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 (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen) and it will blow your mind if you've only lived in the West.
And if you haven't visited, for example this is tier 1 China: cashless society, amazing public transportation, clean streets, no homeless, practically zero crime, drone food delivery (in Shenzhen, certain spots only), high-speed rail to every major city in China (and even to smaller tier-2, tier-3 cities), wonderful infrastructure that gets built in years (vs decades in the West), extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the tracks) etc.
I agree with your assessment on the high end of China's development and the lack of awareness of that from people in the US. But I think the story on the low end /lower class is more interesting and I think there is lack of awareness there too.
Even within the US a lot of upper class people don't know what it's like for lower class people here. It's so easy to slip into homelessness because there aren't reasonable options available to many people to live anymore.
In China they still have a huge amount of their population in a developing stage so they still have ample tools and options and knowledge for how to maintain a reasonable life in a less developed state. So it's easier to fall back to a cheaper lifestyle, and culturally it's easier too.
But in the US were generations removed from these other ways of life, so there's no options or cultural acceptance of not living a highly developed way of life. So people just go straight from a nice house or apartment with modern stuff to being homeless with little to no tools to survive.
Just my probably naive thoughts. Would love to hear others takes on this.
i agree with that. It's as if they tried to outlaw poverty. i mean look at all the insane housing regulations (zoning laws, regulations, permit costs, land usage policy) that prevent low cost housing from being built.
I've seen in thailand, how even the poorest can just build a small hut on a piece of land they own and actually live in it. You'd be risking jail time if you did that in the US.
I think your assessment of homelessness in the US misses some things, though (or at least leaves them unstated):
First, that it's not just that people "don't know how to live more simply", and thus cling to their homes too long when they "should" otherwise be downsizing and cutting expenses. For a lot of people, the fall is sudden—some medical emergency drains all their savings and leaves them unable to work (at least for a time), and there it goes.
Second, what are they going to downsize to? We don't have whole rural villages in the US that are living, essentially, pre-industrialized lives (except with the Amish, I suppose, but that's a whole other kettle of fish). (Also, I don't know for sure that such places exist today in China—I know that they did not too many years ago, but my information is not current.) There isn't really anywhere you can go in the US to live securely, but simply, on $100 a month or whatever. And even if there were, that would involve leaving whatever job you had to begin with, which removes the "securely" part.
As an East Asian, not really trying to argue that China hasn’t accomplished great things.
While I can’t speak directly to this, but from watching The China Show on YouTube, the tradeoff to the amazing amenities is that the personal-injury risk from failing infrastructure has been fatal, but covered up by their propaganda. Anyone on the receiving end of it, will deal with devastating consequences, if not fatal.
Infrastructure and manufacturing corners are cut in ways that look great, but literally kill their population and tourists.
Building foundations are not thick enough, buildings aren’t built to proper fire safety standards, underground pipes leak, leading to roads constantly failing, high rises burn down, sewage pipes literally blow up due to methane build up like someone detonated a bomb.
Drainage grates are fake and flooding cities, drowning people in vehicles, while the QA of car battery manufacturing is causing electric fleets of cars in parking lots to burn.
And the aforementioned occurrences are happening in tier1 cities.
I sound hyperbolic, but China is great at quickly cleaning up and quickly rebuilding, so it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it does.
Once I learned about the infrastructure, I realized my cousin’s business trip accident in China was not a randomly rare accident.
He broke his back in China when his rental car’s front wheel popped off the car.
Chances are most folks are fine if they go. But I would be very weary, because the probability of a disaster is not nearly as high as it ought to be.
Just got back from a trip to Japan and I found that Tokyo and Kyoto also met most of your criteria.
Cash is still pretty common there and definitely can't go cashless (nor would I personally like to), and there's no delivery drones that I'm aware of (I also don't particularly care for that, personally).
I'm not even sure it's that they're ahead, I think we've just fallen behind in a lot of those cases.
China has made amazing progress and the rate of extreme poverty has fallen a lot. But it's also easier to limit the homeless population in cities when they have the Hukou internal passport system to keep many of the poorest people out, as well as forced institutionalization of the severely mentally ill.
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 is from the state, the mafia, and there is a lot of corruption. But nobody can talk about it because there is no free press.
I do think it's important to state how much China is advancing, and surpassing the West, because they are going to rule the world as the Americans did, soon.
>> extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the tracks)
I find this one most interesting. In London for example this is brought up all the time. There is always an excuse (cost, platform length, trains can't stop at the same spot etc etc) and we accept ~100 suicide attempts per year not to mention various accidents. There's the immediate human cost, the PTSD for first emergency workers + the disruption to public transport.
If we can't invest in simple things that would make a meaningful difference how do we expect to match those big infrastructure projects? Crossrail is fantastic but was delayed many years. HS2 is beyond a joke.
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 (easy for other players to accomplish similar AI achievements). China has made that clear. Some open weight LLMs are fine and can run on laptops. It seems the new moat is model parameter size and VRAM requirements. I would bet on innovation in hardware or disruptive algorithms changing that game so better LLMs can run on more personal computers. Remember how bitcoin miners all used GPUs then ASICs came along and made that no longer profitable?
There are many ways the AI industry can be disrupted which makes it that much more volatile.
While I agree with the general sentiment on throwaway compute infra, the generated know-how with large scale experiments is not thrown away. I think a lot hinges on the scaling laws and whether you will hit the jackpot at a certain scale before everyone else. This is hard to guesstimate so someone has to do it in the spirit of empiricism. This might sound a lot like gambling or exploring depending on your sentiment. So, I think it is more justified to criticize the scale and the risks than the spirit of these investments.
Once you can run a GPT5 level LLM locally on a device, it’s over. All this mighty infrastructure is no longer any more impressive than a top of the line 2013 Mac Pro in 2025. I think we’re 10 years away from that.
Consumer devices are already available that offer 128gb specifically labeled for AI use. I think server side AI will still exist for IoT devices, but I agree, 10 years seems pretty reasonable timelie to buy a GTX 5080-sized card that will have 1TB of memory, with the ability to pair it with another one for 2TB. For local, non-distributed use, GPUs are already more than capable of doing 20+ tokens/s, we're mostly waiting on 512gb devices to drop in price, and "free" LLMs to get better.
Each datacenter iteration that increases the size and power consumption is a stepping stone towards (possibly) recursive self-improvement in AI tech. I think that's the way to frame the absolutely massive bets being made by (only a few) companies. There aren't many companies or nation states in the world that can marshal the resources and talent needed to keep competing on this path.
It's a race to the the most powerful and transformative technology in history.
Or it might all collapse like a house of cards. But worth a shot.
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 job, and possibly losing customers.
The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
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.
My dad ran a job shop focused on small jobs and the economics are different.
A lot of his work was keeping other local shops / industrial equipment up and running. So there is a lot of variety of work but very low throughput and kind of by deffintion you have the capabilities to fix your own machines.
Programing a CNC machine makes it east to make a lot of the same part but if you only need one it may be quicker to just knock it out manually.
A 50 year old mill or lathe is easy to keep up and running, can be upgraded with a Digital readout or even CNC controls if desired. A tool in a shop like this likely won't see the cycles one on a factory floor constant uses sees but may be worth keeping around since it offers a unique capability...he had a large ww ii surplus lathe for jobs that wouldn't fit on the smaller more modern machines for example.
> 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.
To be fair, a lot of the tools we use as developers have 30-40 year heritage's themselves. The things that most people depend on and are in the background.
I'm somewhere in the middle, young enough that almost everything I've seen new is disposable crap (including the tools), old enough that I have had an interest in things from before and noticed that they really were built much better, or at least heavier, back then.
I've made the comment on here before that I believe it's short term energy optimisation, in that it used to be seen as reasonable to much heavier objects around. We've made everything so light we've lost the infrastructure for moving heavy stuff around when we might need to.
Kids today have no concept of how heavy workstations, TVs or monitors used to be, and they think it's exaggeration. Let alone tools, cars, appliances etc.
I don't know where I fit on that spectrum, my first thought was there's probably nobody around anymore to replace these fifty year old tools, and/or they'll price it at a level that would wipe all profits for the next 10 years when replacement will be needed.
Our field also have these IBM AS/400 or older running for 30+ years in a server room at the back of an office floor. They are more feared than revered.
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).
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.
> 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”.
It's like when someone wants to choose a brand new web framework that isn't battle tested over one of the most battle tested web frameworks. You can hire way more developers with battle tested tooling, than some bleeding edge thing you don't know if it can even scale.
Less interested in America's expensive and slow manufacturing than in Chinese processes. They can retool faster, handle far more volume, and except for specialized industries (medicine, aerospace) their quality is better.
As an older folk, I perceive 50 year old tools as likely worn out and in desperate need of replacement. However often nobody makes the tool anymore and so we are willing to spend a lot to maintain them instead. (I drive a 25 year old car - this is only possible because I can get a rebuilt transmission, but my maintenance costs over the last 10 years would have bought much newer/nicer used car, and I'm getting close to where I could buy a new car)
The other possibility is the tool isn't used much and modern accountants would never allow you to buy it in the first place because of all the cash tied up. (that is the work the tool did over those 50 years wasn't enough to pay for the cost of the tool and the space to store it)
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.
They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.
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 US has to contend balancing their profit margin and costs to remain competitively priced.
When doing machine shop jobs, it's far easier to bury the cost of initial tooling/fixturing in the initial first job as a separate line charge for NRE. It's alot harder to sell to customers that you will charge them that cost on subsequent orders. You can charge customers for "setup overhead" on subsequent orders but that should be the cost of putting any existing tooling into service, not engineering new ones because you decided to change shit on a whim.
Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups
I am reminded of some of the very finest semiconductor plants. Where parts could in theory be swapped out and replaced, but to do so would break everything. Mirrors aligned to sub-nanometre precision. Lasers and optics where picoseconds matter. Where parts are effectively custom-tuned for this machine only, allied with all these other parts also custom-tuned for this machine only. The US has a challenge on its hands to develop within the US everything and everyone needed to simply getting these systems actually working.
Nothing has changed, people behave the exact same way then or now. People value longevity and quality only when the innovation pace is slow.
Rapid innovation by definition comes with rapid changes. Rapid changes does not always mean it is planned obsolescence or just poor quality.
In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are.
The best recent example is Smartphones, early 2010s everyone updated their phones almost every year standing around the block on release. Today it is maybe once 3-4 years, there is very little reason to. The incremental changes are not meaningful and devices have become lot more reliable and rugged and of course expensive.
We do value quality if features are not going to improve much.
> In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are.
Given the DC-3 is still(!) in service, and there were surely a ton more of them flying in 1975 than today, I'm not sure that's true. And that's far from the only example of a more-than-10-years-old-in-1975 aircraft that was certainly still in wide use in 1975.
Any big shift around then was probably because of the development of high-bypass turbofan jet engines. Not so much driven by "old airframes seem risky" as "pre-high-bypass jet engines are enough more-expensive to operate that airlines will abandon them rapidly". Those engines went into wide use in the 1970s (developed in the '60s). We (demonstrably) had "reliable, long-lived airframe" figured out by the '30s, with some refinement through the '40s but nothing that rendered those '30s models necessarily obsolete (see again: the DC-3, a 1936 design). More-efficient subsonic jet engines were what caused turn-over in a certain segment of the market in the '70s, not so much "I won't trust an old airframe".
