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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

#301

Post by wongarsu »

RataNova wrote: post #289
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…

It's wild to think we used to build things to last decades. Now we build them to chase benchmarks for the next quarter

Computing hardware has always been on 3-5 year depreciation schedules. Not because it doesn't last, most of it will last decades, but because the next generation is so much better that your total costs for the next three years are lower if you buy new gear and throw the old stuff away.

And that's not just because of the rapid advances, but also because servers are expensive to run relative to their purchase price, and setup costs are cheap. For machining tools setup costs can be substantial, and the cost of keeping an old machine around is small

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

#302

Post by tclancy »

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…

There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”.

Of course, this could simply be the perspective of someone turning 50 this year.

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

#303

Post by varjag »

3D30497420 wrote: post #296
simgt wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The leadership in democracy does what the population wants, even more so in the past couple decades.

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

#304

Post by EasyMark »

rgblambda wrote: post #67
keiferski wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess most of these jobs don’t allow for music or YouTube to be used during work? I’m just thinking that people already spend a lot of time just consuming content, so if it were possible to watch YouTube while at the factory, maybe it wouldn’t be as unpopular.

From my limited experience working in a factory environment, listening to music can be a real workplace safety issue if it reduces your ability to hear forklifts or coworkers shouting warnings.

that's not a problem if the people who will be interacting with fork lifts stay in designated areas as do the forklift operators. Nothing is ever going to b 0% chance of an accident but simply adhering to basic rules should keep people on an assembly line listening to spotify from taking a forklift to the knee. Have you ever worked on a factory floor at all? Sure some positions would be impossible but not for 80-90% of them.

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

#305

Post by tclancy »

zbentley wrote: post #271
DannyBee wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation." This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts. After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physi…

> not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done. For sure, but how do you know? If it's only via: > The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process. ...then I worry about the efficiency of improvement. Sure, ma…

Well, I would suggest if a thing is around that long and still does the job, it’s close enough to done. Something going missing in the pushback here is this is a physical machine shop. My grandfather was the shop foreman for a jewelry maker and he was intensely proud of the fact he was the one person on the floor who still had all his fingers. Intact. Different jobs have different ideas about good Developer Experience.

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

#306

Post by rmoriz »

Even AI can be used as "a factory" by creating code or workflows/automation that will create value long after the generation. Instead, most users treat them like generic chat bots and/or highly inefficient interfaces to machines.

Using LLMs to generate texts for inefficient communication (to other humans or machines) is just so wrong.

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

#307

Post by simgt »

varjag wrote: post #303
3D30497420 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The leadership in democracy does what the population wants, even more so in the past couple decades.

Citation very much needed ;) Even our current voting systems are far from being the best we can come up with in term of fairness. The population most certainly wants to remain in an environment humans can comfortably live in, somehow that's not what our democracies are selecting for these days.

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

#308

Post by rmoriz »

iancmceachern wrote: post #165
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.

A gpu from 8 years ago is cost competitive, efficient and "worth using" for modern tasks?

I don't want to be picky, but there is still a lot of value left in "not modern" tasks, like video encoding/transcoding. If somewhere the trickle-down effect is real, then it is computing hardware. Take Hetzner's server auction. If the hardware is physically deployed and running, you just need to find appropriate payloads/customers. https://www.hetzner.com/sb/

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

#309

Post by tim333 »

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 think it's partly the economic conditions. You have some great innovation in AI and it's worth billions. You have some in cars and it just holds off the decline a bit while manufacturing moves to Asia.

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

#310

Post by baq »

al_borland wrote: post #183
lnsru wrote: post #21

Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.

I worked in a factory for a few months. They moved me around on the line. While each week looked the same, each day in the week was different. Though I was told by some of the other guys on the line that it was one of the nicer factories they ever worked in. I did some tech work in a few auto factories as well, and those had a very different vibe on the floor. While it may be boring to someone who use used to doing k…

The thing is, minimum wage there pays for 10 people on the floor in Asia and the cost of the factory is approximately the same. There’s no economic sense to build a factory in the states… which is where all the government subsidies enter the stage, but the budget is already running a war time deficit. It’s going to be so much worse for those small used-to-be-factory cities until the printer starts for real, and then there’s no guarantee it’s going to be any better after.
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