Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 753 posts

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

#321

Post by tim333 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #132
petermcneeley wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could have trade borders.

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.

>People in backwards places like rural...

That's not actually true. You want to visit rural Asia and compare.

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

#323

Post by nemo44x »

Do we even have people to work in the factories? I know a guy who started as a worker and is now a plant manager and he says their biggest problem is finding qualified people (high school or equivalent) that are willing to show up every day. Many get their first check and then suddenly stop showing up and then return 2 or 3 weeks later looking for work.

A lot of younger people it seems like value flexibility over higher pay. They’d rather work casual jobs that are dead ends. At the factory you start with a decent wage and benefits and within a year you’re promoted and salary increases noticeably. If you can put 5 responsible years in you’re certainly recruited to the management development path. These skills are highly transferable between companies.

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

#324

Post by culll_kuprey »

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

That guy did retail shoe sales too. I’ve known some people to survive off those type of jobs, but they sure as hell weren’t living with a sitcom family in the burbs.

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

#325

Post by jcgrillo »

kube-system wrote: post #129
lesuorac wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you hire deaf people? I always found the laws prohibiting drivers from wearing earplugs (some exemptions for motorcycles) and the like pretty funny.

US employers cannot discriminate against a deaf person and must make reasonable accommodations to make it safe for them to do their job. US employers are not legally required to make accommodations for people who simply want to listen to music at work. Today's vehicles already have a lot of sound deadening (and good stereos) and it is becoming a problem for emergency vehicles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lvTBmBD…

If you have even the slightest amount of situational awareness sound deadening or infotainment gizmos will not render you unaware of an approaching emergency vehicle. Scan your mirrors, scan your instruments, scan the horizon, repeat. The problem is unqualified, uneducated drivers.

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

#326

Post by tim333 »

yibg wrote: post #79
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.

Using people for manufacturing fundamentally will never be cost competitive compared to cheaper markets. There are really only a few ways to resolve this in my view: 1. Give up and just outsource manufacturing and be ok with it 2. Invest heavily in automation, technology etc so we remove cost of labor from the equation. Or at least heavily minimize it 3. Put up trade barriers to artificially raise the cost of importe…

US manufacturing keeps going up in dollar terms (see first graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...)

but employs less people as it automates.

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

#327

Post by nradov »

selimthegrim wrote: post #269
nradov wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whoops too late to edit I meant house.

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

#328

Post by kranke155 »

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.

Let’s do the easy thing, even if it is a geopolitical disaster for the West?

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

#329

Post by obscurette »

protocolture wrote: post #156
coliveira wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, most factories in China are already heavily automated. Americans don't have a clue of what they've been doing there in the last 20 years to modernize production. The US would need to invest trillions in automation and workforce training to be able to compete with China, Taiwan and Korea. I don't see Americans being able to do this because they're too addicted to easy money from Wall Street.

Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling items. Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with…

It really just depends. There might short/small runs which are easily automated, and there might be a large scale production which are not and need hand assembly. The very same product might see both during production – fully automated robots and hand assembly etc.

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

#330

Post by scott_w »

nvader wrote: post #180
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…

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.

> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering

For plenty of industries, margins dictate that this is the desired outcome. The goal is to optimise output, not react quickly to changes.

There are factories that work to order and can change to adapt to customer needs. These are fewer and further between, and tend to be more expensive as they aren't (by design) able to take advantage of economies of scale.

Post reply on HN