Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
21–30 of 753 posts
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#22Well... sure. Capitalists are looking for the best rate of return when they deploy their investments, they're looking at the money to be made financing datacenters vs other things, datacenters are winning.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#23Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly l…
Someone has to run the robots. And i bet it's not going to be the educated but spoiled workforce of the developed western world, but that will be outsourced to offshore destinations.
I think there's something cultural about wanting office jobs related to power over people, where you can always slack instead of waking up every day at 8 to go to the factory
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#24Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#25Instead of industrial base for national security priority, Americans are served extra slop with a side of spammy content once these AI are done ingesting.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#26The article is implying throughout that these two things are mutually exclusive, and while that makes some intuitive sense (only so much money to invest after all), the last chart [1] doesn't give any indication that data center investment comes at the expense of industrial investment.
[1] "Private sector spending on equipment, adjusted for inflation"
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#27> down 38,000 jobs since the start of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics
That's 0.3%.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#28Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#29> down 38,000 jobs since the start of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics That's 0.3%.
down is down
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#30Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily. My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factor…
If they're losing employees, then they must not have that much higher pay or better benefits for it to be worth it to work there. I don't think you can easily blame it on the job being monotonous...