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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

#351

Post by mattlutze »

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.

A degree of consensus and unity in leadership which is foreign to current American culture.

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

#352

Post by nradov »

fidotron wrote: post #332
tclancy wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm somewhere in the middle, young enough that almost everything I've seen new is disposable crap (including the tools), old enough that I have had an interest in things from before and noticed that they really were built much better, or at least heavier, back then. I've made the comment on here before that I believe it's short term energy optimisation, in that it used to be seen as reasonable to much heavier objects…

Cars haven't gotten any lighter. Rather the reverse. Battery packs are quite heavy.

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

#353

Post by simmonmt »

nvader wrote: post #216
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…

This is fascinating. I really don't know much about the world you're describing, so thank you for sharing your perspective. Don't customer needs change over time? How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.

It depends on the item. Let's take this screw pitch gage: https://www.starrett.com/details?cat-no=155

Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're probably not making or selling very many of them. But they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock, and eventually they'll run out so they'll need to make new parts. Assuming low volume (I say this just in case I've accidentally picked the one weird thing that does sell like hotcakes), they're not going to spend any engineering time evolving that design. The input materials aren't going to stop being made. It is what it is, it does what it does, some people buy it, and so the name of the game becomes how do you make that specific thing they want with the least overhead? You use the same tooling you've used for the last 50 years. When you need a new batch of parts, you pull out that tooling, stamp out a bunch of leaves, and put the tooling away until you need it again.

There are many many manufactured items that fall into this category.

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

#354

Post by culll_kuprey »

gaindustries wrote: post #72
thaack wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all full time 4x10 work with the employer covering 100% of health insurance premiums.

There's somethhing you're not telling us or not being honest about.

It’s probably the hours. A lower middle class income is not worth losing my every waking hour over.

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

#355

Post by 15155 »

baq wrote: post #310
al_borland wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> minimum wage there pays for 10 people

More like 2-4 at this point, if we're talking about China.

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

#356

Post by trollbridge »

rmoriz wrote: post #308
iancmceachern wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

We have a box at work for employees bring hardware in they’re getting rid of, along with hardware we’re throwing out that we don’t need anymore.

It has a pile of GPUs that are completely obsolete for any task: they use way too much power, have a large form factor that burns up a PCIe x16 slot, are loud, some need extra power cables, lack driver support on modern operating systems, and in return for all that don’t have as much power as something much better you could get for $100.

Value on eBay seems to be about $10-$15, mostly for people with a retro computing hobby or people removing semiconductor components for other purposes.

An obsolete data centre isn’t worth much either. (We have a small one made from equipment being liquidated from local data centres that have been upgraded.) The power consumption is too high and it is not set up for efficient HVAC for modern ultra high power draw workloads.

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

#357

Post by [deleted] »

nebula8804 wrote: post #231
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…

>When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison. Would the rest of the world even care anymore? Everyone from Canada to New Zealand is now making plans for long term disconnection from the US. They will not let the next Trump boss them around like they…

[deleted]

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

#358

Post by culll_kuprey »

mullingitover wrote: post #44

The 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…

> unless it just wants to cosplay

Do not underestimate this as a real population.

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

#359

Post by trollbridge »

coliveira wrote: post #145
crote wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid , they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible! Western lab…

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.

I watched some videos 10GTek published. Rather “boring” stuff of a life in the day of various employees.

But I was shocked by how efficient and modernised their factory was, including really rigorous quality control, advanced testing setups, dedicated jigs everywhere just for the testing… and then one video was of an office worker who spent her day making sure everything runs smoothly, juggling customers, orders for parts from vendors, and getting ahold of the right people when something was going wrong.

Incidentally none of my 10GTek stuff has ever failed.

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

#360

Post by kenhwang »

nradov wrote: post #352
fidotron wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm somewhere in the middle, young enough that almost everything I've seen new is disposable crap (including the tools), old enough that I have had an interest in things from before and noticed that they really were built much better, or at least heavier, back then. I've made the comment on here before that I believe it's short term energy optimisation, in that it used to be seen as reasonable to much heavier objects…

Cars haven't gotten any lighter. Rather the reverse. Battery packs are quite heavy.

Even non-EVs have gotten quite a bit heavier due to the inclusion of more structural safety features and creature comforts.
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