Machines to build homes.

Cheap intelligence is commoditising everything made of intelligence. The cost of knowledge work is falling, and value will migrate to what stays scarce.

Homes are the largest asset class on earth, and every one of them needs two scarce inputs: the land it stands on, and the skilled hands that build it. Land is fixed in supply, so its owners keep the rent whatever a home costs to build. Hands are scarce only until they can be multiplied. Today those hands set the pace of building and much of its cost, and there are too few of them.

Robots now do one trade each on site. They lay bricks, dig foundations, print walls and mark out floors. None completes a home. Completing one takes dozens of trades, in cramped spaces that change daily, with tolerances from a millimetre in the finishes to centimetres in the ground.

Building enough homes is one of the great problems of our age. We think robotics is how intelligence reaches the physical world, and that machines will lower the cost of building a home.