of their own. Of course if we want to expand we need new materials and space.

I agree, though I also think we'll still want to build with new materials since we'll want to expand and increase the standard of living and such, but yes we'll be able to recycle a lot (or everything) so we won't need as much and won't have nearly the same environmental impact.

AMD said 2035 for zettascale...who will win the bet ?

Name something tangible that is infinite and close to free, is useful and no one wants it to hoard it.

I'm sure in your fantasy land, everything is just built by nanobots controlled by unicorns in the center of a black hole.

Air.

I'm surprised someone is dumb enough to not understand that things lose value when there is lots of supply and it's usefulness is irrelevant if you can't corner a market.

Hoarders hoard to reduce supply. Can't do so in a world which can create ever more stuff. If hoarding even makes sense in a world with crazy supply.

More and more of us are caring less and less what "law makers" want. They either work for the general welfare or they can get the fuck out of the way and we will do it.

And I'm serious here. Have you taken a hard look at what one of the two parties are concerned with?

People playing adult dress up?

Christian Nationalism?

Censoring journalists?

Banning certain fields of studies in colleges?

They become more irrelevant every time they open their fucking nasty ass mouths.

A tripping point will be reached and something like Rome will occur. Except this time it will be the majority leaving them on their ass and forming a coalition with them excluded.

I do a lot of repairs on 100-year-old houses for Less well off homeowners. Frequently whatever I'm dealing with has already had one or two repairs sometime in the last century, it's head scratching stuff that will be difficult for an AI to duplicate. https://youtu.be/MVWayhNpHr0 this robot is like 5 years old. Materials aren't sourced on site, and it requires an operator, but it's doing the work of several Masons and only requires a minimal amount of expertise from the worker. https://youtu.be/e5xK2wWUIxw TBH I didn't watch this video but I've watched a bunch of individual ones, and this said it had 10. If a robot comes along halfway through and puts in piping for water and electricity can you not imagine a robot that can build an entire home. The amount of clay in any location can vary a lot, but almost every location has some clay. Maybe we go back to the ancient Mesopotamia style of living in mud brick home

Yeah, sounds like over-hype.

LLMs and transformer NNs, despite their impressiveness, aren't magical. They won't turn water into wine or multiply bread and fishes to feed the poor.

They are just another piece on the creation of a self replicating industrial ecosystem based on robots and AI. Which might never be 100% free of human intervention.

Yeah, but then another one comes along, says all the right things, momentum is lost, and you're back to square one. There is no getting out of the system, you participate or leave for a less secure area of the world. It's a losing battle. If you can't beat'm, join'm.

Most articles are not primary resource so it's just some ones opinion. I don't see in the near future robots taking over construction. This has been talked about for decades. If I was pushed into a new occupation by robots taking my current job (construction) it's probably for the better.

Turn the field into grey goo. Instruct the grey goo to form wood and concrete. Done.

I'm an electrician, I have worked on all kinds of housing and buildings, old, new, prefab etc.

What I think he is saying is that it is similar to prefab buildings. With such designs, wires, plumbing, and general utilities are all pre installed and simply need to be hooked up to mains once the structure has been put together. In Altman's example, I believe he is looking at 3D printing specifically. Similar ideas have been proposed for Luna and Mars bases.

Essentially utilising the raw materials within the proposed structures environment. Piping would actually be pretty simple. It can be ceramic, for example. However, when it comes to electricity, you need conductive material that is not found just anywhere.

Even if you can synthesize the materials on site, you really wouldn't need to. You can just have an self driving truck, automatically dispatched at the appropriate time from a completely autonomous facility with exactly what you need, directly to the site 24 hours a day.

With nanobots, anything is possible. Incinerator toilets take care if sewer and rainwater plus tank snd nanobot recycling means plumbing taken care of. Probably use carbon dioxide to make carbon fibre for electricity transmission which will be powered by solar panels and battery bank.

Weirdly a lot of people here claim to understand the singularity but then say none of this will be possible for many decades. Pretty much this is within the first few years of the singularity. Just sounds fantastical to us right now because we are so low in the curve atm.

I personally think absolutely. 20 years is a very long time. Tesla will start mass manufacturing their robot in 2-3 years. They will use all the robots produced for 2-5 years.