However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.
"If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation."
This is the opposite of brittle.
You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts.
After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physics involved, to optimize cost vs speed.
There is no "tinkering" or "innovation" necessary, and it would be highly detrimental. The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process.
Also - not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done. Even if you could make them slightly better, it's not worth the overall cost over time for everyone. Being "better" is not enough, it has to actually be worth being better. Even things that are worth it, if you want customers to use your new thing, you have to support their old thing, even if that's painful or annoying for you.
This is something that lots of ecosystems used to know (fortran is a good example, which is why NETLIB code from the 70's is still in wide use) but some newer ecosystems can't understand.
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic
Isn't the entire point of a machine shop to be these things?
> capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.
You cannot make a profit on a manufacturing line that is not being utilized. Keeping spare tools around and functional just in case is very expensive insurance policy.
Semiconductor manufacturing follows these rules as aggressively as possible. The entire line is built based on the speed of the highest cost tools. There are cases where having redundant tooling would definitely prevent some scrap events, but the premium on this options contract is never worth it on average.
> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
The technical term for that is "the real world". Moment of perspective on just how weird the software people are that they don't just accept mucking around as expensive and dangerous.
> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me.
It is very britlle.
The situation described is what happens when there is significant loss of knowledge, little pressure to improve productivity and low products turnover. You start to fear changing things because you doubt you would be able to get back to the previous situation. That's a huge red flag because you are one unexpected incident/failure away from a very difficult situation.
That's why someone mentioned process knowledge in another thread. If you have mastery of the process required to setup a manufacturing chain, you are far less afraid of changes and that's indeed key to being efficient and innovative.
But the original commenter is also right that volume is key here. If your volumes are so low that short time unavailability or a small amount of failures is life threatening, you simply don't have the breathing room to properly operate.
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering
For plenty of industries, margins dictate that this is the desired outcome. The goal is to optimise output, not react quickly to changes.
There are factories that work to order and can change to adapt to customer needs. These are fewer and further between, and tend to be more expensive as they aren't (by design) able to take advantage of economies of scale.
You don't tinker, explore or innovate live in prod with the root account either.
There are general purpose machines that you can make new parts on, and you open a pilot plant if you want to experiment with new manufacturing techniques.
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
for many machine shops the level of physical risk is > 0, often by a large amount.
making widgets for X means handling large quantities of red hot metal; even simple stuff that's easy to get your hands around often shoots tons of oil, gas, and metal shavings in volumes that could hurt or cripple people.
if my dev VM gets borked I reboot or revert it, but factories aren't so simple
A lot of cheap stuff through history that was definitely not made to last. I had paper dolls as a child. So did my mother. Probably her mother too - I'd ask, but she's dead.
How long do you expect a car to last? 100k miles (160k km), at least? It wasn't all that long ago that they were dead at 100k.
They used to add talc and sawdust to bread because they were cheaper than flour. Talk about chasing a quick buck. I very highly doubt they even cared about the next quarter. More realistically, things were built using the cheapest parts they could to make what they wanted - and they wanted things that would sell. Sure, some made things nicer than others but that's no different now.
Most of the things that we have now - old fridges, chairs, and so on - are flukes. They survived despite the odds.
Would most people even know if an MP3 player was built to last? How about an ink pen?
Computing hardware has always been on 3-5 year depreciation schedules. Not because it doesn't last, most of it will last decades, but because the next generation is so much better that your total costs for the next three years are lower if you buy new gear and throw the old stuff away.
And that's not just because of the rapid advances, but also because servers are expensive to run relative to their purchase price, and setup costs are cheap. For machining tools setup costs can be substantial, and the cost of keeping an old machine around is small
We still do. I think the Service Life of a Toyota Landcruiser is still 25 years. As a software developer, I've written control code for instruments that are expected to be on the market for at least 15-20 years from initial release and we have to plan Support and spare parts accordingly.
It's just that the fast-paced, built to last 6 months stuff gets all the good press.
I have a 4790k based machine standing unused by my desk (going to get the data off it and then get rid of it). Today's processors are so much better that if you used this one you'd be losing money on power.
> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
There's a sort of collective ADHD where we as a culture or economy collectively chase the latest shiny bauble in the hopes of getting rich without having to expend any effort. It often ends badly for the economy and then we go through a phase where we collectively are forced to slow down and reflect on our mistakes vowing not to repeat them... only to do so a decade or two later. The older you get, the more you notice this pattern. We did it in 2000 with the dotcom implosion and then again in 08 with housing and shady mortgages. This time it's overbuilding AI; putting way too much capital into infrastructure that has short useful lifetime.
Arguably this boom bust cycle is more of a intentional feature than a bug. Thanks to the cycle private actors are able and to capture the benefits of the boom, but when the bill is due the downside falls on the general public or taxpayers at large, basically Ersatz Capitalism or Lemon Socialism. 08 is the clearest example but they're all generally fueled by credit cycles creating exuberance.
There's also a element of lost collective memory via generational change providing a new supply of optimists.
> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
The only way "number goes up" capitalism continues to work is with planned obsolescence and things that need to be replaced regularly. This is a feature of the system, not a flaw. Nvidia (and all of their investors) love the fact that the stuff they make now will be outdated or broken in a few years.
If things last forever and never need to be replaced the only way to continue to increase profits is to have more people buying them. And global population appears to be peaking, at least in western countries, so that's not going to happen.
Is it sustainable? Probably not. But everyone seems to have their heads buried in the sand at the obvious dangers of what we're running into.
I’m a software engineer now but I was a design mechanical engineer for a decade. In America, mechanical engineers always felt like the bottom of barrel. The pay, benefits, and authority was always worse, even at the big tech companies. Culturally, America wants manufacturing back but doesn’t give it the respect it deserves.
I think it's partly the economic conditions. You have some great innovation in AI and it's worth billions. You have some in cars and it just holds off the decline a bit while manufacturing moves to Asia.
I know several mechanical engineers who ended up in semiconductor processing and they make bank. Maybe not senior google coder/engineer money but probably in top 10% of senior engineers easily
Culturally, America wants manufacturing back in order to increase the prestige of non-college men. Some amount of spillover to engineers might be tolerated, but if the pay, benefits, and authority are seen to mostly accrue to high-SAT-scoring engineers (just like in Silicon Valley) then a manufacturing renaissance will be considered an abject failure.
As for mechanical engineer many things that are puzzling to average engineer are easy to understand / recreate by mechanical engineer, especially in 3d printing era
I do a lot of small mechanical projects for fun. But designing something for one or two pieces is very different from designing something that is made in the hundreds or even thousands.
My dad is an immigrant from China who came to America to learn process engineering. After getting his master's, his first job was at a Reynold's aluminum factory in Alabama, and his factory made aluminum stuff and sometimes bottles. 40 years later, after lots of career jumps, he is about to retire this month from Google's AI division.
Something about adaptability? Over time lots of jobs will go away—be it through obsolescence, offshoring, etc. I don’t think the answer is to try to get those jobs to magically come back but rather to find something else.
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.
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 knowledge work, there are a lot of people who need jobs who aren’t going to be doing knowledge work. They need something.
I worked fast food for a shift before I quit. I found that much more boring and hated it much more than the factory. I’d rather see people employed making stuff domestically rather than have yet another drive-thru window in town.
I grew up in a small town with two fairly decent sized factories. That was a solid job prospect for a lot of people coming out or high school that didn’t know what else they could do. It gave those kids options and kept them in town where they could buy a house, raise a family, and spend money supporting other local businesses. Now they’re both closed and the city is hunting for ways to bring businesses to town. My brother-in-law is driving 100+ miles per day to drive to an area with more jobs opportunities. I’m sure if there was a local factory gig he’d probably take it and save a ton on gas, not to mention getting back 10 hours per week of his time.
The thing is, minimum wage there pays for 10 people on the floor in Asia and the cost of the factory is approximately the same. There’s no economic sense to build a factory in the states… which is where all the government subsidies enter the stage, but the budget is already running a war time deficit. It’s going to be so much worse for those small used-to-be-factory cities until the printer starts for real, and then there’s no guarantee it’s going to be any better after.
> 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.
> 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.
Not really, American manufacturing is already automated. Manufacturing jobs have steadily decreased[0] while output has increased (or stayed steady) in manufacturing since the early 2000's [1]. There is only one reasonable explanation for this -> automation.
While it is true that the Chinese are indeed automated their manufacturing, it still doesn't negate the fact that companies like Foxconn still have 200k employees in China.
IMHO the real reason you'll never see manufacturing come back to the USA is because you can't convince people who are already in less manually intensive labor conditions to go back to more manually intensive labor conditions. Said differently, it's easier to get someone who's family has spent decades doing back breaking work in a rice paddy to work in a factory for slightly better pay than it is to do the reverse.
I took a tour of the BMW Spartanburg factory a few days ago. It is highly automated with most work done by industrial robots. There are a few human workers manually pulling parts out of bins to feed the robots but nothing like the way that assembly lines used to operate.
Exactly, most factories in China are already heavily automated. Americans don't have a clue of what they've been doing there in the last 20 years to modernize production. The US would need to invest trillions in automation and workforce training to be able to compete with China, Taiwan and Korea. I don't see Americans being able to do this because they're too addicted to easy money from Wall Street.
> Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production.
The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west - companies can/do setup massive automated sites at huge expense, but there aren’t the skills/infrastructure to do this at the lower end of production (eg if you want to deploy one AMR in the west the AMR companies don’t want to talk to you, and there isn’t really an easy way to get one yourself without talking to an integrator which will charge tens of thousands which will wipe out the benefit, and we don’t have the skills within most small production companies to get a small robot arm/AMR working without external integrators - but a one-AMR deployment might be a more common scenario in China).
> 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 factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
My local factories are mostly union, and they rely heavily on the union to help fill empty openings. They also set up booths at local job fairs and have a poster board with current openings (typically electricians and pipe fitters, sometimes line workers or machinists). The jobs also have benefits and vacation and sick time off. Everybody I know who works there is always trying to get as many overtime shifts as they can, especially the weekend and holiday ones which are double or 2.5X time. Electricians are IBEW, pipefitters are pipefitters’ union, rest are UAW even though it has nothing to do with cars.
General advice is if you’re down on your luck and need a job, you can go there and be at $25 an hour in a few months (step pay increases are mandated by the union). It’s not for everyone but it certainly has less turnover than the local McDonald’s which starts and stays around $14.
Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force. For example the IBEW here always has a full book of apprentices. An employer can get a qualified electrician along with an apprentice basically guaranteed.
Not trying to troll but it seems like there must be some way to make the job at least a little interesting (e.g. by rotating the tasks required, providing a little space for skill development)?
Feels like there are a bunch of factories like that in the Midwest even now. There's a Honda factory near the Columbus, OH area where you have a bunch of employees doing absolute monotonous work all day like checking if a screw is the right shape or something. These jobs are slowly getting automated but it's not like no one would do them if they are available.
I guess most of these jobs don’t allow for music or YouTube to be used during work?
I’m just thinking that people already spend a lot of time just consuming content, so if it were possible to watch YouTube while at the factory, maybe it wouldn’t be as unpopular.
If they're losing employees, then they must not have that much higher pay or better benefits for it to be worth it to work there. I don't think you can easily blame it on the job being monotonous...
