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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

#411

Post by youngtaff »

baq wrote: post #310
al_borland wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a factory for a few months. They moved me around on the line. While each week looked the same, each day in the week was different. Though I was told by some of the other guys on the line that it was one of the nicer factories they ever worked in. I did some tech work in a few auto factories as well, and those had a very different vibe on the floor. While it may be boring to someone who use used to doing k…

The thing is, minimum wage there pays for 10 people on the floor in Asia and the cost of the factory is approximately the same. There’s no economic sense to build a factory in the states… which is where all the government subsidies enter the stage, but the budget is already running a war time deficit. It’s going to be so much worse for those small used-to-be-factory cities until the printer starts for real, and then…

Asian factories particularly China are deploying robots at a rate that puts the rest of the world in the shadows

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

#412

Post by bluGill »

tim333 wrote: post #321
Spooky23 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and you’re going to be poorer as a whole. People in backwards places like rural and urban ‘hoods live reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively speaking. I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car. When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American…

>I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. >People in backwards places like rural... That's not actually true. You want to visit rural Asia and compare.

There are backward rural places in America. However the vast majority of rural people have had reliable electric since the 1950s, along with phone (though those lines may not longer work since everyone has gone cellular). They bought their first color TV in the 1960s like everyone else. They drive cars (the image of a red neck mowing his grass and finding a car - they drove that car 30 years ago, when it wore out they go a different one and quit driving it). Most of the backward in America are groups like the Amish who have every ability to be modern but choose not to.

In rural Asia there are a lot of people who don't have electric, they don't have cars.

Though I don't know why rural is even a topic here. Factories don't exist in rural areas, this exist in cities and towns where the workers live.

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

#413

Post by bluGill »

trollbridge wrote: post #365
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…

My local factories are mostly union, and they rely heavily on the union to help fill empty openings. They also set up booths at local job fairs and have a poster board with current openings (typically electricians and pipe fitters, sometimes line workers or machinists). The jobs also have benefits and vacation and sick time off. Everybody I know who works there is always trying to get as many overtime shifts as they…

> Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force.

Unions need to quit their management is evil message as well. Unions can do good, but when they call all management evil and breed resentment I can't blame companies for not wanting unions around.

The above is US centrist - in other countries the Unions don't do this.

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

#414

Post by schmidtleonard »

ux266478 wrote: post #409
ACCount37 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought is: "when that wears out or fails what the fuck are you replacing it with".

You machine a new part.

Exactly: the new process becomes the lowest bid, new NRE goes forward, and the old process finally gets to drift off into the sunset. It happens all the time and people (sometimes the same people) complain about that too.

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

#415

Post by dunham »

minkeymaniac wrote: post #399
fidotron wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm somewhere in the middle, young enough that almost everything I've seen new is disposable crap (including the tools), old enough that I have had an interest in things from before and noticed that they really were built much better, or at least heavier, back then. I've made the comment on here before that I believe it's short term energy optimisation, in that it used to be seen as reasonable to much heavier objects…

Yes.. try moving that 36 inch Sony Trinitron from the car inside the house.. weighs 200 pounds+ IIRC....you need at least 2 strong people

I remember the Sun monitors (21" I think) were about 80 lbs. I've read that part of that was a metal frame to hold all of the wires in front of the screen.

They were fun monitors - we had a lab full of them, they would degauss on startup, and the degausser would induct into the monitor next to it (and a little bit into the monitor after that).

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

#416

Post by youngtaff »

Closi wrote: post #181
crote wrote: post #74

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. In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid , they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible! Western lab…

> Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible! Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production. The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west -…

They're automating the production of many items not just cars

https://archive.ph/DuZGe

>The overall number of robots added in China last year was 295,000, compared to 27,000 in Germany, 34,000 in the US and just 2,500 in the UK.

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

#417

Post by yxhuvud »

tclancy wrote: post #302
mikewarot wrote: post #133

Having worked in a job shop, a factory that did gears down to quantity one, I became quite aware of the differences between IT, my previous job, and actual physical production. The machine tools were all made 50+ years ago. Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups that are done a few times a year in quantity, to fail, erasing the profits for the j…

There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”. Of course, this could simply be the perspective of someone turning 50 this year.

I rather think of the maintenance nightmare. You can't change anything - not cause the existing system is good but because there are no people left that understand the whole thing.

But then I've got a few years to reach 50. Perhaps my views will change.

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

#418

Post by youngtaff »

nradov wrote: post #406
nebula8804 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison. Would the rest of the world even care anymore? Everyone from Canada to New Zealand is now making plans for long term disconnection from the US. They will not let the next Trump boss them around like they…

The other 95% of the planet has mostly been relying upon the USA as the global hegemon to provide the security guarantees and financial infrastructure necessary for large scale free trade since the end of WWII. If the USA steps back from that then global trade networks will gradually break down because no other country or stable coalition has the desire or resources to step into that role. The situation will revert t…

Nope… the US has been relying on the rest of the world to fund it's deficit, provide land for military bases to project it's 'power'

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

#419

Post by jcgrillo »

kube-system wrote: post #349
jcgrillo wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have even the slightest amount of situational awareness sound deadening or infotainment gizmos will not render you unaware of an approaching emergency vehicle. Scan your mirrors, scan your instruments, scan the horizon, repeat. The problem is unqualified, uneducated drivers.

Sound is great because it does not require line of sight. There's a reason why emergency vehicles have both lights and sirens, and it isn't because all of them have unnecessary equipment.

Agreed, but the root cause of the issue the emergency vehicle operator are noticing isn't sound deadening or infotainment gizmos, it's inattentive distracted drivers. Probably playing with their cell phones instead of driving. Similarly, in a manufacturing situation playing with your phone or watching tv is likely to cause problems. Inattention and inability to focus on the job is the problem. You can't solve that with technology, but you can with education.

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

#420

Post by ux266478 »

simgt wrote: post #279
ffsm8 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.

How do you end up with 10-15 years? China is almost perfectly vertically integrated from raw materials to highly advanced finished products. Their industrialization started in the 70s. Getting to that level would require a lot of planning as well as the kind of hard constraints imposed on China through embargo. We're not even getting back to that level, we've never reached iPhone level of manufacturing in the US or E…

It was not linear growth. The 70s and 80s were essentially write-offs. Things began to move in the mid-1990s and it has been a continual evolution and process over the last 30 years. Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping's teams all did wildly different things for China. The vertical integration you mention was basically non-existent prior to 2020, it came about as part of the New Development Pattern (新发展格局) for the Inner Loop (国内双循环)

China today is virtually unrecognizable compared to even 10 years ago, though.

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