So 4-8 years they will start selling them. They will be connected to the data center where a strong AI will understand the command/job given it, and then it will send back simple instructions to the robot.

I think send driving will be solved well before then so they will have lots of compute to help with training.

Connecting utilities is a walk in the park. However I believe the housing will likely be built off-site with options to be self sufficient. Otherwise the robots just connect it to the utilities.

Additionally by then you will have autonomous heavy machinery as well (eg bulldozers) so the AI at HQ will be able to create the plans for the entire project and then send the instructions to hundreds of humanoid robots and heavy machinery with Tesla cars/semis to move everything around

Because guns are really going to defend against an AI driven attack. Honestly Americans and their guns lol.

My guess is that based on what Sam and OpenAI has said about robotics and their views on compute&scaling. The moment we have robotics of that capability, we're probably in a post ASI world to begin with. As in all our scientific discovery as that point is being done by intelligences far smarter than the whole of humanity. I say this because I get the impression that OpenAI thinks you're going to need a very powerful AI to solve the problem of how you go about stuffing a model that requires a server room of bleeding edge GPUs and the power to run it in a robo chastise or a car. I'm reminded of how constrained the size was for Deepmind's Gato because the model had to be able to run in realtime in a robot hand for example.

Anyway, I think this is why Sam said in a past interview he would sound like a crazy person if he started talking about what the world would could be like if we get AI right, harnessing a magnitude of intelligence that supersedes whatever humans could ever hope to achieve with their biological brains means a lot of scientific advances and or problems that isn't hard constrained by physics could be solvable over night.

it sounds really dumb, imagine the complexity of supply chain production processes that result in building materials for normal houses, now imagine doing all that on site, it's a bad take honestly

There's a novel about his: Walkaway but Cory Docterow

Utilities? U mean water and electricity? That can be captured from rain and from sun. Carbon from the atmosphere can be used to build diamondoid materials and nanotubes. Allowing for structures 100x stronger than steel. Nanostructured carbon is believed may be strong enough to build a cable into space.

Similar use of cheap ubiquitous minerals allow for creation of electronics, antennas, filters, insulation once they are nanostructured.

A day will come when the infrastructure itself is alive and the buildings grow and repair themselves according to designs.

Shortly after agi asi is likely and shortly after asi mastery of nanotechnology. Nanomachines allow for human equivalent droid creation. But also the structures themselves can grow change repair and clean as needed.

Mud isnt the only ubiquitous thing, carbon is as well a diamond or diamondoid house is easy.

Presumably there will be a massive amount of salvageable and reusable materials in the thousands upon thousands of office buildings people will no longer be using.

Carbon nanostructured is ballistic conductor iirc. And biological pipes are far better than artificial pipes. Humans have gene defect on vitamin c synthesis that causes pipe clogging, but there are animals that last for multiple centuries without clogging of their pipes.

Imagine pipes that expand, contract self repair and self clean.

Batteries are inferior to hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are more energy dense, easier to transport, and only produce co2 which is not a concern once u have the ability to mass drain the atmosphere from co2. Co2 production and recycling can be a closed loop with biosynthesized hydrocarbons.

Only reason youd use batteries was if energy efficiency of hydrocarbon generation from sun couldnt be brought up to par with battery energy storage.

Eventually ai will be doling the permissions and the road and sewers will be made by nanomachines growing and self repairing at no cost.

What youre forgetting is two things asi and nanomachines.

The cortex is where general intelligence lay and that has about 60 trillion synapses of which only like 1 to 2% are active at any moment. Inactive synapses need not be simulated.

It’s literally cool, which will help in an increasingly hot climate.

A tree builds atomically precise far more advanced solar energy collectors and pipes on site and can stand for thousands of years. But it is limited by evolution. The tree could be 100x stronger than steel and taller than the tallest building with unevolvable nanostructured carbon. But it is unevolvable but not undesignable, we humans can engineer biology far past the limits of evolution.

No one here truly knows when it'll be possible, though we can speculate. Some will be more conservative than others, but let's not pretend we can truly see anything past then next 5-10 years when we're advancing st such ridiculous speeds. Some things which seem simple will hit hard snags and take much longer than expected and others which seemed to be hard problems will come easily.

