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Here is a podcast episode just released today from my trip to California visiting Emergent 3D and CEO Don Ajamian who bought the company from the original founder after completing the first few projects. Don was the GC on all homes printed by Emergent since the beginning and he plans to keep the company rolling despite false rumors that they gave up. It is true part of the initial team sold out but Don has been there the whole time and he doesn’t plan on going anywhere I lam hopeful to cover their future projects.

Until construction is fully automation people will still need lunch on site, why not lunch served by bots? You can see a ton of people working alongside these bots in the video. I would be concerned with the quantity of plastic required to protect the mechanical parts, after 1,000,000 repetitions the plastic may degrade and leech out. Hopefully they can use non recycled plastics or stainless steel so reduce risk of plastic contamination.

They will need some bathrooms too and with that comes maintenance. Why not have a bot do it? If the bot is anything like my Roomba you will need a person responsible for cleaning the bot too. Having a dog that sheds I consider my Roomba a great investment, assuming vacuuming is a $20/hr task which takes 20 minutes a robot can save you 34 hrs of work vs vacuuming twice a week. Granted there are electric and replacement part costs, all in that requires about 10 minutes every 3 months and ~$60 a year in replacement parts. I figure the realized savings are around $500 a year so full ROI in under 2 years.

I know lot’s of people who bought robot vacuums and don’t use it, this could be a skill issue or perhaps I am too forgiving with the troubleshooting. I imagine at least early iterations of this bathroom bot will be similar but in a commercial setting with many bathrooms it could get far more utility than my Roomba.

Personally I think it’s more likely a humanoid bot with AGI will handle this task better than this system within a decade but who knows maybe purpose built bots will win.