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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

#151

Post by diffeomorphism »

Spooky23 wrote: post #122
pseudocomposer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, the “higher pay and significantly better benefits” are not actually significantly better. I’d rather we address that than just exploit some other workers overseas where they’re out of sight, out of mind. Honestly, it seems like tariffs on imported goods would be the way around this, but also, we need to be sure that money is going to the people doing the work, not just the owners. Speaking of which, I don’…

I’m not the OP. Heavy labor is… a lot of work. It’s rough in the body and some people aren’t cut for it. In the 90s as a high school kid, I made $14/hr as a farmhand when the minimum wage was $4.75. They’d hire 4 crews of 4 guys each and we’d lose about half through the summer. They were great family to work for, but the work was hella hard. You could go retrieve shopping carts for $4.75 an hour and smoke weed all da…

That just tells me that the pay was bad for the job.

If job A pays 80k and job B pays 100k, but job A is 40h and job B is 60h, then job B pays worse. They pay more but not better.

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

#152

Post by profsummergig »

fair_enough wrote: post #84

Just a friendly reminder: The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Of course he doesn't want people to think that tariffs can bring back middle class manufacturing jobs, and naturally he would want to publish propaganda intended to demoralize pro-labor causes like import tariffs and worker protection laws. I'm not saying he's wrong just yet, I'm just pointing out that he owns a propaganda mouthpiece and is willing…

It's intriguing to me how people assumed that Bezos would never interfere with WaPo and then he did.

"We superior Westerners with our moral billionaires would never... Hey! What're you doing!"

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

#153

Post by joe_the_user »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #60
thaack wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand why Craigslist is being framed as a some step down here (while probation clearly is). Craiglist is exactly where you instantly have many eyes on your ad and people will send in resumes without the bullshit filtering of the various portals.

Outside of an urban area, you won't necessary be overwhelmed with resumes. If you portray your job realistically, you'll get people realistically interested in your job.

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

#154

Post by [deleted] »

ReliantGuyZ wrote: post #8
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…

I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about manufactu…

[deleted]

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

#155

Post by wrp »

coliveira wrote: post #146
yibg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using people for manufacturing fundamentally will never be cost competitive compared to cheaper markets. There are really only a few ways to resolve this in my view: 1. Give up and just outsource manufacturing and be ok with it 2. Invest heavily in automation, technology etc so we remove cost of labor from the equation. Or at least heavily minimize it 3. Put up trade barriers to artificially raise the cost of importe…

# 3 is not a solution because it will only make American production more expensive and impoverish the population. It's a full disaster.

Japan used that strategy very successfully for at least a century. The high cost of imported goods encouraged consumers to buy domestic at prices that were also high, which subsidized exports at competitive prices. The Japanese public is less docile now, but this is one example where import restrictions worked well. I believe you can find other examples from the 20th century, but I'm not sure whether they would work well in the current global environment.

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

#156

Post by protocolture »

coliveira wrote: post #145
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…

Exactly, most factories in China are already heavily automated. Americans don't have a clue of what they've been doing there in the last 20 years to modernize production. The US would need to invest trillions in automation and workforce training to be able to compete with China, Taiwan and Korea. I don't see Americans being able to do this because they're too addicted to easy money from Wall Street.

Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling items.

Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with scale orders.

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

#157

Post by shawn_w »

ryandrake wrote: post #108
mullingitover wrote: post #44

The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately. Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services . Yes, there is have a trade deficit on goods, that was a long-term strategy because services were a superior investment. Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money unless you're planning to g…

I don't know why people romanticize 1950-style manufacturing jobs so much, like they are some kind of objectively ideal job. These jobs really weren't great. Bunch of dudes standing at an assembly line all day physically busting their asses and sweating it out. Sometimes in a physically hazardous environment. Sometimes breathing stinky and/or harmful chemicals. Sometimes surrounded by ear-damaging loud noises. Someti…

Back then a couple could buy a house and raise a few kids on the paycheck that factory job of the husband's earned. These days even someone with a 6 figure tech job has trouble with that goal, but I think a lot of people think they can go back to the good old days.

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

#158

Post by buu700 »

crote wrote: post #83
kasey_junk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not an expert in this, and don’t necessarily believe it. But the pitch is that existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints. And that much of the factory automation that hasn’t happened is because it’s too costly to get to that level of specificity in that the existing automation requires higher scale to be cost effective. If you had more general purpose intelligence y…

> existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints Rather the opposite, I'd say: existing manufacturing automation is built around repetitive motions because an assembly line is making multiples of the same product . Having AI reinvent the wheel for every individual item is completely pointless. One-off manufacturing can to a certain extent be automated. We're already seeing th…

I think you could make an analogy to the difference between ASICs and general-purpose CPUs. ASICs are great, but CPUs have flexibility and massive economies of scale. Similarly, a specialized machine might be more efficient than a humanoid robot at a particular task, but advanced humanoid robots could theoretically do all the tasks and as a result would likely end up being manufactured in very high volume.

Imagine a future where any hardware startup could design and provision an assembly line as easily and cheaply as software startups today use cloud computing. Maybe after a certain scale it becomes economical to consider replacing steps of the manufacturing process with "ASIC" solutions, but maybe there'd be a long tail of things which would continue to remain best served by general-purpose robots indefinitely.

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

#159

Post by nradov »

crote wrote: post #74
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. 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…

I took a tour of the BMW Spartanburg factory a few days ago. It is highly automated with most work done by industrial robots. There are a few human workers manually pulling parts out of bins to feed the robots but nothing like the way that assembly lines used to operate.

https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en.html

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

#160

Post by trenchpilgrim »

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…

> hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months

What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.

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