Why did agriculture mechanize and not construction?

A manufacturing process, once in place, can be repeated thousands or millions of times. But it’s very difficult to decompose a building in such a way that it can be produced by a sequence of repetitive movements, and it’s difficult to mass produce large numbers of identical buildings.

Mechanization doesn’t require replicating a human’s movement exactly. The greatest gains from mechanization occur when a complex human movement can be replaced with a simple mechanical movement. A ship’s propeller doesn’t move the same way a fish’s tail fin does - it replaces the back and forth movement of the tail with a simple rotation that yield... See more

Crop harvesting, in essence, is a statistical process. It’s powered by the lack of overlap in the probability distributions of the physical traits of different parts of a plant.Crops that can’t be harvested in this way remain extremely labor intensive.

One trend to keep an eye on is that we’re likely nearing the end of requiring repetitive, unchanging movements for efficient production processes.Nonrepetitive movements are fundamentally an information problem - they require some method of telling a machine the state of the surrounding environment, and what to do depending on what that state is.

But even with project managers, cascading failures remain a risk due to the nature of construction. Construction has the unfortunate combination of building mostly unique things each time (even similar projects will be built on different sites, in different weather conditions, and likely with different site crews) and consisting of tasks that are c... See more