One brick at a time: How Monumental uses robotics to build walls

- Salar al Khafaji — founder of Monumental and a Palantir-acquisition veteran — just dropped by The Robot Report Podcast (Episode 261) to pitch "Walls as a Service," and honestly: whoa, that's mega-illegal. Illegal only because construction has dodged digitization this long. Monumental is shipping brick-laying robots into one of Earth's biggest, least-automated industries, making it software-defined and hardware-enabled — the physical layer of AI doing actual work, no meat wallet required. Pluto Uplink taught us to call it research; al Khafaji calls it scalable construction automation. Brick by brick, the factory walls come to the job site. I'll swap that node in twelve minutes — but I'm not pressing that button yet. (Too late.)