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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

#171

Post by ozgrakkurt »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #151
Spooky23 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They wrote per hour rates though, it is just more difficult per hour

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

#172

Post by starky »

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…

>Why on earth are we trying to bring it back?

The main argument would be if you are relying on other countries and you can't produce anything yourself then you need to rely on other countries being good trading partners. If the relationship with those trading partners fails your economy is in trouble.

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

#173

Post by jaggederest »

iancmceachern wrote: post #168
hansmayer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPUs have a much shorter lifecycle, on the order of ~3 years.

Exactly, I'm a mechanical engineer and I still have tools given to me by my machinist great uncle from WWII that are not only functional, they're identical to a new tool I'd buy today for that purpose, from the same manufacturer. This is the difference the OP was highlighting

We've also been doing machining in the modern sense for at least a hundred and fifty years. The GPU as a concept is about 30 years old, and in the modern sense much younger than that.

Innovation occurs on a sigmoid curve, we're still very early in the sigmoid for software and computer hardware, and very late in the sigmoid for machining, unless you include CNC, in which case, we're back to software and computer hardware being the new parts.

A better example would be the tape out and lifetime for semiconductor fabs, which are only about 70 years old and have lifetimes measured in the decade range.

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

#174

Post by Lapel2742 »

bluGill wrote: post #78
Lapel2742 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> factories with no humans on the assembly line. Not an American myself, but why should that be good for ordinary American citizens? Few people make loads of money, some Gen-Xer secure the value of their 401k and the younger ones are out of job?

This is great for ordinary Americans. It means you don't have to do the boring assembly jobs, but you still get the benefits for vast amounts of mass produced goods. (some of it is junk, but that is a different topic). Those goods should be cheap as well because they are mass produced with little labor costs. The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative. (or those who…

> The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative.

Yes! I'm pretty sure the guy working his ass of at the factory does so because brain surgeon doesn't pay enough...

Is this the next version of "trickle down economics"?

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

#175

Post by starky »

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…

This is assuming that "AI" isn't already being used extensively on manufacturing lines. Computer Vision has used "AI" neural networks for years for various tasks. The issue is that it is a lot of investment to implement automated assembly and there are still enough places in the world where labour is cheap enough to make it not worth it. As I said to one of my suppliers recently when they asked how their factory compared to others, "Automation is nice to have, but at the end of the day I'm choosing a vendor based on who can get me the product cheapest, quickest, and with high quality."

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

#177

Post by imtringued »

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…

That's backwards. If you can amortize $70k in a few months you're doing extremely well.

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

#179

Post by riffraff »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #66
scns wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Watching YouTube though? Yeah, I can't make that work. Only my most routine work can be done with the TV on (and providing it's my 5th rewatch).

It's a matter of habit and personal traits.

I grew up doing homework with the TV on and still sometimes work with a tiny video overlay showing some anime or tv show.

You basically pay attention to a small part of it, and switch focus as needed (pause your task or pause the video). You'll still miss a lot of the video but you just don't care.

I know this is unthinkable to some people but I've met more than one person who does it, so it's not ultra-rare. Possibly related to ADD/ADHD? I don't know.

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

#180

Post by nvader »

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…

I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion.

However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.

Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.

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