Imperial to sensible units…
Thanks ChatGPT! 
Passing time on first Friday back at work of 2024 
EDIT: A friend has just told me:
Standards for the exact length of an inch have varied in the past, but since the adoption of the international yard during the 1950s and 1960s the inch has been based on the metric system and defined as exactly 25.4 mm.<<<
Oh no… AI will take over our jobs 
Use whatever value you want and then round to the precision you need.
Ask your friend about the US survey foot…
haha, I didn’t want to add that into the mix…
Feet are daft enough!
I recommend looking into the impact of ATM machines on the number of tellers. If I recall correctly it was something along the lines of this:
Each ATM could replace 8 tellers and cost significantly less than any one teller, and so the tellers were concerned about job loss… and yet the number of tellers went up faster than the number of ATMs went up. This was attributed to a few factors. First the tellers still had to do stuff the machines couldn’t, so they couldn’t be removed entirely which meant some had to remain at every location. Next because the tellers stopped spending time exchanging money and started doing new tasks which lead to new revenue streams making them more profitable. Lastly because less tellers could do the same work and then some for less money than before, banks were able to open more branches and effectively expand the industry significantly.
This has played out similarly in some other industries as well, but not as well illustrated (winds up that banks are very good at tracking and documenting all costs, revenue, and profits at micro and macro levels). When companies have the opportunity to save costs to gain profit they often reinvest the costs by going after more work, and there is no shortage of work to pursue in any market for AEC.
The challenge there is there is only so many buildings to built, and only so much capital to go around (if anything, clients are more conservative than ever in all but government these days). Banks scale as we get more spenders and consumers, so population drove this - they’re very much in the business of cutting operators and staff as well now according to some of my connections on the inside (generally, the ones doing the cutting).
My hope is that AI in AEC will drive smarter and more resourceful practices - a transformative tool versus a reductive one.
Yeah, the metrics work out to about 1,000 new ones each day to house population growth, which means we need designs and designers. And that doesn’t account for fit outs, renovations, additions, and retrofits. Similar to banks, construction scales as we get more people, across every typology. And we aren’t building at the rate we need to in most markets globally.
The capability to do more with less (similar to the ATMs augmenting staffing) which enables the small firms to compete with the mid size ones and mid size ones to compete with big ones (all to a point) is the hope.
In tend to think of AI as more of a tool than a industry take over, makes me more productive as a result but my hope is that tools arnt produced to replace me before i plan to retire… else ill need to start working for my wifes upholstery business.
Sounds like a fun chat for an AU catchup eventually hopefully.
Realistic supply capability vs required is going to be the tipping point I expect. Here in Australia we’re barely hitting 50% of what we need and already seeing material shortages and workplace skill shortages, but not many willing capital investors or firms we can trust to deliver human centric solutions (aka not Blackrock, WeWork types etc.). Government is generally struggling to solve this as well, very focused on next term elections vs long term solutions that get beyond the term.
I remain ever hopeful it all balances out in the end. What I have zero doubt about is regardless of what happens, software developers will generally be in high demand especially in industries where it is not the core business service, but which their actual services hinge on heavily - creating a need for both specialist industry knowledge combined with programming know-how to make it happen.
Yes, as I see it we need to let the engineers continue to be engineers and not ”cad monkeys” so when the clients ask them to deliver models with more information added to the objects, IFC4.3 engineers need to continue to focus on engineering stuff and I think that the moment when automatization can help them to save time (and money)
Then the other side of the coin is that client need to pat for innovation not how many hours you spent in Project.
There have always, “only been so many buildings to be built” at one time.
But methods change.
Bit like in the olden days people wove their own clothes, then they got looms. Then the luddites smashed them up, but progress is hard to stop.
History shows us repeatedly that every time there is a change in technology jobs are lost, but new jobs are also created. People change skills.
I mean, how many stone masons do you know? But I bet you’ve seen plenty of people putting up buildings. How many computer programmers were there 100 years ago? Etc, etc.
Another thing to consider here is the timeline. The ATM example took 20 years for the banks to actually figure out how to push ATMs out en-mass - AE firms will take just as long, in particular on the design side. This is because as far as time savings resulting in ‘faster product production’ goes, I haven’t seen it happen in design yet. Designers have a contract to spend X amount of hours, and until those hours are spent they won’t put down the pencil, but will fine tune something else. Personally I worked on a lobby where the reception desk was revised and reworked every day for a month because I saved three weeks on four other features of the design with automation. I am positive that is playing out elsewhere as I type this (or rather played out on Friday and Monday, being a weekend and all).
Also worth noting that AI isn’t just impacting design, but also the construction and other aspects of AEC. Those robot masons we see prototype videos of now will be a reality soon enough, and in that 20 year timeframe we’ll see construction companies go through their own evolution.
Really looking forward to that convo at AU though. Maybe we should make it a round table proposal…
hi, I’m Arthur, sorry too tempting.
cordially
christian.stan
Can you explain that one to me please?
I don’t get the reference.
a clue, tale king fairness of the round table .
I’m not a king, don’t worry :
cordially
christian.stan
US Survey Feet…The Unit of measurement that was retired at the end of December 2022?
https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot
December 31, 2022 - The last day U.S. survey foot should be used.
January 1, 2023 - The U.S. survey foot is deemed obsolete and superseded by the international foot (also known as the foot) equal to 0.304 8 meter exactly for all applications.
