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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

#451

Post by mikewarot »

ModernMech wrote: post #427
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.

Yeah I have students who ask me "Why are we learning C++? My dad said it's older than him!"

Ask that question in language arts, and you'll get some very weird looks.

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

#452

Post by varjag »

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.

I don't know what kind of citation you expect. It's clear that political participation was never more direct and organized than now in the age of social media. The fools and resentful who always were numerous have found a way to unite and bypass the establishment and educational filters which were effectively restraining politics before. All the cowards, short termists, wannabe dictators, conspiracists and anti-intellectualists who are being elected squarely and fairly represent the people who voted for them.

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

#453

Post by mbesto »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #340
rhubarbtree wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It dropped down, but is now being extended to 5 years. The 3 year number was reported by the FT this year from a bunch of companies, where they were saying their accountants are extending to 5 years. Another example, MS just moved from 4 years to 5.

You are confusing depreciation (which is mostly driven by tax reasons) with service lifecycle.

And you're confusing all of these terms. The "3 years" is the standard warranty and typically gets extended to 5 years (and maybe 7 or 8 depending on the vendor). This is consistent with Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, etc. servers. Nvidia GPUs on the other hand...there likely could be different terms, but idk because they are not typical purchases for 95% of the companies who make server hardware purchases.

Source - I regularly work with IT departments and review their contracts as part of diligence.

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

#454

Post by joomla199 »

pessimizer wrote: post #288
walthamstow wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This doesn't make any sense at all. The reason China is dominant in manufacturing isn't because the other countries of the world were weak and agrarian and rebuilding after war. What would be awesome is if half-assed finance bro speeches weren't being thrown around as serious macro.

They were talking about economic boom, not manufacturing dominance.

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

#455

Post by [deleted] »

pessimizer wrote: post #288
walthamstow wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This doesn't make any sense at all. The reason China is dominant in manufacturing isn't because the other countries of the world were weak and agrarian and rebuilding after war. What would be awesome is if half-assed finance bro speeches weren't being thrown around as serious macro.

[deleted]

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

#456

Post by myko »

ACCount37 wrote: post #435
rglover wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've seen this sentiment shared before and I just don't get it. What is the logical progression of "AI" to "more dangerous than the atomic bomb"?

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

#457

Post by lossolo »

crote wrote: post #69
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…

> Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant. So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet? And why spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year maintaining a conventional military when you already have nukes? And when are you going to press that button? Do you nuke Eurasia the second they cease diplomatic communications? When a cargo ship heading to LA founders for mysterious reasons? When a smal…

Exactly this. If you do not have the capability to produce as much conventional weaponry as your enemy (especially if that enemy also has a nuclear arsenal) then you've lost.

Sitting in the Whitehouse facing the red button, you ask yourself which city are we willing to trade by pushing that button? Millions in New York or Los Angeles? That's why they will never use nukes. To retain world hegemon status and protect your interests, you need conventional military strength. Because if your aircraft carriers are sunk and the vast majority of your fleet is disabled or destroyed, what will you do? Your shipbuilding capacity is so low that you've basically already lost, you can't project power overseas without a fleet and you can't reproduce it fast enough. What are you going to do then nuke them? They will retaliate, and every decision maker knows that. No one will choose to kill millions/tens of millions of their citizens because they lost a fleet thousands of kilometers from home.

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

#458

Post by torginus »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #403
hyperbovine wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools My students are shocked (horrified?) to learn that they're basically running 50-yr old Fortran code when they use scipy.minimize to train their fancy little neural nets.

I always chuckle at how Python became the dominant language for AI / ML / data science etc but wonder why it is that Fortran and Python became the golden combo, it could have been done with any other language, no complaints, I love Python, but its just amusing to me.

For Fortran, I have the concept of 'immortal code' - code that is generally hard to write, is compatible with everything, and implements an algorithm in a way that's impossible to improve on - or at least doing so would be celebrated as a minor breakthrough.

A lot of numerical optimization code is this - it conforms to a strict 'C' ABI - taking (arrays of) simple floats and ints and outputting the same, so binding it to another higher level language is trivial, so rewriting it makes little sense. If the same algorithm were written in Java, most people would not want to bring in Java as a dependency for their Python/C++/whatever project, but since this is just a tiny C object file, it's happily integrated into everything.

They also tend to be very tricky to get right, I remember reading a paper where the author was adamant that changing the order of a multiply and an add (a mathematically invariant operation) would cause the algorithm to blow up due to the different scales of floating point values involved causing a major loss of precision. I'm sure there's tons of stories like this.

This is the sort of code which took PhD's who studied this exact topic years to get right, even though the actual code often looks unassuming, I would dread the day when I was required to touch it (but I never do - since it always does what it says on the tin)

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

#459

Post by hombre_fatal »

starky wrote: post #172
ryandrake wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people romanticize 1950-style manufacturing jobs so much, like they are some kind of objectively ideal job. These jobs really weren't great. Bunch of dudes standing at an assembly line all day physically busting their asses and sweating it out. Sometimes in a physically hazardous environment. Sometimes breathing stinky and/or harmful chemicals. Sometimes surrounded by ear-damaging loud noises. Someti…

>Why on earth are we trying to bring it back? The main argument would be if you are relying on other countries and you can't produce anything yourself then you need to rely on other countries being good trading partners. If the relationship with those trading partners fails your economy is in trouble.

What does that actually look like, though? And at what cost?

No single country can produce everything it currently imports much less compete globally on every product.

Does the government just prop up every industry with subsidies? Or use tariffs to make everything as expensive as domestic goods?

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

#460

Post by __loam »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #403
hyperbovine wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools My students are shocked (horrified?) to learn that they're basically running 50-yr old Fortran code when they use scipy.minimize to train their fancy little neural nets.

I always chuckle at how Python became the dominant language for AI / ML / data science etc but wonder why it is that Fortran and Python became the golden combo, it could have been done with any other language, no complaints, I love Python, but its just amusing to me.

Fortran has been a research language used by people like physicists and mathematicians that know what they're doing and have been developing that tool for decades and Python is perfect for people who have no idea what they're doing.
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