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Brian Potter: belief

27 Oct 2022 Dwarkesh Podcast Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review

“I suspect that you're just gonna start to see robotics and systems like that take a larger and larger share of the tasks on the construction site over time.”

— Brian Potter

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Brian Potter
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
27 Oct 2022
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

Transcript context

…Overall, it seems from your blog post that you're kind of pessimistic, or you don't think that different improvements in industrialization have transferred over to construction yet. But what do you think is a prospect of future advances in AI having a big impact on construction? With computer vision and with advances in robotics, do you think we'll finally see some carry-over into construction productivity or is it gonna be more of the same? Yeah I think there's definitely gonna be progress on that axis. If you can wire up your computer vision systems, robotic systems and your AI in such a way that your capabilities for a robot system are more expanded, then I kind of foresee robotics being able to take a larger and larger fraction of the tasks done on a typical construction site. I kind of see it being kind of done in narrow avenues that gradually expand outward. You're starting to see a lot of companies that have some robotic system that can do one particular task, but do that task quite well. There's a couple of different robot companies that have these little robots for like drawing wall layouts on like concrete slabs or whatever. So you know exactly where to build your walls, which you would think would not be like a difficult problem in construction, but it turns out that a lot of times people put the walls in the wrong spot and then you have to go back and move them later or just basically deal with it. So yeah, it's basically a little Roomba type device that just draws the wall layout to the concrete slab and all the other systems as well–– for example, where the lines need to run through the slab and things like that. I suspect that you're just gonna start to see robotics and systems like that take a larger and larger share of the tasks on the construction site over time. Yeah, it's still very far away. It's still very far away. What do you think of Flow? That's Adam Neumann's newest startup and backed with $350 million from Andreeseen Horowitz. Brian Potter I do not have any strong opinions about that other than, “Wow, they've really given him another 350M”. I do not have any particularly strong opinions about this. They made a lot they make a lot of investments that don't make sense to me, but I'm out of venture capital. So there's no reason that my judgment would be any good in this situation–– so I'm just presuming they know something I do not. I'm going t o be interviewing Andreeseen later this month and I'm hoping I can ask him about that.…

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