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

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

#701
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Population implosion Still fail to see evidence of that. I wouldnt go around making such a huge blanket statement, without even london horse manure crisis level evidence.

Here's the evidence. Not a sudden implosion but a slow decline that will particularly impact the younger population groups who have typically done most of the manual labor in factories. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts...

A slow decline and a population implosion arent the same thing.

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

#702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get to excuse a lapse in situational awareness because one or another of your senses is compromised. Compensate. Concentrate. Whatever it takes. Or, of you find that you're sufficiently impaired that you're not competent any longer to do the task, slow down and stop safely. You're in control, and therefore you're responsible. Be it driving, operating a forklift, or a spot welder on an assembly line. Do not…

I honestly can't tell if you're serious or not.

I'm sure OP has never once made a mistake due to a lack of situational awareness. Everyone knows there's a little situational awareness gauge on your watch that beeps if it drops below 40%. That's how you know it's compromised. Not when an accident happens or anything like that.

Classic example of being unwilling to concede the argument.

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

#703
post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird that it doesn't translate to any visible growth, everyone became a 10x employee, but if you exclude Ai companies themselves the GDP barely moved in 3 years.

There maybe a lag we are talking 12-24 month projects on our end. But right AI spending is driving everything we will see how long application shows up.

Llms have been there for 3 years now... Is it another "2 more weeks" promise, à la Musk

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

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of that design can be fairly easily automated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwzz-96WliU . And that's without all the "fancy" robotics like arms and so on that is only dropping in price and rising in usability. Factory automation design as a service is already a huge sector but it can get a lot bigger. Of course the capital barrier to entry to standing up a factory for some widget will go up, but the unit pric…

Thats a nice video, thanks for sharing. Everything shown there is old school automation of which China has a whole ecosystem for years. ALso they did they deliberately show only 1-3 steps of the process? Wheres the rest of the speaker? My video showed the speaker production from magnet to packaged box. I'm not convinced that there is a cost advantage yet since all of that technology shown existed in spades for years…

The thing is it's increasingly about the process of stringing things together, rather then the stages themselves. Obviously, not all the stages in your video are in the one video: it's from at least 7 years ago from a company that makes the specific machine class, so I can see why you might be confused about that.

The thing that no one has cracked yet is that sitting 30 people down at a belt and telling them to follow the manual is easy and flexible and while it's a skill, it's not very technical. Designing the line to do the same thing is hard, fiddly and very, very technical. Whoever does that needs to know the machines available, the sensors, IO, networking, wiring, power, PLCs, HMIs, access paths, be able to design and spec anything custom, etc etc. You also need to feed back to the designers if one aspect is hard to automate (poking through wires is a good example). Even loading workflows: You can't just shout "duo kai" at the machinery as you trolley a palette of magnets to the head of the belt and expect them to get out of the way.

That, combined with the outlay of the machines themselves, limits things you can make with it. The kind of factory in your video seems to a very typical Chinese SME where there are 50-200 people in a simple warehouse with some basic equipment and they contract assemble. These places do not generally run the margins you need to stop production, acquire several million in automation and design services, and start up again.

Fully or just highly automated systems thus get used for high-volume stuff that doesn't change much in a run. Cars, phones, that kind of thing are the classics. Food production also due to the massive volumes.

The floor on where it makes sense to even think of automation is, however, lowering quickly. It's not just Siemens NX that can do it any more, factory management platforms are sprouting from everywhere from Huawei's ERP to Hangzhou student bedrooms, and there are other SMEs starting to do this work at lower costs for smaller outfits.

As long as manual CMs exist and are cheaper, CheapNShit Speakers doesn't need to design its product for automatic assembly, even though it definitely could if it needed to. That creates a kind of "snap to automation" where something that wasn't ever automatable suddenly gets automated, because when the machinery is close enough, the last few sticking points are designed away and suddenly you can do it.

Like I said, the real acid test of when this becomes really useful (or dangerous to the workers, depending on perspective) is when you can quickly reconfigure a production line to make the Black Friday CheapNShit 2000+ speakers rather than the ones you made before. The CMs currently will do that with a WeChat message, a new manual and a palette of parts and have them on a truck tomorrow.

