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

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

#261

Post by dustincoates »

Stephen_0xFF wrote: post #123
ryandrake wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nostalgia more than anything. At the time a factory job could buy you a home out of high school, have a wife that stays home and takes care of the children. The factory job itself is a red herring. What people actually want is a post WW2 baby booming economy.

You won't hear me say that the housing market doesn't need an overhaul, but I'm not sure that the "a factory job could buy you a home out of high school" meme is entirely accurate. If you look at home ownership rates, the rates today are higher than (though not by much) the rates in the 1960s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

I can't find numbers from earlier than 1980, but 18-44 _is_ lower, though again the rate in 1980 was just a few percentage points higher, and not nearly high enough to imply that home ownership out of high school was in reach for the majority: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf

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

#262

Post by cpursley »

nebula8804 wrote: post #235
DavidPeiffer wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in manufacturing. There are a few instances where watching YouTube may not be a huge hazard, but 98% of the roles I've seen the are reasonable reasons to not permit that. If nothing else, it'd be easy to let quality suffer which causes many bigger headaches. I went to a panel discussion at a conference last year. Operations managers agreed labor was their biggest challenge. The manager for the promotional mate…

He just needs to wait a decade, the Chinese workers will be retiring and will not be replaced. Entire product segments probably just go away or the inflation raises the table such that the managers situation now is the norm. Problem solved.

You seem obsessed with the “China population collapse” propaganda (which is put out by the usual suspects, btw). Anyways, I hate to break it to you, but this is also the trend throughout the entire Western world. Besides, automation and AI is going offset a lot of those worker losses (which is actually a win). And in 20 years the Chinese will still be giving birth to as many if not more people than the entire combine West.

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

#263

Post by gabrielgio »

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'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.

Isn't the requirements set by the company outsourcing to China? Because as far as I can tell in China you can produce with all ranges of quality so it feels a bit too simplistic to blame "planned obsolescence" to China alone as the whole chain profits from it (besides the end-user of-course).

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

#264

Post by karel-3d »

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…

This feel true 15 years ago, but now everything is from China, both lower, mid and higher end market.

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

#265

Post by numpad0 »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #160
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.

So like, up to 100 months.

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

#266

Post by rubberband »

bgwalter wrote: post #56

They are now open about it. Musk tweets about a new company Macrohard, which does not manufacture itself ( https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1977281341264740625#m ): "Our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but will be able to do so indirectly, much like Apple has other companies manufacture their phones." In other words, we are a knowledge economy and…

This is eerily similar to the Enron business model... @.@

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

#267

Post by selimthegrim »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #170
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. Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really claiming that American society is more primitive than that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu? Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush toilets.

This might be a shocker for you, but flush toilets are really not that big a deal compared to the Asian kind.

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

#268

Post by timeon »

kranke155 wrote: post #237
bsder wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits. I'm SUPER doubtful of this. When I last bumped into this, the local Amazon warehouse paid more than all the local manufacturing. It wasn't even close. Local manufacturing got used to being a local monopoly and being able to underpay. Now that they're not a monopoly, all they do is whine and complain…

The issue is of course there is no market for US made goods at a good salary when other countries were selling their goods in the US market without impediment. Tariffs were supposed to fix that, but now I don’t know if they are effective at all.

Yes that is usually point of the tariffs. Not this time as they are too broad (include products like coffee) and not stable (announced one day than delayed/dismissed etc.). Point of tariffs that current regime made is to destabilize both domestic and foreign markets.

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

#269

Post by selimthegrim »

nradov wrote: post #163
chongli wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You used to be able to buy a nice house in the suburbs with car in the garage and a white picket fence, support a stay-at-home wife with three kids, put them all through college, and take annual vacations to Disneyland or the Caribbean, and cover the healthcare needs of the whole family, all on the salary of a high school educated factory worker. Now all that sounds impossible. You’d have to pay factory workers well…

That was never the reality for most factory workers. Usually the car was cramped with a single bathroom, the wife picked up some part-time work, most vacations were road trips to go camping, and not all the kids went to college. Inflation and growing income inequality are legitimate problems but let's not paint an unrealistic picture of "the good old days".

Not a sprinter van clearly if it was cramped with a single bathroom.

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

#270

Post by CuriouslyC »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #6
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…

China has been building robots and robotic manufacturing without AI. So why AI? Because the AI is a grift for those who can get exposure to its potential gains during the exuberance, while China builds actual capabilities. Profits and fiat are shared delusions, monetarily speaking, robots and factories are real, and will build real things. Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified - https://news.yc…

AI isn't directly a grift, however it's going to be backstopped by the president, and top investors know, so market discipline is out the window. Robotics is the thing that will let China dump money into AI sustainably (in addition to their energy supremacy). That was the point of AI is Too Big to Fail.
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