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

431–440 of 753 posts

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

#431

Post by mschuster91 »

delfinom wrote: post #277
janalsncm wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a result of brain drain, honestly. The people who stood up that hardware 50 years ago are 50 years older now. By contrast, the Chinese have mastered process knowledge , transferring from one domain to the next. If we want to compete with them, it’s worth knowing what doing well looks like.

No the point is "overhead". You don't disturb working setups because you will cause engineering time to update the setup, that engineering time is added to the cost overhead of a job. Time is literally money, even if the employee(s) are salaried, their time is factored into the cost of a job. The knowledge is still there, but American labor is expensive as hell compared to overseas competitors and so any shop in the…

> The knowledge is still there

Tell that to the people who lost FOGBANK, or rather, the knowledge and most importantly the practical experience on how to make it. Or Emmentaler cheese - the one with the bubbles. Turns out, you need something only discovered when someone noticed the bubbles began to vanish... small contaminations from microscopic hay particles [1] that went away when manufacturing switched to fully sealed vats.

There is always, always undocumented steps and unknown implicit assumptions involved in any manufacturing process. No matter how good the documentation is, you need the practical experience.

And that, in turn, is also why the US is producing so much military surplus - should there ever be a full blown war with Russia or China, or there be any other need for a massive invasion land war for whatever cause, there is a shit ton of stuff on stockpile and the production can be rapidly scaled up by experienced personnel training fresh recruits. That would be outright impossible to do if there were no experienced personnel.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mystery-of-disappearing-hole...

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

#432

Post by psunavy03 »

yxhuvud wrote: post #417
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 rather think of the maintenance nightmare. You can't change anything - not cause the existing system is good but because there are no people left that understand the whole thing. But then I've got a few years to reach 50. Perhaps my views will change.

This happens in tech as well. It's called COBOL and it refuses to go away, despite lots of people's best efforts.

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

#433

Post by darepublic »

simgt wrote: post #307
varjag wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In fairness while people do obviously want them they also want all the current conveniences of modern life and more. Completely off the cuff but I'm pretty sure the sum of those desires vastly dwarfs concern over longer term environmental effects. Essentially I think the average joe prioritizes their job and lifestyle over nagging climate concerns just like the gov does.

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

#434

Post by mschuster91 »

walthamstow wrote: post #209
Stephen_0xFF wrote: post #123

Earlier 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.

China wasn't a factor in global economics until the 90s, and Europe only was relevant for US growth for a very short time following WW2 and the Marshall Plan.

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

#435

Post by ACCount37 »

rglover wrote: post #396
ACCount37 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought is: "when that wears out or fails what the fuck are you replacing it with".

A shockingly rare question to be asked. As best as I can tell, the biggest threat to civilization isn't AI, it's our culture of "that's not my problem" leaving otherwise patch-able holes in critical systems.

The biggest threat to civilization is, in fact, AI. It's a new problem, and one with an utterly ridiculous lethality at its limit. It makes the atomic bomb look benign.

"That's not my problem" is something humans have been dealing with since before they mastered the art of sharpening a stick.

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

#436

Post by Fergusonb »

tclancy wrote: post #302
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.

Roller coaster tycoon is good.

The business software I have to work with from the 80s is a straight up nightmare. And I'd say most old software is in this camp.

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

#437

Post by cpursley »

baq wrote: post #395
cpursley wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how is that a disaster? Wasn't one of the big concerns a decade or go about over population? This means less agriculture required, more land for nature, less pollution, fewer energy needs, etc.

It's a disaster for China's economy in the long term unless they automate themselves, which they'll very much want to do. It isn't a disaster for the natural ecosystem obviously.

Want to do? They’re doing it now, and are ahead of the west in some processes already. It’s a made up concern because they are a geopolitical rival. And their economy is already a major success story; they’ve lifted something like 800 million people out of abject poverty in the last 25 years.

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

#438

Post by loire280 »

yxhuvud wrote: post #417
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 rather think of the maintenance nightmare. You can't change anything - not cause the existing system is good but because there are no people left that understand the whole thing. But then I've got a few years to reach 50. Perhaps my views will change.

Every software company I've worked at that is more than 5 years old had major features that nobody understood anymore, even features that were core to the product.

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

#439

Post by beeflet »

crote wrote: post #83
kasey_junk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not an expert in this, and don’t necessarily believe it. But the pitch is that existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints. And that much of the factory automation that hasn’t happened is because it’s too costly to get to that level of specificity in that the existing automation requires higher scale to be cost effective. If you had more general purpose intelligence y…

> existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints Rather the opposite, I'd say: existing manufacturing automation is built around repetitive motions because an assembly line is making multiples of the same product . Having AI reinvent the wheel for every individual item is completely pointless. One-off manufacturing can to a certain extent be automated. We're already seeing th…

What if everything in the economy could be efficiently produced through one-off manufacturing methods? This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately as i've been working on 3d printing/CNC/aluminum casting.

It avoids the need for any sort of parts shipping, and can be easily retooled to make war machines in a time of emergency (which is one of the motivations to bring back american manufacturing).

The main problem with this is that you still need surface-mount components if you are going to make PCBs, and you still need magnets to make motors, etc.

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

#440

Post by chii »

tclancy wrote: post #302
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.

The thing is, those 50 yr old machine tools might be still good, but the more recent CNC machines are much more efficient, and require way less manual dexterity to use (say, compared to a lathe).

This is the whole idea of industrialization - moving away from having skilled artisans, into machines that encode the skill to reproduce the article.

The fact that machines that are 50 yrs old are still in operation is quite a feat but also an indication that the production methods remained static (of course, if the production machines are good enough already, then investment into new machines don't bring in new profits).

Post reply on HN