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America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

washingtonpost.com

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Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#51

Post by i80and »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #46
thaack wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits. Q: Do you ever use an online job service to advertise jobs and collect applications? Asking because my 5 sons all learned that job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers). Other viable but never-seen applicants: Minimal or sporadic job history, the most minimal of cr…

> job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).

It rather feels lately like civilization is the project of putting up as many catch-22's as we can.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#52

Post by amelius »

lallysingh wrote: post #48

My guess is that investors expect AI to automate manufacturing, and are waiting to see where that tech goes before spending a ton of capital on soon-to-be-obsolete machinery.

It's a strange bet because if AI can take over manufacturing, it will take over almost everything else and this will cause a complete overhaul of how we think about our economy.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#53

Post by keiferski »

thaack wrote: post #28
lnsru wrote: post #21

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.

> 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…

I guess most of these jobs don’t allow for music or YouTube to be used during work?

I’m just thinking that people already spend a lot of time just consuming content, so if it were possible to watch YouTube while at the factory, maybe it wouldn’t be as unpopular.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#54

Post by jerlam »

seydor wrote: post #23
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #4

Wait. 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

Right. There is no reason why "AI-enabled" factories would be built in countries that struggle to build and run normal factories, and where the cost of materials is high.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#55

Post by InitialLastName »

0xcafefood wrote: post #18
1970-01-01 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalists keep conflating LLMs with AI. You don't use an entire DC with its own power plant to keep a line of robotic welders online and working.

FWIW journalists are just following the lead of tech executives and others hyping LLMs as "AI" so it's hard to fault the journalists specifically.

They've been trained by a decade of referring to advanced cruise control as "full self-driving".

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#56

Post by bgwalter »

They are now open about it. Musk tweets about a new company Macrohard, which does not manufacture itself (https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1977281341264740625#m):

"Our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but will be able to do so indirectly, much like Apple has other companies manufacture their phones."

In other words, we are a knowledge economy and outsource like it's the 1990s with a bit of "AI" fantasies thrown in. The crash cannot come soon enough.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#57

Post by gretch »

madhacker wrote: post #25

Instead of industrial base for national security priority, Americans are served extra slop with a side of spammy content once these AI are done ingesting.

I actually think infrastructure and competence in AI is going to be huge for national security in a a few years.

Basically, I think future wars will be fought with AI drone swarms. If your AI is crappy, then your drones will suck and you'll lose the war.

It's true that today's use cases are about AI slop content. Then again, a lot of modern internet technology was spear-headed by porn sites.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#58

Post by scns »

keiferski wrote: post #53
thaack wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I guess most of these jobs don’t allow for music or YouTube to be used during work? I’m just thinking that people already spend a lot of time just consuming content, so if it were possible to watch YouTube while at the factory, maybe it wouldn’t be as unpopular.

Listening to music should work, no pun intended. Watching YouTube though?

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#59

Post by GOD_Over_Djinn »

0xcafefood wrote: post #18
1970-01-01 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalists keep conflating LLMs with AI. You don't use an entire DC with its own power plant to keep a line of robotic welders online and working.

FWIW journalists are just following the lead of tech executives and others hyping LLMs as "AI" so it's hard to fault the journalists specifically.

I beg to differ. Journalists are supposed to do their own investigation and analysis of the people, institutions, and events that they report on. If they just parrot the talking points of executives, then they’re producing advertisements, not journalism.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#60

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

thaack wrote: post #50
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits. Q: Do you ever use an online job service to advertise jobs and collect applications? Asking because my 5 sons all learned that job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers). Other viable but never-seen applicants: Minimal or sporadic job history, the most minimal of cr…

I have no involvement with the plant directly. My understanding is the best luck they had was getting in good graces with local probation officers & craigslist classifieds. Job portals were pretty useless from my understanding.

> the best luck they had was getting in good graces with local probation officers & craigslist classifieds.

I appreciate the answer. And I understand that you may not have more-granular info than this.

But I am wondering what how jobs were advertised prior to utilizing ProbOff/CL. Maybe the answer is this. There was no avenue to get job listings in front of the most likely eyeballs.

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