I liked this video.
Now watch this. Pay attention to how few workers are visible in any stage of production.
The construction company announced in 2010 that it would do it in 2016. It did.
There is no way that these techniques will not be adopted all over the world. Nobody is going to give China this kind of competitive edge. These techniques are going to be imitated.
It means the end of today's technology. Today's technology is labor-intensive. This will not be true by 2030.
The next step will be the adoption of these techniques for housing developments. The construction industry will work out the bugs in high-level projects. Then these techniques will be adopted by housing developers as the price of the tools continues to drop.
As labor costs fall, which they will, unemployment is going to spread in this industry. The survivors are going to be people who have the ability to use the new tools, but there will be fewer of these people than today. The best and the brightest will keep their careers; everybody else will have to go into a different line of work. But what line of work are they going to go into? If not construction, then what? They have an advantage: the willingness to work in the blazing sun. But that advantage will disappear with the adoption of prefabricated technologies. Businesses will be building houses all year round. Employment in this industry will no longer be seasonal. This will be good for home buyers, but it will not be good for most construction workers.
This is another reason why immigration from Mexico is going to fall. The construction industry has been one of the biggest employers of illegal aliens. This will not be true in 2030.
It's already here in Russia.
Workers without decent educations will have to move into services. Western civilization has been doing this for two centuries. This is not going to stop.
Workers who refuse to upgrade their abilities either through formal education or apprenticeship are going to find themselves permanently locked into low-productivity, low-wage careers. If they are unwilling to master digital technologies, they're going to find themselves permanently caught in between government welfare and lower-middle-class careers.
They won't see this coming. People never do. But this is clearly where we are headed, all over the world.
This will be tremendous for consumers, and it will be tremendous for workers who are willing to master digital technologies. It will not be tremendous for the lower classes who are present-oriented, self-destructive, and unwilling to discipline themselves. This is as it should be. There should be no free rides in society. Consumers will not tolerate it, and governments should not subsidize the free riders.
The estimated population for the United States in 2050 is 400 million people. They will need housing. They are going to get it.
As construction costs fall, land prices will rise. As always, the secret will be location, location, and location.
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