Fricken
5 months ago
I worked as a sculptor of styrofoam for a few months in my student days. The sculptures would be sprayed with a hard enamel coating, then painted and delivered to mini-golf courses, amusement parks etc all over North America. We made kitschy stuff.
We had a CNC machine that was able to cut out the broad strokes. We didn't use it much, however because it didn't really save time. 90% of the work went into the fine details and polish. I have no experience with stone, but I imagine the breakdown to be similar.
Seeing as how they're doing all the finishing work by hand I'm wondering how much labour they can really save with their robots. For a trained sculptor the broad strokes are the easy part, and the fun part. Then it's a bunch of tedium getting everything clean and smooth.
Like with other forms of bespoke automation, such as vibe coding, I'm afraid that once you factor in everything that goes into a project from concept to deliverables, you're not actually saving yourself much trouble.