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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

#721

Post by autoexec »

ACCount37 wrote: post #570
Scarblac wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it's global warming. Because fossil fuel is stupid useful and there's no way we're going to stop burning it. And then we get to the climate scenarios that aren't compatible with our current sophisticated civilization, even with the currently accepted climate science (that always seems to underestimate what actually happens).

Global warming just isn't harmful enough to pose a credible extinction risk. The damage is too limited and happens far too slowly. Even the unlikely upper end projections aren't enough to upend the human civilization - the harms up there at the top end are "worse than WW2", but WW2 sure didn't end humankind. At the same time: the ever-worsening economics of fossil fuel power put a bound on climate change even in a "n…

AI is less of an extinction than climate change. Especially what passes for AI these days. Climate change is going to displace billions of people. That alone is going to be chaos, but food/water shortages are going to be a problem too.

AI is only a threat if we suddenly reach sci-fi levels where AI concludes that the earth is better off without humanity on it and there's zero indication that we're anywhere near that today.

The good news is that our society will likely collapse or require resources pulled away from power/water hungry AI datacenters well before we see any actual I in AI

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

#722

Post by autoexec »

GolfPopper wrote: post #539
ACCount37 wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are dominating the environment by hopelessly outsmarting everything in it. Applied intelligence is extremely powerful . Humans, however, are not immune to being hopelessly outsmarted themselves. And what are we doing with AI now? We're trying to build systems that can do what human intelligence does - but cheaper, faster and more scalable. Multiple frontier labs have "AGI" - a complete system that matches or e…

Even if LLMs don't become AGI (and I don't think they will), LLMs are potentially superb disinformation generators able to operate at massive scale. Modern society was already having difficulty holding onto consensus reality. "AI" may be able to break it. Don't think "smart human". Think about a few trillion scam artists who cannot be distinguished from a real person except by face to face conversation. Your every av…

I think we'll adapt. At any point we can start to treat the internet like the trash pile of bullshit it's been turning into and stop taking anything in our inboxes as legitimate and websites as nothing more than entertainment.

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

#723

Post by janalsncm »

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…

Just because something works doesn’t mean it’s optimal. If you can get the same output with a cheaper or faster process, there’s a clear business justification.

However, you are right that engineer salaries have to be factored in. If expensive engineers are unfamiliar with an old process, it will take them a lot longer and the break even point will be pushed out farther.

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

#724

Post by buellerbueller »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #670
buellerbueller wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a nice assertion, but do you have any facts?

It is a reasonable common-sense claim that if a company which possesses a model that can perform all cognitive tasks as well as a human or better, that that model would be more powerful than any other technology available, barring significant limitations to its operation or deployment.

>any GDP put into manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical opportunity cost

is the assertion I am referring to; you do a lot of handwaving to assume that AGI is achievable.

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

#725

Post by grep_name »

yibg wrote: post #136
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…

I hear people (media, politicians) talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America, but I haven't heard too much well articulated reasons for why. There are issues with national security, reliance on less than friendly nations etc. For instance, we'd want to grow our own food, even if importing would be cheaper. But those surely aren't the majority of manufacturing jobs. Given the choice of increasing the numb…

> Given the choice of increasing the number of high paying, high skills jobs or the number of relatively low skill, dangerous manufacturing jobs, why wouldn't we choose the former?

Idk, the trend in manufacturing seems to be towards more and more high skilled work and less dangerous or low-skill work as time marches on. Your post also positions it as a binary choice, where we must either increase IT service jobs / web services or manufacturing, which doesn't seem to be true given the landscape of the job market these days.

Personally I would like it if there were a more diverse array of job opportunities in general for people looking to gain and employ skills in machining, fabrication, factory automation, production, etc. "Just learn to code, bro" has been a meme since I was in college, but at this point at 33 every single person I know who is doing even 'kinda ok' has either gotten a tech job or gone into nursing. Exactly 0 of these people actually care about technology or are interested in computers at all, but it feels like the only avenue available anymore for Americans. That doesn't seem good or sustainable.

No matter how much of a cash cow the tech industry has been, is it really a virtue to be totally anemic in such a basic function as ability to produce actual, physical goods?

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

#726

Post by benibela »

mrinterweb wrote: post #505

Investing in AI infrastructure seems very risky to me. With how short of a lifecycle computing hardware generally has, does it make sense to blow billions on hardware that will need to be replaced in a few years? AI companies have been burning billions on hardware. Will the costs of that hardware be covered by profits before the hardware lifecycle is up? That's a big gamble. We used to talk about AI as having no moat…

>Investing in AI infrastructure seems very risky to me. With how short of a lifecycle computing hardware generally has, does it make sense to blow billions on hardware that will need to be replaced in a few years?

That also depends on the budget. I work in the public sector, so there's usually no money, but now they've just discovered that they have a 25 million budget, which needs to be spend this year on hardware (for AI). If we do not spend the money within this year, the budget expires and then we cannot spend it at all

25 million is not billions, but that could still be a higher budget than any other public institution agency in the entire state here has

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

#727

Post by dapperdrake »

torginus wrote: post #458
giancarlostoro wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Swapping addition and multiplication on floating point numbers fails to be invariant.

You are thinking of real numbers, for example as all Cauchy sequences with fractions for coefficients. That is not what a CPU does.

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

#728

Post by Bratmon »

sharadov wrote: post #524
giancarlostoro wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I found R a better language for Data Science, somehow Python won out.

R is an entire language based around the idea of making code as unreadable as possible by means of bizarrely stacked syntactic sugar. It shouldn't surprise anyone that it didn't win out.

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

#729

Post by deadfoxygrandpa »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #626
toephu2 wrote: post #599

What many Americans don't realize is that China has already surpassed the United States in terms of development (developing country vs developed country sense of the word). Obviously both are 'developed' countries at this point but compare Chinese tier 1 cities vs American tier 1 cities. I would argue Chinese tier 1 cities are 10-20 years ahead of their American counterparts. source: visit any Chinese tier 1 city (Be…

While I do believe that China is surpassing the West on many points, I'd like to underline that a cashless society is not a good thing. It's a terrible, terrible idea. With no cash, the citizen passport and the GFW, the dictatorship has total control of society. It's not that there are no homeless, is that they are pushed to even worse conditions, out of sight. It's not that there is zero crime, it's that the crime i…

there really are far fewer homeless people in china than there are in america. it's not just that they're out of sight, it literally is much less of a problem to begin with. you can't try to equate these things

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

#730

Post by herbst »

tracker1 wrote: post #719
herbst wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very lazy excuse that always comes up. Even Russia has a better train connection and it's even less dense.

So Russia's population centers are on opposite ends of the country?

No and yet they have a working train system
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