Amid the tech boom-fueled sprawl in Austin, Texas, Wolf Ranch at first appears to be another colorfully named but architecturally unimaginative suburban subdivision. Until, that is, you turn a corner and stumble across giant robots building homes resembling waves frozen in concrete. This 100-house addition to the 2,500 homes planned for Wolf Ranch is called “the Genesis Collection,” and as the world’s largest 3D-printed community, it is indeed sui generis. A collaboration between Lennar Corp., the US’s second-biggest home builder, and 3D-printing startup Icon, Genesis represents perhaps the most significant innovation in residential construction in decades. If it can scale, 3D-printed construction promises to deliver energy-efficient homes that can be built faster and more affordably, in novel designs and with minimal waste. The concrete structures are also more resilient to increasingly intense climate-driven hurricanes, wildfires and heat waves. “I think we'll look back and say this was a pretty pivotal moment in the history of construction,” says Jason Ballard, Icon’s cowboy hat-wearing co-founder and chief executive officer. “I do think 3D printing and robotic construction are necessary to end the global housing crisis.”  A Vulcan printer system prints the walls of a 3D printed home in the Wolf Ranch development by ICON and Lennar in Georgetown, Texas. Photographer: Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg Labor shortages, rising material costs and pressure to reduce housing’s carbon footprint are driving a tradition-bound industry to innovate. Those shifts led Lennar in 2021 to invest in Austin-based Icon, which has raised $451 million since it was founded in 2017. Icon built its first permitted home, a 350-square-foot residence, in 2018 to demonstrate the abilities of its first-generation Vulcan printer. The machine extrudes a proprietary concrete mixture called Lavacrete, which it lays down layer upon layer to form the exterior and interior walls of a building. The latest iteration of the Vulcan is house-sized itself. The 46.5-foot-wide robot consists of a crossbar that moves up and down between two 15.5-foot-tall towers that sit astride a foundation. Attached to the cross bar is a nozzle that shuttles from side to side.  A layer of Lavacrete will dry in about 15 minutes, eventually fading to a light gray color. Photographer: Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg On a January afternoon at Wolf Ranch, seven of the robots can be seen layering Lavacrete on foundations that overlook the limestone hills of Georgetown, a rapidly growing bedroom community 30 miles north of downtown Austin. In contrast to the din of a typical construction site swarmed by laborers hammering wood frames and hanging drywall, quiet pervades Wolf Ranch — the silence punctuated by the ambient hum of printers attended to by four workers apiece. The building site is clean, too; there’s virtually no construction debris to be hauled off to a landfill. Charlie Coleman, Lennar’s Austin division president, expects construction time to be cut 30% at Wolf Ranch. Pricing has not been set but he expects Genesis homes to start in the mid $400,000-range, which is competitive with other new homes at Wolf Ranch. Sustainability and savings are also likely to be selling points when the homes go on the market this year. Concrete is carbon-intensive, but Ballard says the material’s use at Wolf Ranch creates nearly airtight buildings that will reduce homeowners’ heating and cooling costs, while the solar panels installed on each residence will supply carbon-free electricity. Icon’s 3D-printed walls have exceeded building code strength requirements by 350%, according to the company, which allows them to better withstand hurricanes and wildfires. An initiative is also underway to reduce Lavacrete’s carbon intensity.  3D printing liberates construction from the geometric constraints of the right angle. The Vulcan can print walls, and even a kitchen island, that swoop, fold and form half shells. Photographer: Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg Ballard says Icon has “several hundred” more homes under contract with builders, but can’t disclose the details yet. Longer-term, the company has more ambitious plans. It is currently developing technology for NASA to construct buildings on the moon, and has 3D-printed a prototype of a Mars structure that BIG designed for the space agency. But when it comes to re-engineering suburbia, Ballard has more down-to-Earth concerns, like getting governments to extend the hours his robots are allowed to operate. “Most municipalities have start and stop times because conventional construction methods are very, very loud,” he says. “We are trying to make the case that not only do our robots not need smoke breaks or anything like that, they also are very quiet and should be allowed to work around the clock.”
Good morning.
I got some pushback last December when I wrote that ChatGPT was the most important news story of 2022. After all, it was a big year for news: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended the world economic and geopolitical order.
But three months later, my prediction holds up pretty well. The world is reeling as people contemplate the implications of this new technology. And I’m not just talking about the fact that the wily chatbot tried to separate Kevin Roose from his wife. (If you missed that one, see here.) Utopian and dystopian scenarios abound. Consider yesterday’s news:
—Bank of America said the “adoption rate of this technology so far is unprecedented,” putting us on the verge of another “iPhone moment,” and predicted the economic impact would be $15.7 trillion by 2030. That’s trillion, folks.
—Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he would create a new “based” A.I. to counter what he says is increasingly “woke” A.I., leading Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, to conjure up “the idea of a fragmented A.I. universe, like we have a fragmented social media or network news universe. I think that’s bad for all of us.” Amen.
–Closer to home, the CEO of media company Axel Springer, Mathias Döpfner, said he foresees disruption to media as big as the disruption that the internet caused for newspapers, and provided this mind-spinning quote: “Artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was—or simply replace it.” Huh?
I spoke yesterday with former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, who said the introduction of ChatGPT “is a perfect example of why we have to introduce these technologies in a way that creates trust in them. We all have a responsibility to manage the upsides and the downsides.” But that’s easier said than done at a time when velocity of technological change is so much faster than the speed at which people and society can adapt.
 | | | Musk Delayed Paying Twitter’s Amazon Cloud Bill, Sparking Ad Threat | By Erin Woo | Elon Musk is running into an obstacle in his relentless drive to cut costs at Twitter: some of the same vendors that Twitter is squeezing to save money are also its advertising clients. As recently as last month, Twitter sales and marketing staff were told by their colleagues that Amazon had threatened to withhold payment for advertising it runs on Twitter because the social network for months refused to pay its Amazon Web Services bills for cloud computing services, according to two people familiar with the discussions. | |
|
|
|
|
|
.png)
