What's worrying is that this "AI gold rush" feels eerily similar to past tech bubbles: lots of capital, lots of hype, and unclear long-term value
America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
281–290 of 753 posts
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#282My dad is an immigrant from China who came to America to learn process engineering. After getting his master's, his first job was at a Reynold's aluminum factory in Alabama, and his factory made aluminum stuff and sometimes bottles. 40 years later, after lots of career jumps, he is about to retire this month from Google's AI division. I don't really know what the lesson here is.
Something about adaptability? Over time lots of jobs will go away—be it through obsolescence, offshoring, etc. I don’t think the answer is to try to get those jobs to magically come back but rather to find something else.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#283My dad is an immigrant from China who came to America to learn process engineering. After getting his master's, his first job was at a Reynold's aluminum factory in Alabama, and his factory made aluminum stuff and sometimes bottles. 40 years later, after lots of career jumps, he is about to retire this month from Google's AI division. I don't really know what the lesson here is.
It came full circle... from process engineering in the physical world to process engineering in the digital one
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#284The 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…
> The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean other than individual rich people started outsourcing labor to poor countries because they were allowed to import the products of that labor back into the country cheaply.
> Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services.
This is just nonsense. The trade deficit includes services, and grows a negative balance of payments that has been growing for 50 years. It would be different if that money were used for investment, but that money was just given to the wealthy. Reversing the trade deficit will not be enough. It's not that the government is debt-ridden, it's that the nation is debt-ridden. We're borrowing foreign cash to buy foreign imports. All we have left is to sell off land, buildings, and exclusive franchises.
But that's populist. As in the population that won't just be able to move to a country that isn't broken.
I mean, every single part of this is wrong, and there's nothing in it that resembles an economic argument. We need to bring manufacturing to the US because we need to produce something in order to be paid. We have no advantage in services, we only pretend to have one because we have wealthy people who import talent and who are themselves immigrants. We are not only not working, but are badly educated. I have no idea why you think that the world will continue to feed America for free, forever. What we're doing is selling the furniture and the fixtures, and pretending like everything is just fine.
And the people who inherited the furniture and the fixtures are like, yup, nothing's wrong.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's true that West has population decline as well, but due to 1 child policy the decline in China is going to be much steeper.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#286Earlier 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 sure I agree. Tariffs adds cost, unless domestic manufacturing can be done in a more or less cost effective way. Manufacturing works benefit of course but that's a overall small proportion of the population and ought to be (we probably don't want most people to be doing manufacturing work). But the added costs end up be a tax on everyone and a regressive one at that. I also don't see offshoring manufacturing…
why does this arbitrage exist? Why is the cost of energy, the fundamental input into every economy, cheaper in Asia? Tractors consume fuel, fertilisers do too. Human labour is the least efficient at converting fuel into energy. When you dig a little deeper, you'd find an economy structured around keeping rentiers away from the basics: housing, energy and food.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#287My dad is an immigrant from China who came to America to learn process engineering. After getting his master's, his first job was at a Reynold's aluminum factory in Alabama, and his factory made aluminum stuff and sometimes bottles. 40 years later, after lots of career jumps, he is about to retire this month from Google's AI division. I don't really know what the lesson here is.
It came full circle... from process engineering in the physical world to process engineering in the digital one
From China to America, where those original factory jobs went from America to China, and maybe AI at some point is destined to head there too.
Also, I was born in that factory town and I'm currently writing this in Shanghai, where I'm trying to relocate to in hopes of better career/entrepreneurial opportunities lmao. The world is funny sometimes.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Agreed. For that economy to come back, you need all possible competitors to be weak and poor, in the mid 20th century that meant either still agrarian (China) or rebuilding after war (Japan and Europe). It was a unique moment and it's never coming back.
This doesn't make any sense at all. The reason China is dominant in manufacturing isn't because the other countries of the world were weak and agrarian and rebuilding after war.
What would be awesome is if half-assed finance bro speeches weren't being thrown around as serious macro.
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#289Having 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…
It's wild to think we used to build things to last decades. Now we build them to chase benchmarks for the next quarter
Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!"
When the ship is sinking the captain has to intervene
He's your captain, not mine. I prefer intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate, moral people to random rich guys who happened to be in the right place at the right time.