I don't mean for this to be as pointed as it probably will come off - but do you allow these workers to listen to music, take regular (not smoke) breaks, and do their job from a chair?
The few factory jobs I've seen were not only monotonous, they were needlessly soul crushing.
For no reason at all, you had to stand for hours on end. Your only breaks were lunch and smokes. Bathroom breaks were monitored like a crime. And you were afforded no distractions from the task, 100% focus required.
Coupled with no care put into making someone feel actually appreciated and the end-products being MBA shrinkflated garbage nobody could be proud of, it's not shocking that no one in their right mind would want to work there.
Sorry but whenever I hear employers say "much better pay/benefits compared to the competition", the reality is in 99.9% of cases that it's a negligible difference for work that is harder and much less desirable.
How much higher is the pay? Cause the first thing that crosses into my mind is oil rigs, where they get paid more than many software engineers I know do, and there's a huge number of people doing the work happily despite the gruelling conditions. I realize not every business can pay Big Oil salaries, but still, it might be worth thinking realistically about whether your pay & benefits really are better than Walmart's (who are the number 1 employer in the states AFAIR, so they must be doing something right).
Should hire us autists and allow us to program via voice commands and augmented reality.. i would love something almost automate-able while doing something that also needs higher brain functions.
Obviously, the “higher pay and significantly better benefits” are not actually significantly better. I’d rather we address that than just exploit some other workers overseas where they’re out of sight, out of mind.
Honestly, it seems like tariffs on imported goods would be the way around this, but also, we need to be sure that money is going to the people doing the work, not just the owners.
Speaking of which, I don’t really know your business, but a post starting with “my family owns a business” and ending with “we lose workers to Walmart even though we pay them more” (with no specificity as to how much more)…. This really comes off like a problem with the business itself, not the overall market.
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.
1. Ok then what do you make?
2. A bit too late for that given that China is also highly automated.
3. You would have to be serious for this to work.
As for your responses.
1 who is "us"
3. I mean some would be automated etc. There is actually data on how little the cost of labor adds to different parts of manufacturing.
2. You at least have a sustainable economy (I dont mean that in an environmental sense)
I used to work in such a factory in Germany and turn-over was high :) A large pool of uni students doing their summer breaks propped up the place. They could afford to work there for 1-2 months mentally because they knew they'd go back to university (me, too). The few long-timers on the factory floor were mostly functioning alcoholics.
The slight problem with how AI is currently being marketed is that AI is going for the fun and creative jobs that people want to do, not the dull and repetitive jobs that nobody wants to do.
If every creative job is gone to the AI beast then there will be people willing to do factory work since nothing else will be available.
What's the point of GenAI in a manufacturing pipeline? Good ol' ML based AI automation is heavily used in larger manufacturing plants to identify defects
Rubbish. Ai has been used for many years in factories and modern AI will be even more useful. The issue is that most people aren't going to be the target of this sort of AI advertising and also that this takes longer than making a chat bot
Ironically green energy, EVs, etc is probably one of the best blue collar investments the country could make right now
Industries in the US are at an inflection point, with govt / global market giving conflicting signals. For example car manufacturers need to decide whether to invest in EVs, which is a huge capital investment they won't see return on for maybe a decade. If they dont invest, they won't be relevant outside the few markets clinging religiously to ICEs
Do you layout a billion dollars to try to stay relevant outside the US? Or stick to reliable, if soon shrinking, domestic internal combustion engine business model?[1]
Contrast this with AI where signals are unambiguous from government and investors.
The article is implying throughout that these two things are mutually exclusive, and while that makes some intuitive sense (only so much money to invest after all), the last chart [1] doesn't give any indication that data center investment comes at the expense of industrial investment.
[1] "Private sector spending on equipment, adjusted for inflation"
I'll admit I have not read this article incredibly thoroughly, but I don't see what you're claiming. The article is contrasting the growth of the AI industry with the slump in manufacturing. I don't think it's positing any causal link between the two.
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 go to conventional war, and since the US is a nuclear superpower it's never going to get into an existential boots-on-the-ground Serious War again unless it just wants to cosplay. Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant.
So: it took decades to burn the boats with manufacturing, and trying to rebuild them in a few years is a hilarious folly. It absolutely will not go anywhere, and honestly shouldn't anyway. There is real danger, however, that the US burns the boats on the carefully crafted service sector as well.
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. Sometimes mind-numbingly repetitive work. This work sucks! And we should be happy that as a country we managed to transition our economy away from depending on this kind of work! Why on earth are we trying to bring it back?
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.
Manufacturing jobs are mostly unionized and service jobs aren't.
Americans actually want unions back, but because anti-union propaganda is so prevalent, they confused themselves into thinking they want manufacturing jobs 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.
Back then a couple could buy a house and raise a few kids on the paycheck that factory job of the husband's earned. These days even someone with a 6 figure tech job has trouble with that goal, but I think a lot of people think they can go back to the good old days.
> 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 small detachment plants a flag on Little Diomede Island? When they capture Attu Island? When they land troops on Hawaii? When they declare war? When they are walking in San Francisco? When they capture Salt Lake City? When they are 15 minutes away from the missile fields? When DC falls?
What do you imagine the world is going to look like afterwards? If you fired too soon, how are you going to stop the revolution breaking out after you've killed hundreds of millions of innocent people? If you fired too late, why bother? The country is lost already, surely you're not going to nuke yourself?
Besides, that's assuming the existential war happens in the US itself. The US isn't self-reliant, and it will never be. Are you going to nuke any country refusing to sell critical materials to the US? Sure, the US has started wars in the Middle-East for oil before, but nukes?
The other comment said "for survival." But yeah there are still nuclear powers fighting conventional wars, or posturing against each other with conventional weapons.
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.
A service economy is an utopia or a scam if you wish. You don't have to be a conservative to understand this. That being said, maybe you shouldn't burn bridges with the biggest producer in the world when you're trying to be a "service economy".
That's the big issue, the US needs to understand they can't force the world to do things forever because there is a dependency that cannot be broken anymore. The time when this decoupling was possible is over, from now on only diplomacy can work.
"Services" are actually fake and it turns out you need to be able to make things to survive. Not for ROI or for trade deficits, but because the world manufacturer sets the rules.
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 number of high paying, high skills jobs or the number of relatively low skill, dangerous manufacturing jobs, why wouldn't we choose the former?
If you have no leverage during a negotiation and your counterpart has can say 'no' without having to give up anything then you're screwed.
America doesn't have to be the best manufacturers, but we do need to have the ability to say, "fuck it we'll build it ourselves" when the other side of the table says something we don't like.
And anyone living in the fantasy utopia where the whole world agrees on everything and there's peace all the time... read more history.
Global supply chains seem to be gradually breaking down due to a mix of politics, demographics, and armed conflicts. Everyone has become accustomed to the post-WWII system of global free trade but historically it is an aberration and everything will eventually revert to the mean. I wouldn't be surprised if China disintegrates into another civil war within the next few decades. We can't necessarily rely on foreign countries to make stuff for us anymore so if we want to have stuff we might have to make it ourselves.
The crazy thing is, due to coordinated propaganda campaigns, people don't realize that the Biden administration got people to invest in US factories at an unprecedented rate. Trump's already managed to scare off a lot of that investment, presumably because he wants to protect the trade deficit.
Here's a graph of actual private investment money going into factories in the US since 1950. It proves my point:
I guess the tariffs are serving some other purpose, like forcing foreign governments to bribe him under-the-counter(?) That'd explain his rapid increase in net worth since taking office.
Biden was a relatively mediocre president (which I sure miss), but his administration was amazing for America. They laid the foundation for long-term prosperity, which is entirely squandered now. Such a shame.
sure in the sense in which operating an airline or high speed rail network makes you less money than running an ad or porn website but the world doesn't run on money, it runs on infrastructure. I believe we have a term for civilizations that value money over power, we call them decadent.
If you're content living in Mark Zuckerberg's slop metaverse that's a possible route to go down but it's important to understand that the world will belong to countries that focus on what powers that entertainment dystopia, and the US has some competitors who have the good sense to understand that the material world matters.
> operating an airline or high speed rail network makes you less money than running an ad or porn website
Airlines and high speed rail systems are also services. Heck, even Tesla's real value isn't in manufacturing, it's in the (delusional, but nonetheless) belief that they're going to make an absolute killing on services at some point in the future. They could probably sell off their manufacturing arm and their stock price would increase.
> The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean other than individual rich people started outsourcing labor to poor countries because they were allowed to import the products of that labor back into the country cheaply.
> Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services.
This is just nonsense. The trade deficit includes services, and grows a negative balance of payments that has been growing for 50 years. It would be different if that money were used for investment, but that money was just given to the wealthy. Reversing the trade deficit will not be enough. It's not that the government is debt-ridden, it's that the nation is debt-ridden. We're borrowing foreign cash to buy foreign imports. All we have left is to sell off land, buildings, and exclusive franchises.
But that's populist. As in the population that won't just be able to move to a country that isn't broken.
I mean, every single part of this is wrong, and there's nothing in it that resembles an economic argument. We need to bring manufacturing to the US because we need to produce something in order to be paid. We have no advantage in services, we only pretend to have one because we have wealthy people who import talent and who are themselves immigrants. We are not only not working, but are badly educated. I have no idea why you think that the world will continue to feed America for free, forever. What we're doing is selling the furniture and the fixtures, and pretending like everything is just fine.
And the people who inherited the furniture and the fixtures are like, yup, nothing's wrong.
The U.S. is still a leader in agricultural, although that’s heavily dependent on oil and cheap oil. Note that a place like Brazil is also a leader in ag… and one of the reasons they got to that position was through heavy protectionism to develop their own industries.
Quite the contrary to the points made in some of the comments mentioning that China is far ahead in applying automation tools/workflows in factories, which then shaped the competitive benifits in manufacture industries.
No, it's not.
It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to involve because of the involving needs for newer/better products.
It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources, it is the growing needs from the comsumers that require products to have newer/more functionality even if it has shorter lifetime, or event 'better', the product is looking for growth so they are designed to be short lifetime so the manufacturer and the customer both willing to upgrade in the future.
> It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to involve because of the involving needs for newer/better products.
Isn't the requirements set by the company outsourcing to China? Because as far as I can tell in China you can produce with all ranges of quality so it feels a bit too simplistic to blame "planned obsolescence" to China alone as the whole chain profits from it (besides the end-user of-course).
> It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources
Can you name a few items that you feel that way?
My impression as a consumer is that everything comes from China nowadays, even the reliable brands. The main difference I think is the time spend around product design and fine tuning the manufacturer's process. Think about it, there's a reason why they have to make it very visible that the product is "designed with love in colorado" when all the manufacturing jobs are in China.
Here in the west it is common sense that between products made in China and in the West the main difference is that the later category barely exists and if it does it comes at mostly unaffordable prices.
If you are as far ahead in manufacturing as China is, of course you can dictate the terms of competition and they want to increase consumption. I have zero doubt that this is anything but a deliberate choice, which could be altered by Chinese manufacturers if wanted to.
The myth of incompetent Chinese engineering and manufacturing is just that. And believing in it puts you in a dangerous place, where some day some Chinese company can do everything you can for half the price, which has happened again and again.
