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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

#291

Post by joenot443 »

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.

> There was no avenue to get job listings in front of the most likely eyeballs

Bit of an aside, but if anyone else is in this position and trying to reach the eyeballs of jobseekers who aren't actively using portals, I really can't recommend local Facebook groups enough.

A post from a real account (not the business) saying "Gizmo Plastics are hiring line workers for $18/h, anyone interested?" will get some guaranteed traction. In my small town Ontario groups, I've never seen a post looking for laborers go ignored.

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

#292

Post by pessimizer »

some_guy_nobel wrote: post #31
bdcravens wrote: post #27

> down 38,000 jobs since the start of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics That's 0.3%.

You can show any number in isolation and it can mean anything. Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job gains/losses!

The reason the percentage was included was to take the number out of isolation. What can mean anything is when people tell you to ignore the numbers, because they could mean anything.

> Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job gains/losses!

You first!

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

#293

Post by ta1243 »

keiferski wrote: post #64
scns wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah I guess it’s probably not realistic for most factory jobs. I am just thinking that “get paid $20 an hour to do a simple task and watch YouTube/listen to music” is actually kind of appealing to many people.

When I was 18 I got paid below minimum wage to sit in my car delivering pizzas while listening to the radio. Far better than the higher paid shop job I tried at university.

Today with not just unlimited music (with no adverts), but the vast amounts of audio books you can listen to, it's even more appealing for people with limited financial obligations.

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

#294

Post by ForHackernews »

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…

The heavy presses produced in 1955 are still in use today https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-pr...

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

#295

Post by syntaxing »

I’m a software engineer now but I was a design mechanical engineer for a decade. In America, mechanical engineers always felt like the bottom of barrel. The pay, benefits, and authority was always worse, even at the big tech companies. Culturally, America wants manufacturing back but doesn’t give it the respect it deserves.

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

#296

Post by 3D30497420 »

simgt wrote: post #279
ffsm8 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.

How do you end up with 10-15 years? China is almost perfectly vertically integrated from raw materials to highly advanced finished products. Their industrialization started in the 70s. Getting to that level would require a lot of planning as well as the kind of hard constraints imposed on China through embargo. We're not even getting back to that level, we've never reached iPhone level of manufacturing in the US or E…

It would also require a degree of consensus and quality of leadership which is completely lacking.

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

#297

Post by defraudbah »

syntaxing wrote: post #295

I’m a software engineer now but I was a design mechanical engineer for a decade. In America, mechanical engineers always felt like the bottom of barrel. The pay, benefits, and authority was always worse, even at the big tech companies. Culturally, America wants manufacturing back but doesn’t give it the respect it deserves.

do you still create stuff for fun?

As for mechanical engineer many things that are puzzling to average engineer are easy to understand / recreate by mechanical engineer, especially in 3d printing era

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

#298

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

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 "mucking around" is the correct perspective there.

It's hard to argue that most if not all of the recent innovations in manufacturing concern making chains more modulable, and easier and cheaper to modifywhich you could see as bringing manufacturing closer and closer to software engineering and this is probably to be even more true in the year to come.

Large scale automation using mostly wireless technology, easily reconfigurable pick-and-place machine and robot conveyor, cheap additive manufacturing, easy to use and cheap CNC machining with precision which were until recently limited to very expensive models, we are quickly getting to a point where configuring a mostly automated short run is both manageable and cost effective provided you have invested in the tooling and have the engineers able to put it in place efficiently.

I think that when people talk about bringing back manufacturing, most think Ford Model T assembly line in 1900 when the norm is quickly becoming a SpaceX-like pacing. That's basically what you are competing against in South East Asia and it sadly has far less need for an uneducated workforce than many expect.

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

#299

Post by EasyMark »

syntaxing wrote: post #295

I’m a software engineer now but I was a design mechanical engineer for a decade. In America, mechanical engineers always felt like the bottom of barrel. The pay, benefits, and authority was always worse, even at the big tech companies. Culturally, America wants manufacturing back but doesn’t give it the respect it deserves.

I know several mechanical engineers who ended up in semiconductor processing and they make bank. Maybe not senior google coder/engineer money but probably in top 10% of senior engineers easily

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

#300

Post by menaerus »

jaggederest wrote: post #173
iancmceachern wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hardw…

Interesting thought but is it that the sigmoid curve can represent the developments in SW and/or HW? To reach the saturation point we need to be able to define a system up to the point where there are almost no more unknowns (variables), no? I am thinking that this probably isn't possible in the context of {SW, HW}.
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