Completing the rather tedious task of removing the mortar is, somewhat unfortunately, essential. If you tried to lay the lumpy-bumpy old bricks as is, you'd potentially end up with a very wonky wall.

SAM can lay bricks three times faster than a normal brick layer. SAM isn’t planning on taking away any jobs yet though — it still needs a human mason following behind to clean up the mortar.

Australian company FBR’s Hadrian X is a tablet-controlled system that follows CAD models to lay the blocks one by ... quickly that there’s no time for mortar, so they dip the bottom of each ...