"Slower growth: Despite the record output, some analyses reported that the overall growth of U.S. manufacturing output was modest, at just 1% in 2024. This reflected a lag between announced investments and new operational capacity coming online."
So far, the ROI has been much lower than expected. The hype certainly attracted a ton of investment, but aside from some code generation and summarization, I’ve yet to see any meaningful yield.
The narrative claims that AI will make everyone far more productive, but in reality, I see people working harder than ever and burning out while maintaining this slop in production.
AI search and summarization have been a flop, and most people I know hate them. LLMs are undoubtedly useful, but despite all the supposed productivity gains, I’m not seeing any measurable impact. I used to spend hours reviewing human-written PRs, and now I spend even more time because of lazy AI-generated garbage creeping into the codebase.
Some AI parrots will say, “Oh, I never push code I don’t understand,” but that doesn’t stop others from doing it, and now you have to be extra vigilant during PR reviews.
The gist is that everyone claims to be more productive, but the numbers say otherwise. Even so, LLMs are genuinely useful, just not nearly as much as the investment would suggest.
My guess is that investors expect AI to automate manufacturing, and are waiting to see where that tech goes before spending a ton of capital on soon-to-be-obsolete machinery.
It's a strange bet because if AI can take over manufacturing, it will take over almost everything else and this will cause a complete overhaul of how we think about our economy.
Just a friendly reminder: The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Of course he doesn't want people to think that tariffs can bring back middle class manufacturing jobs, and naturally he would want to publish propaganda intended to demoralize pro-labor causes like import tariffs and worker protection laws.
I'm not saying he's wrong just yet, I'm just pointing out that he owns a propaganda mouthpiece and is willing to lie on a grandiose scale to protect his business interests.
The reason the percentage was included was to take the number out of isolation. What can mean anything is when people tell you to ignore the numbers, because they could mean anything.
> Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job gains/losses!
There might have been. Labor in manufacturing is way down - a trend going back to the 1950s. However manufacturing in the US has been booming all along. What used to take 2000 people in manufacturing now takes less than 200.
"Our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but will be able to do so indirectly, much like Apple has other companies manufacture their phones."
In other words, we are a knowledge economy and outsource like it's the 1990s with a bit of "AI" fantasies thrown in. The crash cannot come soon enough.
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.
I mean it kind of makes sense if you squint. Over the past 20-40yr regulatory (often public, but also often private) developments have created an insane amount of value non-producing paper pushing busy work. A man who supplies bent steel troughs to a company that outfits food producing factories spends infinitely more time on overhead paper pushing than he did 20yr ago (pulling this example out of my own friend group). What we need isn't more stuff. What we need is cheaper clerical labor to cut through the BS mountain we've built for ourselves enabling us to spend more time doing the things that produce value.
Do we even have people to work in the factories? I know a guy who started as a worker and is now a plant manager and he says their biggest problem is finding qualified people (high school or equivalent) that are willing to show up every day. Many get their first check and then suddenly stop showing up and then return 2 or 3 weeks later looking for work.
A lot of younger people it seems like value flexibility over higher pay. They’d rather work casual jobs that are dead ends. At the factory you start with a decent wage and benefits and within a year you’re promoted and salary increases noticeably. If you can put 5 responsible years in you’re certainly recruited to the management development path. These skills are highly transferable between companies.
Instead of blaming the workers, they should figure out how to make workers want to show up and find out the incentives they need.
Here’s a start: daily pay (there are a bunch of fintechs out there that will do this for you). My buddy who does construction does this. It filters out people who need a quick fix of cash on day 1 instead of wasting two weeks on them.
View labour unions as a friend, not an enemy, who will figure out where to get more workers and how to keep them willing to show up to the job.
Well... sure. Capitalists are looking for the best rate of return when they deploy their investments, they're looking at the money to be made financing datacenters vs other things, datacenters are winning.
Instead of industrial base for national security priority, Americans are served extra slop with a side of spammy content once these AI are done ingesting.
All we're doing is building platforms for ads, pits for advertisers to pitch dollars, nothing is getting made, all it does is drive consumerism. Google, Meta, Amazon, aside from now NVidia the whole economy is increasingly built around selling slop that we decreasingly know how to make anymore.
Manufacturing was hard to do 2 decades ago, and is harder now.
I started, grew, and exited a modern manufacturing-based business, and I can confirm that almost everything about modern capitalism in this cycle is biased -against- any business that manufactures in 1st world economies. The business, Spoonflower, was and is an innovative marketplace of textile design, mated to on-demand manufacture, and had factories in Durham NC and Berlin Germany.
Three factors made this very difficult:
-- raising funding or debt to support old-fashioned capital equipment. Building factories was once the backbone of the US economy but is now pretty close to impossible for an entrepreneur. Raising money to write software is straightforward and well understood. Raising money to purchase industrial equipment the size of a city bus is not what our startup economy is optimized for, or even understands or has models for. Confusion about this is nearly universal.
-- operating a labor-intensive (anything where the largest component of cost is the labor component) manufactory. As others have noted, making stuff is physically demanding. Some people love hard work, but culturally this is rare. If you are crazy successful, the reward is another shift of harder, potentially more efficient work.
-- exiting investors / providing ROI. Our business fit in two categories: creative digital marketplaces (Ebay, Etsy...) valued at 4-6x revenue, or makers like Cimpress or Shutterfly at .5 to 1x revenue. Who buys factories.... even really interesting ones? The short answer: only those that already own factories. When you have a very short list of potential acquisitors, its hard to create an auction market for your equity.
In general, we did okay. But every step from launch to growth to exit felt very much like swimming into a strong current. The same very hard working and resourceful group of colleagues could have done anything. I'm proud of the work, but a lot of that pride is sheer contrariness at having executed on something so unlikely and having survived.
This would be much harder now.
Sourcing is harder. Friends working in the space now rely on a global sourcing network just as we did, that is in utter disarray. Operating on thin margins with a factory that must be fed raw materials to make money is terrifying on a normal day. These days the threat to supply chains is existential.
Launching consumer brands is harder. As has been widely noted, access to the top of the funnel has now been fully monetized (or fully enshittified) by Google, Facebook etc, and because of AI, that funnel now shrinks. Something will break loose here, but nothing has yet.
A post-pandemic employment environment is even more difficult for manufacturers. I think it is safe to say that demand for jobs that require 8-12 hours of physically demanding work surrounded by colleagues and industrial machinery is at an all time low.
I spent 15 years in service to a vision of domestic making, and while we were not defeated, I understand deeply the uphill battle any manufacturing entrepreneur faces.
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 line.
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 manufacturing at scale is that you want a person or machine that follows a tiny instruction set (at least in comparison to the potential flexibilities of an LLM) and nails the execution every time. This seems to me like the complete opposite of the strengths of an AI system like the ones that Wall Street are cheering.
I've heard that the general transformer architecture (not specifically LLMs, which imply a language model, but applied to sensory perceptions and outputting motor commands) has actually been fairly successful when applied to robotics. You want your overall assembly line to have a tiny, repeatable instruction set, but inside each of those individual instructions is oftentimes a complex motion that's very dependent upon chaotic physical realities. Think of being able to orient a part or deal with a stuck bolt, for example. AI Transformers potentially would allow us to replace several steps in the assembly that currently require human workers with robots, and that in turn makes the rest of the assembly much more reproducible (and cheaper).
Training these models takes a bunch more time, because you first need to build special hardware that allows a human to do these motions while having a computer record all the sensor inputs and outputs, and then you need to have the human do them a few thousand times, while LLMs just scrape all the content on the Internet. But it's potentially a lot more impactful, because it allows robots to impact the physical world and not just the printed word.
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 you could get around those constraints.
The video models are the ones that seem to be attracting the most attention in this area as it seems do similar to sight recognition.
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 to do.
The more we can bring down all the difficulty of all these processes, the more we can accelerate manufacturing locally.
That's not how the LLMs should be used in manufacturing. It is still the current assembly lines robots that will do that. LLMs can be used by the humans who design the automation workflow, as coding assistants. That can lower the breakeven number of items that can be automated. Maybe if today it only makes sense to automate the manufacturing of a widget only if you can sell more than 100000 of those widgets, then with LLM assistance that number can be reduced to 1000. Whenever you have a 10x improvement of something, there's scope for a mini-revolution to happen.
Someone has to run the robots. And i bet it's not going to be the educated but spoiled workforce of the developed western world, but that will be outsourced to offshore destinations.
I think there's something cultural about wanting office jobs related to power over people, where you can always slack instead of waking up every day at 8 to go to the factory
Right. There is no reason why "AI-enabled" factories would be built in countries that struggle to build and run normal factories, and where the cost of materials is high.
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.
This is assuming that "AI" isn't already being used extensively on manufacturing lines. Computer Vision has used "AI" neural networks for years for various tasks. The issue is that it is a lot of investment to implement automated assembly and there are still enough places in the world where labour is cheap enough to make it not worth it. As I said to one of my suppliers recently when they asked how their factory compared to others, "Automation is nice to have, but at the end of the day I'm choosing a vendor based on who can get me the product cheapest, quickest, and with high quality."
China has been building robots and robotic manufacturing without AI. So why AI? Because the AI is a grift for those who can get exposure to its potential gains during the exuberance, while China builds actual capabilities. Profits and fiat are shared delusions, monetarily speaking, robots and factories are real, and will build real things.
> Now covering 64 critical technologies and crucial fields spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas, the Tech Tracker’s dataset has been expanded and updated from five years of data (previously, 2018–2022) to 21 years of data (2003–2023). These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.
AI isn't directly a grift, however it's going to be backstopped by the president, and top investors know, so market discipline is out the window. Robotics is the thing that will let China dump money into AI sustainably (in addition to their energy supremacy). That was the point of AI is Too Big to Fail.
What if it contributes to an evisceration of the middle class, instead? Hiring for new grads is already dead because of it, and it's not going to be coming back.
It's having the same sort of impact as unlimited immigration, except that in this case, the workers don't need weekends, or pay taxes.
Hiring new grads is dead because companies are cutting their spending while they wait to see how Trump's erratic behavior shakes out and for interest rates to drop.
AI is making almost no difference in hiring at all.
zero growth in the eu in 2 decades, meanwhile the US powered on ahead.
I'm all for optimism, but only realism matters.
Hopefully the US has a manufacturing revival for the sake of working class folk, but that isn't so relevant to its growth since services/product aren't antithetic.
1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on
2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job)
3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so due to a mix of architectural tricks that can be applied to any general-purpose model, including chip design, tactical intelligence, persuasion, beating the stock market, etc
The argument is something like AGI or its owner wouldn't want other AGIs to exist. So it would destroy the capabilities of other AGI before it could evolve(by things like hacking, manipulation etc.).
Far more is being done than simply throwing more GPU's at the problem.
GPT-5 required less compute to train than GPT-4.5. Data, RL, architectural improvements, etc. all contribute to the rate of improvement we're seeing now.
I have seen no credible explanation on how current or proposed technology can possibly achieve AGI.
If you want to hand-wave that away by stating that any company with technology capable of achieving AGI would guard it as the most valuable trade secret in history, then fine. Even if we assume that AGI-capable technology exists in secret somewhere, I've seen no credible explanation from any organization on how they plan to control an AGI and reliably convince it to produce useful work (rather than the AGI just turning into a real-life SHODAN). An uncontrollable AGI would be, at best, functionally useless.
