[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Not only are there better ways to build affordable housing, there are better ways to do exactly what the article is describing.

A buddhist monastery in my area managed to build beautiful structures using bricks made from local raw earth. No fancy giant 3D printers necessary.

[GLGirty]

Do you have have links for monastery? I have so many questions... how big is it? what does it look like? I love the idea of earth as a building material, and I'd love to see what the state of the art is now. Do we, as a species, possess the skill to build a Guastavino vault as good as a century ago in New York? Or something as pleasing Cuba's National Art Schools?

3d printing a building might be a cursed problem. If it doesn't scale past single-family dwellings, it's useless. Mo sprawl, mo problems. How could this tech scale up to the size of an apartment building? If you have a big crane, prefab panels are certainly cheaper and faster. Maybe if you built in the style of Agadez Mosque, with the scaffold incorporated into the structure, the robots could climb as they build. That seems to rule out toothpaste extrusion as a technique since the cure time would be a bottleneck. (Let's rule out energy intense curing agents.)

A bricklaying robot... supplied with bricks via the scaffold in the structure.... could the engineering to do that possibly be cost effective against skilled humans? Or the big crane? We haven't even considered aesthetics.

Cursed. Problem.