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

71–80 of 753 posts

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

#71

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

arcbyte wrote: post #17
ReliantGuyZ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about manufactu…

Manufacturing robotics is all about movement. All movement exists on a spectrum of difficulty and context needed to perform. For instance, welding the steel plates together in an empty and repeatable consistent 3d space is now on the lower end of difficulty. Navigating through a partially manufactured vehicle cab to install a complicated dash assembly requires a lot of context and is incredibly difficult for a robot…

And yet China already has 100% automated vehicle production lines.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/12/why-western-...

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

#72

Post by gaindustries »

thaack wrote: post #47
gaindustries wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits. Better pay + benefits than the most rock bottom lowest possible pay + benefits is really pathetic. And based on the vagueness of your claims, we can assume full-time hours are also out of the picture, meaning no health insurance. On top of that, tyranical small business owners are usually a nightmar…

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.

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

#73

Post by bluGill »

cvz wrote: post #40
arcbyte wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturing robotics is all about movement. All movement exists on a spectrum of difficulty and context needed to perform. For instance, welding the steel plates together in an empty and repeatable consistent 3d space is now on the lower end of difficulty. Navigating through a partially manufactured vehicle cab to install a complicated dash assembly requires a lot of context and is incredibly difficult for a robot…

That's at odds with everything I know about manufacturing robotics, having worked with people doing that work. The complexity of the environment is irrelevant because the robot is programmed to make a specific motion and to adjust that motion in predictable ways based on the appearance of specific features. That is by design, not because (or at least not just because) the robot is incapable of planning its own motion…

> The whole system is designed to be predictable instead of adaptable because that's what you need to do to do the same thing millions of times.

That final "millions" is the problem. Automation is great and easy when you will do the same thing millions of times. Sure it might cost half a million to program the robot (which itself cost half a million) - but that is $1.00 per part, and it goes down as you make more. When you are only building 10 though a million dollars is a lot of money and so you want humans - or robots that are "CAPABLE of plannings its own motion".

Costs have been going down. In high school I took the class on how to write g-code (I have one free period so I took shop for non-college bound kids for fun even though I was college bound - it was a great time that I highly recommend even though it was only for fun). These days almost everyone just uses their CAD/CAM and isn't even aware that the g-code is supposed to be a human readable programming language. (it probably isn't)

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

#74

Post by crote »

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.

> 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 labor is never going to compete with Asian labor, so it's no use even trying. If we want to have any chance of matching what China is already doing (let alone beating it), we're going to have to invest an absolute fortune in automation and streamlining: reduce the number of unique products, reduce the part count, reduce the number of vendors, reduce the distance to vendors, and automate everything you can reasonably automate.

Make it capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive and we might be able to keep up.

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

#75

Post by carlosjobim »

snozolli wrote: post #62
stouset wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job being monotonous is clearly enough of a downside that significantly higher pay and benefits are needed to attract talent. Paying higher wages might help retain employees (or not! there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay) but doing so could easily increase costs to the point where your product is uncompetitive in the market. It also might just be worth having higher turnover in order to ke…

there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay I do not believe this common claim.

Theoretically, an utterly horrible job with great pay would attract a lot of workers who do it for some time to get a financial boost before moving on.

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

#76

Post by bluGill »

GOD_Over_Djinn wrote: post #59
0xcafefood wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW journalists are just following the lead of tech executives and others hyping LLMs as "AI" so it's hard to fault the journalists specifically.

I beg to differ. Journalists are supposed to do their own investigation and analysis of the people, institutions, and events that they report on. If they just parrot the talking points of executives, then they’re producing advertisements, not journalism.

Fair, but there have never been very many journalists in the world. Between lazy fact checkers and there being more money in sensationalist reporting (My American history classes covered this back in the 1800s, and I have no doubt other history classes of earlier times will as well) there has never been much.

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

#77

Post by jltsiren »

carlosjobim wrote: post #70
thaack wrote: post #28

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. I work in a factory and see this daily. My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factor…

[flagged]

Some jobs are just inherently bad. People do them, if there are no better jobs available. If you increase the wage, people will do the job for a while, until they have reached sufficient financial stability. Then they can afford to switch to another job that pays less but provides a better quality of life. Or to retire early in extreme cases.

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

#78

Post by bluGill »

Lapel2742 wrote: post #10
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #4

Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly l…

> factories with no humans on the assembly line. Not an American myself, but why should that be good for ordinary American citizens? Few people make loads of money, some Gen-Xer secure the value of their 401k and the younger ones are out of job?

This is great for ordinary Americans. It means you don't have to do the boring assembly jobs, but you still get the benefits for vast amounts of mass produced goods. (some of it is junk, but that is a different topic). Those goods should be cheap as well because they are mass produced with little labor costs. The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative. (or those who are incapable of doing something else)

There is the constant argument that what when machines do everything. We are not there yet, and so far there is no reason to think we will be anytime soon.

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

#79

Post by yibg »

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 imported goods, which is what the current admin is trying to do, at least officially

1. leaves us dependent on other potentially adversarial countries, 3. increases the cost of goods sold so puts a burden on the population. So seems like 2. is the only way to go, if the country can get behind it. But it also inherently won't add a lot of jobs.

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

#80

Post by petermcneeley »

crote wrote: post #74
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.

> 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…

Or you could have trade borders.
Post reply on HN