AGI is --- and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be --- science fiction.
We have an AI promoter here. AGI isn't the future of anything right now. It could be. But so could a lot of things, like vaccine research (we're making promising development on HIV and cancer). Try saying those people would own the future in the 1980s-1990s. Sure, that'd be an obvious outcome, but it wasn't on the horizon for the people in the field at the time (unless your family owned the company).
Even if you could cure cancer or HIV with a vaccine it would have a relatively negligible impact compared to AGI.
There are far more signals that AGI is going to be achieved by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the next 5-10 years than there were of any other hyped breakthrough in the past 100 years that ultimately never came to fruition. Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen, but to ignore the multitude of trends which show no signs of stopping, it seems naive in Anno Domani 2025 to discount it as a likely possibility.
Even AI can be used as "a factory" by creating code or workflows/automation that will create value long after the generation. Instead, most users treat them like generic chat bots and/or highly inefficient interfaces to machines.
Using LLMs to generate texts for inefficient communication (to other humans or machines) is just so wrong.
https://archive.is/TY950
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 (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen) and it will blow your mind if you've only lived in the West.
And if you haven't visited, for example this is tier 1 China: cashless society, amazing public transportation, clean streets, no homeless, practically zero crime, drone food delivery (in Shenzhen, certain spots only), high-speed rail to every major city in China (and even to smaller tier-2, tier-3 cities), wonderful infrastructure that gets built in years (vs decades in the West), extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the tracks) etc.
I agree with your assessment on the high end of China's development and the lack of awareness of that from people in the US. But I think the story on the low end /lower class is more interesting and I think there is lack of awareness there too.
Even within the US a lot of upper class people don't know what it's like for lower class people here. It's so easy to slip into homelessness because there aren't reasonable options available to many people to live anymore.
In China they still have a huge amount of their population in a developing stage so they still have ample tools and options and knowledge for how to maintain a reasonable life in a less developed state. So it's easier to fall back to a cheaper lifestyle, and culturally it's easier too.
But in the US were generations removed from these other ways of life, so there's no options or cultural acceptance of not living a highly developed way of life. So people just go straight from a nice house or apartment with modern stuff to being homeless with little to no tools to survive.
Just my probably naive thoughts. Would love to hear others takes on this.
i agree with that. It's as if they tried to outlaw poverty. i mean look at all the insane housing regulations (zoning laws, regulations, permit costs, land usage policy) that prevent low cost housing from being built.
I've seen in thailand, how even the poorest can just build a small hut on a piece of land they own and actually live in it. You'd be risking jail time if you did that in the US.
I think your assessment of homelessness in the US misses some things, though (or at least leaves them unstated):
First, that it's not just that people "don't know how to live more simply", and thus cling to their homes too long when they "should" otherwise be downsizing and cutting expenses. For a lot of people, the fall is sudden—some medical emergency drains all their savings and leaves them unable to work (at least for a time), and there it goes.
Second, what are they going to downsize to? We don't have whole rural villages in the US that are living, essentially, pre-industrialized lives (except with the Amish, I suppose, but that's a whole other kettle of fish). (Also, I don't know for sure that such places exist today in China—I know that they did not too many years ago, but my information is not current.) There isn't really anywhere you can go in the US to live securely, but simply, on $100 a month or whatever. And even if there were, that would involve leaving whatever job you had to begin with, which removes the "securely" part.
As an East Asian, not really trying to argue that China hasn’t accomplished great things.
While I can’t speak directly to this, but from watching The China Show on YouTube, the tradeoff to the amazing amenities is that the personal-injury risk from failing infrastructure has been fatal, but covered up by their propaganda. Anyone on the receiving end of it, will deal with devastating consequences, if not fatal.
Infrastructure and manufacturing corners are cut in ways that look great, but literally kill their population and tourists.
Building foundations are not thick enough, buildings aren’t built to proper fire safety standards, underground pipes leak, leading to roads constantly failing, high rises burn down, sewage pipes literally blow up due to methane build up like someone detonated a bomb.
Drainage grates are fake and flooding cities, drowning people in vehicles, while the QA of car battery manufacturing is causing electric fleets of cars in parking lots to burn.
And the aforementioned occurrences are happening in tier1 cities.
I sound hyperbolic, but China is great at quickly cleaning up and quickly rebuilding, so it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it does.
Once I learned about the infrastructure, I realized my cousin’s business trip accident in China was not a randomly rare accident.
He broke his back in China when his rental car’s front wheel popped off the car.
Chances are most folks are fine if they go. But I would be very weary, because the probability of a disaster is not nearly as high as it ought to be.
Just got back from a trip to Japan and I found that Tokyo and Kyoto also met most of your criteria.
Cash is still pretty common there and definitely can't go cashless (nor would I personally like to), and there's no delivery drones that I'm aware of (I also don't particularly care for that, personally).
I'm not even sure it's that they're ahead, I think we've just fallen behind in a lot of those cases.
China has made amazing progress and the rate of extreme poverty has fallen a lot. But it's also easier to limit the homeless population in cities when they have the Hukou internal passport system to keep many of the poorest people out, as well as forced institutionalization of the severely mentally ill.
>clean streets, no homeless, practically zero crime
The US regressed on this heavily in the last generation.
no it didn't. crime rates have been steadily declining for over 30 years
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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 is from the state, the mafia, and there is a lot of corruption. But nobody can talk about it because there is no free press.
I do think it's important to state how much China is advancing, and surpassing the West, because they are going to rule the world as the Americans did, soon.
But let's not pretend it's some kind of utopia.
>> extensive subway systems with protective barriers at every single station (so you can't suicide or push someone on the tracks)
I find this one most interesting. In London for example this is brought up all the time. There is always an excuse (cost, platform length, trains can't stop at the same spot etc etc) and we accept ~100 suicide attempts per year not to mention various accidents. There's the immediate human cost, the PTSD for first emergency workers + the disruption to public transport.
If we can't invest in simple things that would make a meaningful difference how do we expect to match those big infrastructure projects? Crossrail is fantastic but was delayed many years. HS2 is beyond a joke.
What are some examples that might blow my mind?
Public transportation is on a different level and all mayor cities are connected via a high speed rail network.
The latter probably will never happen in the US.
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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 (easy for other players to accomplish similar AI achievements). China has made that clear. Some open weight LLMs are fine and can run on laptops. It seems the new moat is model parameter size and VRAM requirements. I would bet on innovation in hardware or disruptive algorithms changing that game so better LLMs can run on more personal computers. Remember how bitcoin miners all used GPUs then ASICs came along and made that no longer profitable?
There are many ways the AI industry can be disrupted which makes it that much more volatile.
Considering we're two years in and everyone's still... talking about chatbots pretty much. Yea, I'd say that's a hell of a gamble.
Of course the hardware can probably be repurposed towards crypto mining afterwards, so hey!
The chatbot focus may be a news/accessibility bias. Take a look at deepmind's research blog to see applications in more areas.
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While I agree with the general sentiment on throwaway compute infra, the generated know-how with large scale experiments is not thrown away. I think a lot hinges on the scaling laws and whether you will hit the jackpot at a certain scale before everyone else. This is hard to guesstimate so someone has to do it in the spirit of empiricism. This might sound a lot like gambling or exploring depending on your sentiment. So, I think it is more justified to criticize the scale and the risks than the spirit of these investments.
While scaling laws are only empirical curve fitting and extrapolation, none of them predict a discontinuous "jackpot effect."
You're assuming that gold is going towards infrastructure. I don't think a lot of it is. I think it's a money grab while the getting's good.
Once you can run a GPT5 level LLM locally on a device, it’s over. All this mighty infrastructure is no longer any more impressive than a top of the line 2013 Mac Pro in 2025. I think we’re 10 years away from that.
10 years from now, the capabilities of gpt5 will be as relevant to AI as Atari is to modern gaming
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Consumer devices are already available that offer 128gb specifically labeled for AI use. I think server side AI will still exist for IoT devices, but I agree, 10 years seems pretty reasonable timelie to buy a GTX 5080-sized card that will have 1TB of memory, with the ability to pair it with another one for 2TB. For local, non-distributed use, GPUs are already more than capable of doing 20+ tokens/s, we're mostly waiting on 512gb devices to drop in price, and "free" LLMs to get better.
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Have you tried the reasoning mode of Gemini Pro 2.5? https://aistudio.google.com/
It gives me the chills, thinking about when it has 1000x cheaper ~GPU compute.
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Very high risk/Insane payoff (maybe).
Pretty much it, albeit I think very few appreciate how high's the risk of leaving with nothing in their hands.
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Each datacenter iteration that increases the size and power consumption is a stepping stone towards (possibly) recursive self-improvement in AI tech. I think that's the way to frame the absolutely massive bets being made by (only a few) companies. There aren't many companies or nation states in the world that can marshal the resources and talent needed to keep competing on this path.
It's a race to the the most powerful and transformative technology in history.
Or it might all collapse like a house of cards. But worth a shot.
> But worth a shot.
Worth betting the entire US economy on it?
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>I would bet on innovation in hardware or disruptive algorithms changing that game so better LLMs can run on more personal computers.
This is classic jevon's paradox. As efficiency increases so does demand.
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 job, and possibly losing customers.
The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
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.
People here also don't understand machine shops.
My dad ran a job shop focused on small jobs and the economics are different.
A lot of his work was keeping other local shops / industrial equipment up and running. So there is a lot of variety of work but very low throughput and kind of by deffintion you have the capabilities to fix your own machines.
Programing a CNC machine makes it east to make a lot of the same part but if you only need one it may be quicker to just knock it out manually.
A 50 year old mill or lathe is easy to keep up and running, can be upgraded with a Digital readout or even CNC controls if desired. A tool in a shop like this likely won't see the cycles one on a factory floor constant uses sees but may be worth keeping around since it offers a unique capability...he had a large ww ii surplus lathe for jobs that wouldn't fit on the smaller more modern machines for example.
> 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.
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To be fair, a lot of the tools we use as developers have 30-40 year heritage's themselves. The things that most people depend on and are in the background.
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I'm somewhere in the middle, young enough that almost everything I've seen new is disposable crap (including the tools), old enough that I have had an interest in things from before and noticed that they really were built much better, or at least heavier, back then.
I've made the comment on here before that I believe it's short term energy optimisation, in that it used to be seen as reasonable to much heavier objects around. We've made everything so light we've lost the infrastructure for moving heavy stuff around when we might need to.
Kids today have no concept of how heavy workstations, TVs or monitors used to be, and they think it's exaggeration. Let alone tools, cars, appliances etc.
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I don't know where I fit on that spectrum, my first thought was there's probably nobody around anymore to replace these fifty year old tools, and/or they'll price it at a level that would wipe all profits for the next 10 years when replacement will be needed.
Our field also have these IBM AS/400 or older running for 30+ years in a server room at the back of an office floor. They are more feared than revered.
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).
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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.
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> 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”.
It's like when someone wants to choose a brand new web framework that isn't battle tested over one of the most battle tested web frameworks. You can hire way more developers with battle tested tooling, than some bleeding edge thing you don't know if it can even scale.
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This is known as the Lindy Effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
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.
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I'm a nearly 50 year old tool myself.
