A massive 3D printer is building 100 homes in Georgetown, Texas — or rather, printing them. Once finished, the project will be the largest 3D-printed neighborhood in the world, Reuters reports.
The 3D robotic printer completing the task is made by a Texas-based company, ICON Technology. The printer, called Vulcan, weighs nearly 5 tons and is 45 feet wide. It can construct homes less wastefully, faster, and cheaper than traditional methods, ICON says. The neighborhood’s one-story homes with three to four bedrooms, made with a concrete mixture, take three weeks to print.
But it requires far fewer workers. ICON’s senior project manager Conner Jenkins told Reuters, “where there were maybe five different crews coming in to build a wall system, we now have one crew and one robot.” That raises questions about the labor force impacts of the giant printers, should they become widely popular building tools.
Some 4.7% of the U.S. labor force in 2022 held jobs in the construction industry. In Texas, the construction industry accounts for 5.6% of the state’s labor force.
Despite claims that robots will assist humans with their jobs rather than replace them, even AI leaders have contended that rapidly evolving technology will make some jobs obsolete. Some 60% of companies across the globe working in consumer goods production and the oil and gas industries project that robots will replace some of their workers’ jobs, according to a 2023 World Economic Forum study.
The use of robot tech is already proliferating across industries. For example, BMW this month began using a humanoid robot at a factory in South Carolina.