While I'm sure lower construction costs would provide some positive benefits for society, all I see when I look at these sorts of efforts to transition to factory built modular housing is yet another massive wealth transfer from the working class to the capitalist class.

I live in a relatively rural place in Canada where residential construction is on of the primary drivers of the local economy and one of the last bastions of well paying local jobs. You start shipping in a bunch of these "Microfactories" or transition to prefab construction done offsite in some "Megafactory" somewhere, and you put a heck of a lot of people who are supporting families and spending their incomes in my local community out of work.

Rather than a whole town's worth of construction workers swinging hammers making a decent local buck, you now have a scant few foreign billionaires capturing most of the profit in the residential construction value chain. We're being sold the concept on the bullshit promise "Cheaper houses" but all we're going to get is the enshitification of the construction industry, as like with everything else, once startups and VCs get involved in an industry, a few people make billions, but everyone else ends up worse off.

The framers, dry-wallers, concrete pourers, etc. aren't "Retraining" to be "AI prompt engineers" or whatever bullshit we're being fed will be the "Jobs of the future" either, they are going on government assistance or taking minimum wage retail jobs, never financially recovering from the loss of stable, relatively well paying local jobs, and ultimately pulling their families and entire communities down with them.

Meanwhile 1/100th as many people as have been put out of construction jobs around the world are now employed in a few factories owned by billionaires, who then use their wealth to influence public policy to engage in regulatory capture of their industry, and entire swathes of communities become soulless cookie-cutter corporate suburbs of identical, shoddily built pre-fabricated "Homes" that were designed to maximize corporate profits, not for people to actually enjoy living in.

I see the writing on the wall here, as between robotics / automation, economies of scale and VCs pouring billions into businesses that will operate at a loss while they gobble up market share, I definitely think we're going to see a pretty rapid transition to factory built pre-fabricated homes in the next couple decades, as traditional local scale builders just aren't going to be able to be cost-competitive, but from where I'm sitting this is a terrifying rather than hopeful proposition, as at least where I live, it's not going to make housing any cheaper, but its definitely going to put A LOT of people out of work, and we don't really have anything else for those folks to do, so while it is almost certainly inevitable, the transition to pre-fabricated construction is going to absolutely decimate my community and a great many communities just like it around the world.