Yeah I have students who ask me "Why are we learning C++? My dad said it's older than him!"
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Less interested in America's expensive and slow manufacturing than in Chinese processes. They can retool faster, handle far more volume, and except for specialized industries (medicine, aerospace) their quality is better.
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My first thought is: "when that wears out or fails what the fuck are you replacing it with".
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As an older folk, I perceive 50 year old tools as likely worn out and in desperate need of replacement. However often nobody makes the tool anymore and so we are willing to spend a lot to maintain them instead. (I drive a 25 year old car - this is only possible because I can get a rebuilt transmission, but my maintenance costs over the last 10 years would have bought much newer/nicer used car, and I'm getting close to where I could buy a new car)
The other possibility is the tool isn't used much and modern accountants would never allow you to buy it in the first place because of all the cash tied up. (that is the work the tool did over those 50 years wasn't enough to pay for the cost of the tool and the space to store it)
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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.
They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.
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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 US has to contend balancing their profit margin and costs to remain competitively priced.
When doing machine shop jobs, it's far easier to bury the cost of initial tooling/fixturing in the initial first job as a separate line charge for NRE. It's alot harder to sell to customers that you will charge them that cost on subsequent orders. You can charge customers for "setup overhead" on subsequent orders but that should be the cost of putting any existing tooling into service, not engineering new ones because you decided to change shit on a whim.
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Smarter Every Day did a great video on that.
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Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups
I am reminded of some of the very finest semiconductor plants. Where parts could in theory be swapped out and replaced, but to do so would break everything. Mirrors aligned to sub-nanometre precision. Lasers and optics where picoseconds matter. Where parts are effectively custom-tuned for this machine only, allied with all these other parts also custom-tuned for this machine only. The US has a challenge on its hands to develop within the US everything and everyone needed to simply getting these systems actually working.
Nothing has changed, people behave the exact same way then or now. People value longevity and quality only when the innovation pace is slow.
Rapid innovation by definition comes with rapid changes. Rapid changes does not always mean it is planned obsolescence or just poor quality.
In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are.
The best recent example is Smartphones, early 2010s everyone updated their phones almost every year standing around the block on release. Today it is maybe once 3-4 years, there is very little reason to. The incremental changes are not meaningful and devices have become lot more reliable and rugged and of course expensive.
We do value quality if features are not going to improve much.
> In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are.
Given the DC-3 is still(!) in service, and there were surely a ton more of them flying in 1975 than today, I'm not sure that's true. And that's far from the only example of a more-than-10-years-old-in-1975 aircraft that was certainly still in wide use in 1975.
Any big shift around then was probably because of the development of high-bypass turbofan jet engines. Not so much driven by "old airframes seem risky" as "pre-high-bypass jet engines are enough more-expensive to operate that airlines will abandon them rapidly". Those engines went into wide use in the 1970s (developed in the '60s). We (demonstrably) had "reliable, long-lived airframe" figured out by the '30s, with some refinement through the '40s but nothing that rendered those '30s models necessarily obsolete (see again: the DC-3, a 1936 design). More-efficient subsonic jet engines were what caused turn-over in a certain segment of the market in the '70s, not so much "I won't trust an old airframe".
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I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion.
However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.
"If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation."
This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts.
After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physics involved, to optimize cost vs speed.
There is no "tinkering" or "innovation" necessary, and it would be highly detrimental. The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process.
Also - not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done. Even if you could make them slightly better, it's not worth the overall cost over time for everyone. Being "better" is not enough, it has to actually be worth being better. Even things that are worth it, if you want customers to use your new thing, you have to support their old thing, even if that's painful or annoying for you.
This is something that lots of ecosystems used to know (fortran is a good example, which is why NETLIB code from the 70's is still in wide use) but some newer ecosystems can't understand.
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> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic
Isn't the entire point of a machine shop to be these things?
> capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.
You cannot make a profit on a manufacturing line that is not being utilized. Keeping spare tools around and functional just in case is very expensive insurance policy.
Semiconductor manufacturing follows these rules as aggressively as possible. The entire line is built based on the speed of the highest cost tools. There are cases where having redundant tooling would definitely prevent some scrap events, but the premium on this options contract is never worth it on average.
> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
The technical term for that is "the real world". Moment of perspective on just how weird the software people are that they don't just accept mucking around as expensive and dangerous.
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> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me.
It is very britlle.
The situation described is what happens when there is significant loss of knowledge, little pressure to improve productivity and low products turnover. You start to fear changing things because you doubt you would be able to get back to the previous situation. That's a huge red flag because you are one unexpected incident/failure away from a very difficult situation.
That's why someone mentioned process knowledge in another thread. If you have mastery of the process required to setup a manufacturing chain, you are far less afraid of changes and that's indeed key to being efficient and innovative.
But the original commenter is also right that volume is key here. If your volumes are so low that short time unavailability or a small amount of failures is life threatening, you simply don't have the breathing room to properly operate.
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering
For plenty of industries, margins dictate that this is the desired outcome. The goal is to optimise output, not react quickly to changes.
There are factories that work to order and can change to adapt to customer needs. These are fewer and further between, and tend to be more expensive as they aren't (by design) able to take advantage of economies of scale.
You don't tinker, explore or innovate live in prod with the root account either.
There are general purpose machines that you can make new parts on, and you open a pilot plant if you want to experiment with new manufacturing techniques.
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
for many machine shops the level of physical risk is > 0, often by a large amount.
making widgets for X means handling large quantities of red hot metal; even simple stuff that's easy to get your hands around often shoots tons of oil, gas, and metal shavings in volumes that could hurt or cripple people.
if my dev VM gets borked I reboot or revert it, but factories aren't so simple
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It's wild to think we used to build things to last decades. Now we build them to chase benchmarks for the next quarter
Did we, though? I am just not convinced.
A lot of cheap stuff through history that was definitely not made to last. I had paper dolls as a child. So did my mother. Probably her mother too - I'd ask, but she's dead.
How long do you expect a car to last? 100k miles (160k km), at least? It wasn't all that long ago that they were dead at 100k.
They used to add talc and sawdust to bread because they were cheaper than flour. Talk about chasing a quick buck. I very highly doubt they even cared about the next quarter. More realistically, things were built using the cheapest parts they could to make what they wanted - and they wanted things that would sell. Sure, some made things nicer than others but that's no different now.
Most of the things that we have now - old fridges, chairs, and so on - are flukes. They survived despite the odds.
Would most people even know if an MP3 player was built to last? How about an ink pen?
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Computing hardware has always been on 3-5 year depreciation schedules. Not because it doesn't last, most of it will last decades, but because the next generation is so much better that your total costs for the next three years are lower if you buy new gear and throw the old stuff away.
And that's not just because of the rapid advances, but also because servers are expensive to run relative to their purchase price, and setup costs are cheap. For machining tools setup costs can be substantial, and the cost of keeping an old machine around is small
We still do. I think the Service Life of a Toyota Landcruiser is still 25 years. As a software developer, I've written control code for instruments that are expected to be on the market for at least 15-20 years from initial release and we have to plan Support and spare parts accordingly.
It's just that the fast-paced, built to last 6 months stuff gets all the good press.
Deregulation and firms like Bain capital (Romney) parted out all those corporations to china.
You see the same process that destroyed Toys r Us and Sears more recently.
This was all on purpose to extract whatever could from the corpse or USA manufacturing
I have a 4790k based machine standing unused by my desk (going to get the data off it and then get rid of it). Today's processors are so much better that if you used this one you'd be losing money on power.
> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
There's a sort of collective ADHD where we as a culture or economy collectively chase the latest shiny bauble in the hopes of getting rich without having to expend any effort. It often ends badly for the economy and then we go through a phase where we collectively are forced to slow down and reflect on our mistakes vowing not to repeat them... only to do so a decade or two later. The older you get, the more you notice this pattern. We did it in 2000 with the dotcom implosion and then again in 08 with housing and shady mortgages. This time it's overbuilding AI; putting way too much capital into infrastructure that has short useful lifetime.
Arguably this boom bust cycle is more of a intentional feature than a bug. Thanks to the cycle private actors are able and to capture the benefits of the boom, but when the bill is due the downside falls on the general public or taxpayers at large, basically Ersatz Capitalism or Lemon Socialism. 08 is the clearest example but they're all generally fueled by credit cycles creating exuberance.
There's also a element of lost collective memory via generational change providing a new supply of optimists.
They can stop using the screwdriver, wrench, and hammer and see how far they can get.
Or keep changing those tools to better fit the job.
Progress continues with continual process improvements.
> hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months
What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.
A gpu from 8 years ago is cost competitive, efficient and "worth using" for modern tasks?
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Data centre hardware is more like 3 years.
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So like, up to 100 months.
The heavy presses produced in 1955 are still in use today https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-pr...
> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
The only way "number goes up" capitalism continues to work is with planned obsolescence and things that need to be replaced regularly. This is a feature of the system, not a flaw. Nvidia (and all of their investors) love the fact that the stuff they make now will be outdated or broken in a few years.
If things last forever and never need to be replaced the only way to continue to increase profits is to have more people buying them. And global population appears to be peaking, at least in western countries, so that's not going to happen.
Is it sustainable? Probably not. But everyone seems to have their heads buried in the sand at the obvious dangers of what we're running into.
That's backwards. If you can amortize $70k in a few months you're doing extremely well.
I’m a software engineer now but I was a design mechanical engineer for a decade. In America, mechanical engineers always felt like the bottom of barrel. The pay, benefits, and authority was always worse, even at the big tech companies. Culturally, America wants manufacturing back but doesn’t give it the respect it deserves.
It’s a rent extraction economy not an industrial one.
I think it's partly the economic conditions. You have some great innovation in AI and it's worth billions. You have some in cars and it just holds off the decline a bit while manufacturing moves to Asia.
I know several mechanical engineers who ended up in semiconductor processing and they make bank. Maybe not senior google coder/engineer money but probably in top 10% of senior engineers easily
Culturally, America wants manufacturing back in order to increase the prestige of non-college men. Some amount of spillover to engineers might be tolerated, but if the pay, benefits, and authority are seen to mostly accrue to high-SAT-scoring engineers (just like in Silicon Valley) then a manufacturing renaissance will be considered an abject failure.
do you still create stuff for fun?
As for mechanical engineer many things that are puzzling to average engineer are easy to understand / recreate by mechanical engineer, especially in 3d printing era
I do a lot of small mechanical projects for fun. But designing something for one or two pieces is very different from designing something that is made in the hundreds or even thousands.
My dad is an immigrant from China who came to America to learn process engineering. After getting his master's, his first job was at a Reynold's aluminum factory in Alabama, and his factory made aluminum stuff and sometimes bottles. 40 years later, after lots of career jumps, he is about to retire this month from Google's AI division.
I don't really know what the lesson here is.
Something about adaptability? Over time lots of jobs will go away—be it through obsolescence, offshoring, etc. I don’t think the answer is to try to get those jobs to magically come back but rather to find something else.
America will retire after AI?
It came full circle... from process engineering in the physical world to process engineering in the digital one
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.
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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 knowledge work, there are a lot of people who need jobs who aren’t going to be doing knowledge work. They need something.
I worked fast food for a shift before I quit. I found that much more boring and hated it much more than the factory. I’d rather see people employed making stuff domestically rather than have yet another drive-thru window in town.
