>Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.

Alternatively, megastructures are only achievable through massive amounts of low wage workers with terrible working conditions.

Consider: Panama canal, most large railroads, Snowy hydro.

As time rolls forward we appear to lose our ability to do large things, and in part that's because we are less and less accepting of risk.

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autoexec 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

There's no reason to think that megastructures are only achievable through slavery, but I think it's fair to say that it's a lot cheaper if you're willing to disregard the humanity of others and abuse them until you get what you want. The alternative is that you pay workers what they're worth and use enough of them that they aren't being overworked, but that eats into profits.

I think we still take plenty of risks, still do big things, and still enslave and abuse a lot of workers. It's increasingly seen for the evil it is, but that hasn't stopped it from happening. I think the biggest reason you don't see as many massive projects these days is because we've already got a ton of infrastructure in place, major technological advances are getting harder to come by as we've covered a lot of the "easy" stuff already, and the emphasis on short term/immediate profits.

When we suddenly need a massive structure to house a major sporting event like the world cup or Olympics where a small number of people are basically certain to make a fortune you'll find we're still perfectly willing to construct it on the backs and corpses of forced labor and migrant workers suffering abuse, only to abandon it afterwards until it's time to build a new one somewhere else.

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anonzzzies 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Advanced aliens (and we 'almost') will have robots for that. And they would also have less resource issues than us, so, they would have trillions of them.

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protocolture 7 days ago | parent [-]

I remain unconvinced of the viability of robots, as much as I love scifi renditions.

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tremon 7 days ago | parent [-]

Have you seen a modern car manufacturing plant? Many parts of the production pipeline are fully automated. Granted, most of these machines are not ambulatory but they're still considered robots. Or consider modern freight shipping: many ports rely on intelligent automation for container handling. The development path of 3d printing is also leaning more heavily into robotics, featuring freely-moving articulated arms controlled by cameras and sensors.

I'd say robots are entirely viable, and we don't need science fiction to validate them.

	▲	protocolture 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah so the tradeoff appears to be size vs utility. The problem is that, at best, that means a lot of the world would have to be redesigned to cater to robots. Thats why they excel in auto plants. Space already isnt a concern, so you can make them huge. Huge robots are capable of tremendous strength dexterity and speed. But in an environment built for humans they suck. Redesigning a data center to be 100% robot operated will probably happen, but thats going to be an extraordinarily unfriendly place for a human to be. The amount of space you would lose getting a robot to be able to retrieve a crud rj45 connector, or a stuck sfp module, from any one of 200 racks, at multiple heights, would make the robot massive. So the entire concept of the data centre will have to be rebuilt from the ground up to make it robot friendly. The full tech stack too. Robot friendly connectors etc. Thats a huge capex outlay for something with dubious utility. Imagine ubiquitous robots on the street. Machines capable of tearing humans to shreds. The liability issues are huge on their own. If LLMs are the pinnacle of artificial intelligence, you would probably have a death a week in most cities. Space is worse because the robot has to be launch economical, or built up there. Whats he doing up there without humans. Back to accidents again.
	▲	anonzzzies 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		... and we are very early on in human-robot development still... We don't know yet if the current push will speed things up or leave it stagnant; I would say it's definitely not a stretch to assume it will speed up...

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lnsru 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Once I had well paid job at American company in Germany which paid nice salary. Consider Apple’s iPhone. You have it, I have it and it’s a technical mega project. When you do a teardown, there are hundreds of different components. There was dozen engineers working on the smallest part. Hundreds if not more on the processor. Thousands on manufacturing, logistics and retail. These people don’t dig dirt all day long. But trust me, design, build all the parts on time, assembly and ship the phones to stores on time is absolutely a mega project. But outsiders don’t see this. Imho that’s real large scale global project.

	▲	smus 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Iphones are created by low wage workers with poor working conditions