Robot Brickmasons and a Robotic Bricklaying Stock

An article by Bloomberg a few days ago titled Want to Stay Safe While Traveling? Wear a Rolex was probably the worst piece of travel advice we’ve ever seen. Among all the vices that our closely knit team of writers, researchers, and MBAs like to dabble in, the one that we find the most rewarding is travelling the world to have adventures while trying not to get killed or thrown in jail for longer than 24 hours. In a fair number of places we’ve been, wearing a Rolex is a sure way to get shanked. One country that might fall into the category of “don’t wear a Rolex while traveling to” is Bangladesh. When traveling there, you will encounter the friendliest people on the entire planet and structures like these sprinkled all over the country:

Those smoke stacks are brick kilns, and 8,000 of them across Bangladesh are responsible for a great deal of pollution, but also serve an important purpose. They provide the building blocks needed to assemble sweat factories for first world countries. As it turns out, bricks are big business everywhere.

According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, there are 64,370 brickmasons and blockmasons working in the U.S. that are paid an average salary of $53,440. Back of the napkin math puts the total spend on bricklaying in the United States at around $3.4 billion. Given all the focus we’ve seen lately on the digitization of the construction industry, it’s