I grew up in a small town with two fairly decent sized factories. That was a solid job prospect for a lot of people coming out or high school that didn’t know what else they could do. It gave those kids options and kept them in town where they could buy a house, raise a family, and spend money supporting other local businesses. Now they’re both closed and the city is hunting for ways to bring businesses to town. My brother-in-law is driving 100+ miles per day to drive to an area with more jobs opportunities. I’m sure if there was a local factory gig he’d probably take it and save a ton on gas, not to mention getting back 10 hours per week of his time.
The thing is, minimum wage there pays for 10 people on the floor in Asia and the cost of the factory is approximately the same. There’s no economic sense to build a factory in the states… which is where all the government subsidies enter the stage, but the budget is already running a war time deficit. It’s going to be so much worse for those small used-to-be-factory cities until the printer starts for real, and then there’s no guarantee it’s going to be any better after.
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> 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.
> 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.
Not really, American manufacturing is already automated. Manufacturing jobs have steadily decreased[0] while output has increased (or stayed steady) in manufacturing since the early 2000's [1]. There is only one reasonable explanation for this -> automation.
While it is true that the Chinese are indeed automated their manufacturing, it still doesn't negate the fact that companies like Foxconn still have 200k employees in China.
IMHO the real reason you'll never see manufacturing come back to the USA is because you can't convince people who are already in less manually intensive labor conditions to go back to more manually intensive labor conditions. Said differently, it's easier to get someone who's family has spent decades doing back breaking work in a rice paddy to work in a factory for slightly better pay than it is to do the reverse.
[0] - https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling...
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GOMA
I took a tour of the BMW Spartanburg factory a few days ago. It is highly automated with most work done by industrial robots. There are a few human workers manually pulling parts out of bins to feed the robots but nothing like the way that assembly lines used to operate.
https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en.html
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Exactly, most factories in China are already heavily automated. Americans don't have a clue of what they've been doing there in the last 20 years to modernize production. The US would need to invest trillions in automation and workforce training to be able to compete with China, Taiwan and Korea. I don't see Americans being able to do this because they're too addicted to easy money from Wall Street.
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> Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production.
The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west - companies can/do setup massive automated sites at huge expense, but there aren’t the skills/infrastructure to do this at the lower end of production (eg if you want to deploy one AMR in the west the AMR companies don’t want to talk to you, and there isn’t really an easy way to get one yourself without talking to an integrator which will charge tens of thousands which will wipe out the benefit, and we don’t have the skills within most small production companies to get a small robot arm/AMR working without external integrators - but a one-AMR deployment might be a more common scenario in China).
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Or you could have trade borders.
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> 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 factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
My local factories are mostly union, and they rely heavily on the union to help fill empty openings. They also set up booths at local job fairs and have a poster board with current openings (typically electricians and pipe fitters, sometimes line workers or machinists). The jobs also have benefits and vacation and sick time off. Everybody I know who works there is always trying to get as many overtime shifts as they can, especially the weekend and holiday ones which are double or 2.5X time. Electricians are IBEW, pipefitters are pipefitters’ union, rest are UAW even though it has nothing to do with cars.
General advice is if you’re down on your luck and need a job, you can go there and be at $25 an hour in a few months (step pay increases are mandated by the union). It’s not for everyone but it certainly has less turnover than the local McDonald’s which starts and stays around $14.
Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force. For example the IBEW here always has a full book of apprentices. An employer can get a qualified electrician along with an apprentice basically guaranteed.
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> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
Q: Do you ever use an online job service to advertise jobs and collect applications?
Asking because my 5 sons all learned that job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).
Other viable but never-seen applicants: Minimal or sporadic job history, the most minimal of criminal records, the wrong zip code.
Seen but never hired: Fully qualified people who are awful at job interviews.
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Not trying to troll but it seems like there must be some way to make the job at least a little interesting (e.g. by rotating the tasks required, providing a little space for skill development)?
Feels like there are a bunch of factories like that in the Midwest even now. There's a Honda factory near the Columbus, OH area where you have a bunch of employees doing absolute monotonous work all day like checking if a screw is the right shape or something. These jobs are slowly getting automated but it's not like no one would do them if they are available.
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I guess most of these jobs don’t allow for music or YouTube to be used during work?
I’m just thinking that people already spend a lot of time just consuming content, so if it were possible to watch YouTube while at the factory, maybe it wouldn’t be as unpopular.
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If they're losing employees, then they must not have that much higher pay or better benefits for it to be worth it to work there. I don't think you can easily blame it on the job being monotonous...
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I don't mean for this to be as pointed as it probably will come off - but do you allow these workers to listen to music, take regular (not smoke) breaks, and do their job from a chair?
The few factory jobs I've seen were not only monotonous, they were needlessly soul crushing.
For no reason at all, you had to stand for hours on end. Your only breaks were lunch and smokes. Bathroom breaks were monitored like a crime. And you were afforded no distractions from the task, 100% focus required.
Coupled with no care put into making someone feel actually appreciated and the end-products being MBA shrinkflated garbage nobody could be proud of, it's not shocking that no one in their right mind would want to work there.
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Sorry but whenever I hear employers say "much better pay/benefits compared to the competition", the reality is in 99.9% of cases that it's a negligible difference for work that is harder and much less desirable.
How much higher is the pay? Cause the first thing that crosses into my mind is oil rigs, where they get paid more than many software engineers I know do, and there's a huge number of people doing the work happily despite the gruelling conditions. I realize not every business can pay Big Oil salaries, but still, it might be worth thinking realistically about whether your pay & benefits really are better than Walmart's (who are the number 1 employer in the states AFAIR, so they must be doing something right).
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> The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
I'm SUPER doubtful of this.
When I last bumped into this, the local Amazon warehouse paid more than all the local manufacturing. It wasn't even close.
Local manufacturing got used to being a local monopoly and being able to underpay. Now that they're not a monopoly, all they do is whine and complain.
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Should hire us autists and allow us to program via voice commands and augmented reality.. i would love something almost automate-able while doing something that also needs higher brain functions.
The problem is opportunity cost
Of what?
Of getting on disability (back pain)
And getting more (from the govt.) to sit at home and cook up conspiracy theories on the Internet
[flagged]
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> 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 nightmare to work for.
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Obviously, the “higher pay and significantly better benefits” are not actually significantly better. I’d rather we address that than just exploit some other workers overseas where they’re out of sight, out of mind. Honestly, it seems like tariffs on imported goods would be the way around this, but also, we need to be sure that money is going to the people doing the work, not just the owners.
Speaking of which, I don’t really know your business, but a post starting with “my family owns a business” and ending with “we lose workers to Walmart even though we pay them more” (with no specificity as to how much more)…. This really comes off like a problem with the business itself, not the overall market.
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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.
1. Ok then what do you make? 2. A bit too late for that given that China is also highly automated. 3. You would have to be serious for this to work.
As for your responses. 1 who is "us" 3. I mean some would be automated etc. There is actually data on how little the cost of labor adds to different parts of manufacturing. 2. You at least have a sustainable economy (I dont mean that in an environmental sense)
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US manufacturing keeps going up in dollar terms (see first graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...)
but employs less people as it automates.
# 3 is not a solution because it will only make American production more expensive and impoverish the population. It's a full disaster.
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I used to work in such a factory in Germany and turn-over was high :) A large pool of uni students doing their summer breaks propped up the place. They could afford to work there for 1-2 months mentally because they knew they'd go back to university (me, too). The few long-timers on the factory floor were mostly functioning alcoholics.
This was a family owned biz? Somehow, I imagine, I'd feel better slogging for an SME than in an "externally-funded" place.
I'm guessing that US needs a similar nation-wide service to connect gig-workers of all sorts to factories specifically.
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Let’s do the easy thing, even if it is a geopolitical disaster for the West?
i get what you're saying, and i'd probably quickly hate it too, but somehow industrial bakeries seem to still work this way
The slight problem with how AI is currently being marketed is that AI is going for the fun and creative jobs that people want to do, not the dull and repetitive jobs that nobody wants to do.
If every creative job is gone to the AI beast then there will be people willing to do factory work since nothing else will be available.
What's the point of GenAI in a manufacturing pipeline? Good ol' ML based AI automation is heavily used in larger manufacturing plants to identify defects
Rubbish. Ai has been used for many years in factories and modern AI will be even more useful. The issue is that most people aren't going to be the target of this sort of AI advertising and also that this takes longer than making a chat bot
Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, has been visiting factories in China.[1]
"Ford CEO Jim Farley said Chinese cars have "far superior" technology, lower costs and great quality."
Ford is working on fixing this and getting a $30,000 EV out the door.[2]
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/764318/ford-ceo-china-evs-humbled...
[2] https://archive.is/kUbEW
Very different tact from GM, it seems
https://www.ft.com/content/096e883a-7dea-48a9-bbb3-72f4e79e7...
Ironically green energy, EVs, etc is probably one of the best blue collar investments the country could make right now
Industries in the US are at an inflection point, with govt / global market giving conflicting signals. For example car manufacturers need to decide whether to invest in EVs, which is a huge capital investment they won't see return on for maybe a decade. If they dont invest, they won't be relevant outside the few markets clinging religiously to ICEs
Do you layout a billion dollars to try to stay relevant outside the US? Or stick to reliable, if soon shrinking, domestic internal combustion engine business model?[1]
Contrast this with AI where signals are unambiguous from government and investors.
1 - As an example, this $1.6B charge GM is taking https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-14/gm-to-tak...
>"Ironically green energy, EVs, etc is probably one of the best blue collar investments the country could make right now"
People have been saying this for 20 years, and it seems plausible, but it hasn't really worked out (so far).
The article is implying throughout that these two things are mutually exclusive, and while that makes some intuitive sense (only so much money to invest after all), the last chart [1] doesn't give any indication that data center investment comes at the expense of industrial investment.
[1] "Private sector spending on equipment, adjusted for inflation"
I'll admit I have not read this article incredibly thoroughly, but I don't see what you're claiming. The article is contrasting the growth of the AI industry with the slump in manufacturing. I don't think it's positing any causal link between the two.
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 go to conventional war, and since the US is a nuclear superpower it's never going to get into an existential boots-on-the-ground Serious War again unless it just wants to cosplay. Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant.
So: it took decades to burn the boats with manufacturing, and trying to rebuild them in a few years is a hilarious folly. It absolutely will not go anywhere, and honestly shouldn't anyway. There is real danger, however, that the US burns the boats on the carefully crafted service sector as well.
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. Sometimes mind-numbingly repetitive work. This work sucks! And we should be happy that as a country we managed to transition our economy away from depending on this kind of work! Why on earth are we trying to bring it back?
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.
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Manufacturing jobs are mostly unionized and service jobs aren't.
Americans actually want unions back, but because anti-union propaganda is so prevalent, they confused themselves into thinking they want manufacturing jobs back
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>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.
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Back then a couple could buy a house and raise a few kids on the paycheck that factory job of the husband's earned. These days even someone with a 6 figure tech job has trouble with that goal, but I think a lot of people think they can go back to the good old days.
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It isn't the jobs, its the economic power of having unions that people really want.
National security
> 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 small detachment plants a flag on Little Diomede Island? When they capture Attu Island? When they land troops on Hawaii? When they declare war? When they are walking in San Francisco? When they capture Salt Lake City? When they are 15 minutes away from the missile fields? When DC falls?
