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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

#251

Post by shunia_huang »

Quite the contrary to the points made in some of the comments mentioning that China is far ahead in applying automation tools/workflows in factories, which then shaped the competitive benifits in manufacture industries.

No, it's not.

It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to involve because of the involving needs for newer/better products.

It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources, it is the growing needs from the comsumers that require products to have newer/more functionality even if it has shorter lifetime, or event 'better', the product is looking for growth so they are designed to be short lifetime so the manufacturer and the customer both willing to upgrade in the future.

Excuse my language/grammer.

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

#253

Post by t1E9mE7JTRjf »

saubeidl wrote: post #204

The US is committing economic suicide, based on a misguided belief in something that'll never happen. The new superpowers will be the EU, which was smart enough not to make the same gamble, and China, which will structurally survive it.

zero growth in the eu in 2 decades, meanwhile the US powered on ahead. I'm all for optimism, but only realism matters. Hopefully the US has a manufacturing revival for the sake of working class folk, but that isn't so relevant to its growth since services/product aren't antithetic.

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

#254

Post by ap99 »

yibg wrote: post #136
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 hear people (media, politicians) talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America, but I haven't heard too much well articulated reasons for why. There are issues with national security, reliance on less than friendly nations etc. For instance, we'd want to grow our own food, even if importing would be cheaper. But those surely aren't the majority of manufacturing jobs. Given the choice of increasing the numb…

It's about leverage, which you mentioned.

If you have no leverage during a negotiation and your counterpart has can say 'no' without having to give up anything then you're screwed.

America doesn't have to be the best manufacturers, but we do need to have the ability to say, "fuck it we'll build it ourselves" when the other side of the table says something we don't like.

And anyone living in the fantasy utopia where the whole world agrees on everything and there's peace all the time... read more history.

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

#255

Post by WJW »

roenxi wrote: post #240
nvader wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. The technical term for that is "the real world". Moment of perspective on just how weird the software people are that they don't just accept mucking around as expensive and dangerous.

I don't think it's weird, it's just a feature of their/our tools. For software people, experimentation is cheap and easy. Version control means rollbacks are easy and fast. If you do break something, completely rebuilding the application from scratch is something that happens dozens of times per day anyway. When trying a new tool, it arrives with almost no lead time and often at zero cost, so the only price is a few person-hours of work.

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

#256

Post by constantcrying »

shunia_huang wrote: post #251

Quite the contrary to the points made in some of the comments mentioning that China is far ahead in applying automation tools/workflows in factories, which then shaped the competitive benifits in manufacture industries. No, it's not. It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to inv…

Here in the west it is common sense that between products made in China and in the West the main difference is that the later category barely exists and if it does it comes at mostly unaffordable prices.

If you are as far ahead in manufacturing as China is, of course you can dictate the terms of competition and they want to increase consumption. I have zero doubt that this is anything but a deliberate choice, which could be altered by Chinese manufacturers if wanted to.

The myth of incompetent Chinese engineering and manufacturing is just that. And believing in it puts you in a dangerous place, where some day some Chinese company can do everything you can for half the price, which has happened again and again.

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

#257

Post by peterdsharpe »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #195
alsetmusic wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have an AI promoter here. AGI isn't the future of anything right now. It could be. But so could a lot of things, like vaccine research (we're making promising development on HIV and cancer). Try saying those people would own the future in the 1980s-1990s. Sure, that'd be an obvious outcome, but it wasn't on the horizon for the people in the field at the time (unless your family owned the company).

Even if you could cure cancer or HIV with a vaccine it would have a relatively negligible impact compared to AGI. There are far more signals that AGI is going to be achieved by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the next 5-10 years than there were of any other hyped breakthrough in the past 100 years that ultimately never came to fruition. Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen, but to ignore the multitude of…

There is a beautiful irony in your misspelling of Anno Domini as Anno Domani, for the Italian speakers in the room.

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

#259

Post by mtrovo »

shunia_huang wrote: post #251

Quite the contrary to the points made in some of the comments mentioning that China is far ahead in applying automation tools/workflows in factories, which then shaped the competitive benifits in manufacture industries. No, it's not. It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to inv…

> It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources

Can you name a few items that you feel that way?

My impression as a consumer is that everything comes from China nowadays, even the reliable brands. The main difference I think is the time spend around product design and fine tuning the manufacturer's process. Think about it, there's a reason why they have to make it very visible that the product is "designed with love in colorado" when all the manufacturing jobs are in China.

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

#260

Post by nebula8804 »

nikanj wrote: post #245
nebula8804 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homer Simpson exemplifies this. Heres a guy that never went to college being the lead safety inspector for a nuclear power plant. He owns his home with three kids a stay at home wife and two cars and two pets(with the occasional elephant that comes and goes). A lot has changed since the writing of these characters and the world now. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp2Ey0H7OUE

My go-to example is Al Bundy. He was a loser, but most zoomers can only dream of having a house, a few kids, a car project in the garage et cetera

Yes absolutely! I was never too much into Married with Children as a kid hence I jumped straight to the simpsons but the idea of a shoe salesman having all of that today? Not possible.
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