This is likely a place where "AI" will find a home, whatever happens to the chatbots. It's things like allowing a fairly generic robot to pick up a new kind of speaker case and put it on something else without having to have an engineer write a program or even G-code to do it.

Also like AI, this isn't quite like last time when the US lost its manufacturing to China. The US lost low-medium manufacturing to China based on, basically, labour costs. Then it lost the high end on labour and automation that means as long as you have the machine you don't need the expert US workers and network effects because everything you need for that is available within 2 hours in Shenzhen.

China losing the middle-high end to cheaper places implies that automating most of it will remain so hard that it's always more expensive in TCO terms than the cheapest global labour. If labour is only a small part, this is not necessarily true or it may be true only for some products (clothing is a good example of something traditionally hard to automate fully).

On the other hand, automation getting to that state also means the US, or anywhere, can get the manufacturing back if it wants to, by competing not on labour costs, which is unlikely within the next decades, but on the technology and network effects that make it possible to acquire, stand up and run these kinds of line quickly.

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

#705
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Population implosion Still fail to see evidence of that. I wouldnt go around making such a huge blanket statement, without even london horse manure crisis level evidence.

Here's the evidence. Not a sudden implosion but a slow decline that will particularly impact the younger population groups who have typically done most of the manual labor in factories. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts...

Employment in China is actually pretty thin right now. The labour force reduction is surely coming down the track, but it's not here yet. There may be enough time to pivot to lower-labour options with good management.

With the exact right approach and enough luck, you can conceive that automation can replace the bodies at the rate they are lost demographically and thus avoid the crisis of underemployment or the crisis of insufficient labour. To far one way or the other and it ends in tears.

Time will tell, and it could all go horribly, terribly wrong, but if any country can thread the eye of that needle, it would be this one.

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

#706
post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is of course there is no market for US made goods at a good salary when other countries were selling their goods in the US market without impediment. Tariffs were supposed to fix that, but now I don’t know if they are effective at all.

> The issue is of course there is no market for US made goods at a good salary The Smarter Every Day scrubber demonstrates that is not true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY The problem is that the US has systematically destroyed all the ecosystem required to manufacture by outsourcing everything. Maximally efficient is minimally robust.

Both issues can be true. A single scrubber is not a good counterpoint to entire industries having left.

However, yes, the US (and the West in general) were uniquely victims of elite betrayal, where the financial and business elites decided it was best for them to outsource manufacturing, while telling the urban mass and politicians that this was "everyone's best interest". The current political and now geopolitical disaster followed.

The financialization of America and the UK in the 1980s was a failure in all respects. Stock buybacks made legal, factories closed, Wall Street as an engine of growth. It was all fiction.

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

#707

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.

i see both sides. while some core tech made decades ago might be tedious to adapt to today's needs, i HATE the fact that modern code is not designed to be sustainable.

speaking of ai, there was a startup acquired by google in 2017, whose core features remain unchanged. however, their sdk and branding got switched around every 18 months or so. incredibly annoying how you cannot run the same code anymore despite having the libraries cached because of the cloud and its moody deprecation cycles.

recently had a similar situation with azure and their (yet another) copilot rebranding had existing work being phased out by the end of the year, when the actual sdk did not get changed besides the package name!

having said that i have come to appreciate things that were well-designed and lasted that long. change is not bad, but only when it is not just for the sake of it.

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

#708
post #535
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From China to America, where those original factory jobs went from America to China, and maybe AI at some point is destined to head there too. Also, I was born in that factory town and I'm currently writing this in Shanghai, where I'm trying to relocate to in hopes of better career/entrepreneurial opportunities lmao. The world is funny sometimes.

Do you think Shanghai has better career opportunities?

eg https://x.com/TaylorOgan/status/1978373534138401206

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

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like these are the kinds of excuses that would be ignored with Chinese infrastructure projects. Tunnel through the mountains.

Yeah, nobody in the US is working on that at all... https://www.boringcompany.com/

Where's the high speed rail then? Tunnelling isn't the difficult part.

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

#710
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.

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…

I recently did some reading on the blight in Baltimore. Lots of vacant neighborhoods with severe impact on the economy. Seems the private sector is eager to support but staying back due to various factors like crime-rate, lack of neighborhood development, exorbitant utility charges etc.
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