That's the way of life.

Intel & co haven't exactly been delivering the goods recently, so not high confidence.

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Everything will be 3d printed with a new material in the future . You are thinking about the future with old tech .

Well there is a solution to this. Instead of assuming the AI can figure out how to repair any arbitrary house (though it might actually be doable), if houses were factory built, the robots/AI can be much more limited.

Basically, make the whole house/office building out of flat panels and other objects designed to fit into the dimensions of a max size load truck and easy to assemble on site. Robot trucks haul the pieces to the job site, robot cranes lift them into place, robots probably ride the piece up (no OSHA standards for them!) and use their arms to pull it into alignment and bolt/weld into place.

So the solution would be to basically take a 100 year old house and replace it with a brand new house where it's been made to look externally like the same house.

The new stuff would be robot repairable, with everything behind panels that robots can easily remove and subdivided into modules that can be easily removed and replaced.

I think the best way to interpret this is to always ask whether there is something fundamentally limiting or constrained about a given issue, because if not, the broader assertion is that when the relative cost of energy and computation go towards zero, anything that is amenable to solution via application of those factors becomes on a long enough time scale just an engineering problem. A simple matter of engineering as they say.

Eg the question of being on or off grid presupposes that there is a grid in the sense we mean it today and more importantly that it is a fundamental determinant of what is plausible.

The thrust of this idea about robot built houses is undoubtedly not just that grid connection will be a trivial and well solved problem, but that it may be a red herring because it may not be necessary in the sense it is today.

With enough energy, you can pull water out of the air; and with the right energy and tech you can dispense with gray water and wastewater.

That's probably the far down the line extreme but the theory is the same for incremental improvements.

There is a world in which the limits we have are the limits of physics.

I don't expect to see it and don't have a great deal of faith anyone will, given current obstacles, but I think it's a lot less far fetched and a lot more plausible than we would have thought conceivable only a couple decades ago.

AI = deflation.

That is the thesis.

Anonymous art and many other things will loose all value that is for sure.

But there is only one Palm Beach and physical attractiveness still follows a hierarchy.

That can’t be reproduced by AI, and people controlling AI will use all of its powers to conquer whats best.

So everything productive and anonymous (whether people or things) will become cheap and everything non productive and non anonymous will become expensive, IMO.

You just have to imagine further, what if it were better, they were smarter, and so on. Due to ecological concerns maybe the only legal construction robots will build shelters with locally sourced materials that are biodegradable and so on, so shelters will resemble those of our ancestors more. Maybe robots will come by and repair things every so often to make up for less structural integrity. Or maybe the construction techniques will just be so much better that the local materials like mud will end up being as strong as concrete. I know it's pie in the sky but for for the implications of a super intelligence we have to just flex our imagination as much as possible since they will be ridiculously 'smart'.

Yes if we want the AI can bend our environment into ideal shapes. It can be all natural stuff they use and create, structures good for the environment. It all depends what it prioritizes but things like structure for humans is an easy problem for a super intelligence I'd think.

it's actually 30k? that seems insanely cheap.

The Flintstones was actually futuristic.

All this talk of utilities. Like others have said, you can have those already build by robots in the house. If the expense your talking about is how expensive it is to get utilities out to the burbs and beyond, people can drill holes for well water, solar for electricity. I think can even do your own gray water to be hauled by septic management or buried like outhouses etc

It’s not the the utilities in the house that’s the problem we already do this with bathroom\kitchen pods off-site manufacturing. What kills the cost is getting the existing underground water/electric all the way to a house as this can’t be done offsite. You still need a human to dig it all up, connect on to it, and co ordinate all the way to a house. The further house is the greater the cost and can significantly impact the cost of a house.

Yeah. Brand new 3d printed homes, and these companies are going to get more affordable as the technology gets better

Even still, before all that I'm sure they will be able to configure some way for machines to automate that process. The only thing the company would have to do in the immediate future is file paperwork (for now).

you skipped 80% of my comment

3D printed houses started being build by property developers.

They bulk 100 homes in same development, to get cost benefit. Yet people are still needed to finish the roof, doors,windows, etc..