Construction Firm Balfour Beatty Considers Drone Workers

cagraham writes "International engineering and construction firm Balfour Beatty is considering using drones in order to construct walls and monitor work sites, among other things. Beatty CIO Danny Reeves, speaking at the Fujitsu Forum, said drones could improve efficiency and safety on sites. He also talked of implementing sensors that would monitor worker's stress levels and bodily functions, and notify management when they became less effective, or mistake-prone, on the job."

Ahh, predicting the future...

[Anonymous Coward]

What we envisioned: Man overseeing the construction robots doing their elaborate dance.

What we got: robotic sensors collect every bit of observable data, so that the man can be put into good use with highest efficiency.

Knowing them, it'll be for labor relations uses

[sethstorm]

In addition to adding drones to its workforce, Balfour Beatty is exploring the possibility of incorporating “body area networks” into its work-sites. Such networks consist of wearable tech devices that monitor various bodily functions such as heart rate, stress levels, and hydration. For companies, the idea is that such networks could alert management when individual workers stress or fatigue levels make them ineffective on the job, or even a danger to themselves and others.

If anything, it'd be more likely to be used to get rid of soueone that is hard to fire(e.g. whistleblower, minority, union support) while maintaining a clean excuse. They'd just point to the sensors and fire/not renew the contract of the worker.

And do what with the unemployed?

[Rigel47]

This is all well and good and inevitable but society really needs to think hard and fast about what we are going to do with a future where there are only so many jobs available for people with a shovel or a wrench. It used to be something like 30% of the nation was involved with food production. Thanks to industrialization that's now 1-2%. Even the last bastions of farm work -- fruit picking -- is being inched into by robotics. The farm hands who left the fields and went into the factories are now finding themselves being replaced en masse by sophisticated machines.

In the utopian fantasy the rise of the bots means the people have more leisure time and devote themselves to intellectual pursuits. In the reality playing out they go on disability and other "safety net" programs and lead meager lives of not-so-quiet desperation. As it is there are now more people going on disability than entering the work force. The economics of all this is just disastrous. From the government deficit on down to the generation of kids being raised in food stamp households the situation is untenable. One can only hope we find a path forward that does not involve increasing social decay and civil unrest.

It's a brave new world alright.

Re:reminds me of the story "manna"

[femtobyte]

The main part of the economics that don't make sense is trusting a secretive technocratic savior, wielding trillions of dollars of resources, to actually give a shit about helping out all the low-level peons who initially funded the system. It's an extremely elitist vision, that, by people's parents handing over investment money to a small cabal of technological geniuses, their kids will be handed a post-scarcity utopia on a platter --- instead of the wealthy technocrats simply joining forces with the rest of the oppressive oligarchy, laughing at the suckers who gambled away their children's futures on promises of technology serving the people rather than vice-versa. The story provides a well-founded criticism of the use of technology/Taylorization to enslave the masses, but the solution offered (post-scarcity salvation handed down from a technocratic elite) is absurdly prone to failure (i.e. the typical pattern that a technocratic elite will be just as self-serving as any other authoritarian elite handed control over human society).

Not really

[rsilvergun]

because you're ignoring the core problem he's discussing because he didn't name it: idle capacity. The wealthiest Americans have 40% of their net worth in cash [cnn.com]. They're not investing. They're grabbing all the wealth and grinding the US economy to a halt. If anyone calls them on this and suggests we use the gov't to address the idle economy they're shouted down with cries of "Theif!" and "Deficits!".

Basically, we have enormous idle capacity in our economy and it's getting worse because we're racing to give ownership of everything to an increasingly small number of people, and these people can't possible use that idle capacity. No matter how greedy you are there's only so many hours in the day to buy stuff with...

Re:Why?

[maxwell demon]

The trouble is everything above makes perfect sense

Everything except the one fundamental premise on which the whole argumentation is built:

If you don't work you don't eat, because you haven't earned the right to eat

You must eat in order to live, and to live (and therefore by extension, to eat) is a fundamental human right which you do not have to earn. Since the basis of the argumentation is invalid, the whole argumentation falls down.