121–130 of 223 posts
I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train? They had literally everything: universities, manufacturing culture, expertise and supporting supply chains, cash. I forgot, they also had ASML, freaking next door!
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I'm not saying Asian culture is the main factor. Yes, it's true that authoritarian governance driven by dictatorial regimes and chaebol politics has played a strong role, but fundamentally, the long working hours are simply inherent to this business. You brought up the New Mexico story quite well, but that place is notorious for the exploitation of Navajo women's labor. In the first place, the factory was occupied an…
This is extrapolating from a single example of something that has worked and the conflating correlation with causation. There are plenty of places with highly educated cheap workforces who work hard. Eastern European culture is almost identical down to the whole "tiger mom" stereotype. And there are numerous counter examples: Ireland has a huge semiconductor industry: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/semicondu…
As you said, if it were just about labor, other countries would probably have some supply of it as well. But in the case of Eastern Europe, there was likely American pushback against the European continent. As you know, semiconductors today can't be made entirely by a single entity. They're connected through a chain of trust. If Europe were to move beyond just producing semiconductor equipment and start directly manufacturing semiconductors through fabs, it would easily become a competitor to the U.S. rather than a supply chain partner.
In fact, the semiconductor chain is deliberately fragmented so that no single player can monopolize it.
On top of that, the U.S. is using South Korea and Taiwan to contain China. Under the ideology of protecting foundries from Chinese aggression and industrial attacks, the U.S. is sending the signal that it can cut off the supply chain. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, is tied up with the EU, making it much harder for the U.S. to control.
In the end, what matters when the consumer nation, the U.S., outsources production is how securely it can relocate it. Look at what happened to Japan's semiconductor industry. It was crushed through the 1986 agreement. The U.S. simply does not tolerate the emergence of an independent manufacturing hub that possesses sovereign economic power.
What matters is whether the U.S. can maintain control while keeping the price low.
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This is the path that Japan tried to go down and it hasn't worked out yet, but we have also solved a lot more of the technical issues since they began. going to be interesting to see if we pull it off this time.
The current humanoid hype don't have much substances or key technologies in it, and incumbent industrial robotics companies like FANUC are already in the process of rolling the techniques created for humanoids into their robots. I personally think this is going to be just series of incremental gains for big welding bots, and nursery equipment becoming mildly robotic, like Aperture Science wall panels, than humanoids…
This is something people refuse to understand. The shape of the robot changes absolutely nothing about robot intelligence unless it abandons the basic concept of joints and links. Continuum robots are very difficult to control but they are also incredibly niche.
I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train? They had literally everything: universities, manufacturing culture, expertise and supporting supply chains, cash. I forgot, they also had ASML, freaking next door!
They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts follo…
Reminded of Matt Yglesias’s excellent headline from 2010: Angela Merkel Lucky the Bar for “Worst German Leader” is Very High
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For the optimistic case, read this piece by RethinkX: https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/rethinkx/the-disruption-of-lab... (Fwiw, >20 years ago RethinkX correctly projected the exponential cost declines of solar and batteries, when everybody else was drawing straight lines.)
> Humanoid robots will enter the market at a cost-capability of under $10/hour for their labor, on a trajectory to under $1/hour before 2035 and under $0.10/hour before 2045. I dont see it, unless this is an expectation that a robot will work for 50 years without maintenance at capex. Why doesnt a comparable tool, like an excavator, work with this math? Why arent they 100 times cheaper to run than 20 years ago? Excav…
What is the big push for humanoid robots? We make non-humanoid robots because they're better at doing things than humanoid robots are.
I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train? They had literally everything: universities, manufacturing culture, expertise and supporting supply chains, cash. I forgot, they also had ASML, freaking next door!
Socialism or more its german variant, a system that can spend much more than more capitalistic power holders can ever earn and doesn't really plan well for future. Just look at it - very protected jobs, stifling bureaucracy, very hard to fire people, brilliant folks are definitely not compensated accordingly compared to (below) average peers - more often than not they earn the same. Its not agile economy nor workforce by any means, in contrary.
The feeling that the German Way (TM) is The Right Way, regardless of situation. If it worked in the past, it will in future, right. That leads to stagnation, complacency and when competition leap frogs them by the mile, surprised puzzled looks and wondering how it all happened.
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If there's no unknown unknowns in the brain, it's most likely possible. As the universal approximation theorem and empirical results of scaling SGD+RL suggest. Whether it will be economically viable remains to be seen. The human cerebellum has a peculiar structure and 80% of the brain's neurons after all.
Real neurons are orders of magnitude more complex than their artificial pseudo-approximation (it is all based on the century-old understanding of how neurons work). You can think of _individual_ biological neuron as an analog of the small artificial neural network. You can see this simple visual explanation on YouTube[1]. So we aren't even close. It doesn't mean the AI is impossible, it just means people underestimat…
We don't know the violations of the physical Church-Turing thesis that are conductive for machine learning. We don't have evidence for their existence in the brain (although, the brain would be the prime candidate for finding them as evolution works directly with the true physical laws).
BTW, large ANNs don't try to model how the brain does things. They are trying to mimic what the brain does. So, using "how many transistors/artificial neurons it takes to model a biological neuron" is not a good approach.
We have no evidence. We even have no solid theories how this can work (Penrose's OrchOR is "OrchOR somehow taps into mathematical knowledge somehow encoded into the structure of spacetime"). But people, for some reason, insist that there should be something there. I can't attribute it to anything else but to deeply entrenched feeling of human exceptionalism.