What do you imagine the world is going to look like afterwards? If you fired too soon, how are you going to stop the revolution breaking out after you've killed hundreds of millions of innocent people? If you fired too late, why bother? The country is lost already, surely you're not going to nuke yourself?
Besides, that's assuming the existential war happens in the US itself. The US isn't self-reliant, and it will never be. Are you going to nuke any country refusing to sell critical materials to the US? Sure, the US has started wars in the Middle-East for oil before, but nukes?
The other comment said "for survival." But yeah there are still nuclear powers fighting conventional wars, or posturing against each other with conventional weapons.
> So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet?
Russia is not fighting for their survival in Ukraine, even though Ukraine is.
Russia doesn't need to use nukes for that.
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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.
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A service economy is an utopia or a scam if you wish. You don't have to be a conservative to understand this. That being said, maybe you shouldn't burn bridges with the biggest producer in the world when you're trying to be a "service economy".
That's the big issue, the US needs to understand they can't force the world to do things forever because there is a dependency that cannot be broken anymore. The time when this decoupling was possible is over, from now on only diplomacy can work.
"Services" are actually fake and it turns out you need to be able to make things to survive. Not for ROI or for trade deficits, but because the world manufacturer sets the rules.
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 number of high paying, high skills jobs or the number of relatively low skill, dangerous manufacturing jobs, why wouldn't we choose the former?
It's about leverage, which you mentioned.
If you have no leverage during a negotiation and your counterpart has can say 'no' without having to give up anything then you're screwed.
America doesn't have to be the best manufacturers, but we do need to have the ability to say, "fuck it we'll build it ourselves" when the other side of the table says something we don't like.
And anyone living in the fantasy utopia where the whole world agrees on everything and there's peace all the time... read more history.
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Global supply chains seem to be gradually breaking down due to a mix of politics, demographics, and armed conflicts. Everyone has become accustomed to the post-WWII system of global free trade but historically it is an aberration and everything will eventually revert to the mean. I wouldn't be surprised if China disintegrates into another civil war within the next few decades. We can't necessarily rely on foreign countries to make stuff for us anymore so if we want to have stuff we might have to make it ourselves.
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The crazy thing is, due to coordinated propaganda campaigns, people don't realize that the Biden administration got people to invest in US factories at an unprecedented rate. Trump's already managed to scare off a lot of that investment, presumably because he wants to protect the trade deficit.
Here's a graph of actual private investment money going into factories in the US since 1950. It proves my point:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RC1Q027SBEA
I guess the tariffs are serving some other purpose, like forcing foreign governments to bribe him under-the-counter(?) That'd explain his rapid increase in net worth since taking office.
Biden was a relatively mediocre president (which I sure miss), but his administration was amazing for America. They laid the foundation for long-term prosperity, which is entirely squandered now. Such a shame.
> unless it just wants to cosplay
Do not underestimate this as a real population.
Thank you, absolutely agree.
>Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money
sure in the sense in which operating an airline or high speed rail network makes you less money than running an ad or porn website but the world doesn't run on money, it runs on infrastructure. I believe we have a term for civilizations that value money over power, we call them decadent.
If you're content living in Mark Zuckerberg's slop metaverse that's a possible route to go down but it's important to understand that the world will belong to countries that focus on what powers that entertainment dystopia, and the US has some competitors who have the good sense to understand that the material world matters.
> operating an airline or high speed rail network makes you less money than running an ad or porn website
Airlines and high speed rail systems are also services. Heck, even Tesla's real value isn't in manufacturing, it's in the (delusional, but nonetheless) belief that they're going to make an absolute killing on services at some point in the future. They could probably sell off their manufacturing arm and their stock price would increase.
> The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean other than individual rich people started outsourcing labor to poor countries because they were allowed to import the products of that labor back into the country cheaply.
> Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services.
This is just nonsense. The trade deficit includes services, and grows a negative balance of payments that has been growing for 50 years. It would be different if that money were used for investment, but that money was just given to the wealthy. Reversing the trade deficit will not be enough. It's not that the government is debt-ridden, it's that the nation is debt-ridden. We're borrowing foreign cash to buy foreign imports. All we have left is to sell off land, buildings, and exclusive franchises.
But that's populist. As in the population that won't just be able to move to a country that isn't broken.
I mean, every single part of this is wrong, and there's nothing in it that resembles an economic argument. We need to bring manufacturing to the US because we need to produce something in order to be paid. We have no advantage in services, we only pretend to have one because we have wealthy people who import talent and who are themselves immigrants. We are not only not working, but are badly educated. I have no idea why you think that the world will continue to feed America for free, forever. What we're doing is selling the furniture and the fixtures, and pretending like everything is just fine.
And the people who inherited the furniture and the fixtures are like, yup, nothing's wrong.
The U.S. is still a leader in agricultural, although that’s heavily dependent on oil and cheap oil. Note that a place like Brazil is also a leader in ag… and one of the reasons they got to that position was through heavy protectionism to develop their own industries.
I am perturbed by the power consumption of these behemoths causing high market prices for everyone.
We've been through this before; "history may not repeat itself but it certainly rhymes":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CottonopolisCropped.jpg
Quite the contrary to the points made in some of the comments mentioning that China is far ahead in applying automation tools/workflows in factories, which then shaped the competitive benifits in manufacture industries.
No, it's not.
It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to involve because of the involving needs for newer/better products.
It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources, it is the growing needs from the comsumers that require products to have newer/more functionality even if it has shorter lifetime, or event 'better', the product is looking for growth so they are designed to be short lifetime so the manufacturer and the customer both willing to upgrade in the future.
Excuse my language/grammer.
> It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to involve because of the involving needs for newer/better products.
Isn't the requirements set by the company outsourcing to China? Because as far as I can tell in China you can produce with all ranges of quality so it feels a bit too simplistic to blame "planned obsolescence" to China alone as the whole chain profits from it (besides the end-user of-course).
This feel true 15 years ago, but now everything is from China, both lower, mid and higher end market.
> It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources
Can you name a few items that you feel that way?
My impression as a consumer is that everything comes from China nowadays, even the reliable brands. The main difference I think is the time spend around product design and fine tuning the manufacturer's process. Think about it, there's a reason why they have to make it very visible that the product is "designed with love in colorado" when all the manufacturing jobs are in China.
Here in the west it is common sense that between products made in China and in the West the main difference is that the later category barely exists and if it does it comes at mostly unaffordable prices.
If you are as far ahead in manufacturing as China is, of course you can dictate the terms of competition and they want to increase consumption. I have zero doubt that this is anything but a deliberate choice, which could be altered by Chinese manufacturers if wanted to.
The myth of incompetent Chinese engineering and manufacturing is just that. And believing in it puts you in a dangerous place, where some day some Chinese company can do everything you can for half the price, which has happened again and again.
US manufacturing hit an all time high of 2.9 trillion dollars in 2024, and is up year over year. Yeah totally failing.
According to Google:
"Slower growth: Despite the record output, some analyses reported that the overall growth of U.S. manufacturing output was modest, at just 1% in 2024. This reflected a lag between announced investments and new operational capacity coming online."
So record output, but practically zero growth.
So far, the ROI has been much lower than expected. The hype certainly attracted a ton of investment, but aside from some code generation and summarization, I’ve yet to see any meaningful yield.
The narrative claims that AI will make everyone far more productive, but in reality, I see people working harder than ever and burning out while maintaining this slop in production.
AI search and summarization have been a flop, and most people I know hate them. LLMs are undoubtedly useful, but despite all the supposed productivity gains, I’m not seeing any measurable impact. I used to spend hours reviewing human-written PRs, and now I spend even more time because of lazy AI-generated garbage creeping into the codebase.
Some AI parrots will say, “Oh, I never push code I don’t understand,” but that doesn’t stop others from doing it, and now you have to be extra vigilant during PR reviews.
The gist is that everyone claims to be more productive, but the numbers say otherwise. Even so, LLMs are genuinely useful, just not nearly as much as the investment would suggest.
Well at least energy infrastructure is useful for both data centers and factories.
My guess is that investors expect AI to automate manufacturing, and are waiting to see where that tech goes before spending a ton of capital on soon-to-be-obsolete machinery.
It's a strange bet because if AI can take over manufacturing, it will take over almost everything else and this will cause a complete overhaul of how we think about our economy.
But for 20 sweet minutes just before the entire thing collapses, someone will get crowned the winner
Just a friendly reminder: The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Of course he doesn't want people to think that tariffs can bring back middle class manufacturing jobs, and naturally he would want to publish propaganda intended to demoralize pro-labor causes like import tariffs and worker protection laws.
I'm not saying he's wrong just yet, I'm just pointing out that he owns a propaganda mouthpiece and is willing to lie on a grandiose scale to protect his business interests.
It's intriguing to me how people assumed that Bezos would never interfere with WaPo and then he did.
"We superior Westerners with our moral billionaires would never... Hey! What're you doing!"
When the ship is sinking the captain has to intervene
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also a literal gold rush
underrated observation
> down 38,000 jobs since the start of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics
That's 0.3%.
You can show any number in isolation and it can mean anything.
Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job gains/losses!
The reason the percentage was included was to take the number out of isolation. What can mean anything is when people tell you to ignore the numbers, because they could mean anything.
> Now try presenting it the distribution of typical job gains/losses!
You first!
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Feels like Milton from Office Space: I was told there would be a manufacturing boom.
There might have been. Labor in manufacturing is way down - a trend going back to the 1950s. However manufacturing in the US has been booming all along. What used to take 2000 people in manufacturing now takes less than 200.
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down is down
Hardly a boom.
They are now open about it. Musk tweets about a new company Macrohard, which does not manufacture itself (https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1977281341264740625#m):
"Our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but will be able to do so indirectly, much like Apple has other companies manufacture their phones."
In other words, we are a knowledge economy and outsource like it's the 1990s with a bit of "AI" fantasies thrown in. The crash cannot come soon enough.
In other words, a middleman trying to extract big markups, which seems to be a lot of businesses these days (like W09 AirBNB).
They orchestrate partners!
This is eerily similar to the Enron business model... @.@
We use AI to help manufacturers run their OT system more effectively. We don't see employment rising in this sector but do see output increases.
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.
I mean it kind of makes sense if you squint. Over the past 20-40yr regulatory (often public, but also often private) developments have created an insane amount of value non-producing paper pushing busy work. A man who supplies bent steel troughs to a company that outfits food producing factories spends infinitely more time on overhead paper pushing than he did 20yr ago (pulling this example out of my own friend group). What we need isn't more stuff. What we need is cheaper clerical labor to cut through the BS mountain we've built for ourselves enabling us to spend more time doing the things that produce value.
So funding research education and renewable energy would be the move as a country right .... ?
What's worrying is that this "AI gold rush" feels eerily similar to past tech bubbles: lots of capital, lots of hype, and unclear long-term value
AI labor fixes this.
Do we even have people to work in the factories? I know a guy who started as a worker and is now a plant manager and he says their biggest problem is finding qualified people (high school or equivalent) that are willing to show up every day. Many get their first check and then suddenly stop showing up and then return 2 or 3 weeks later looking for work.
A lot of younger people it seems like value flexibility over higher pay. They’d rather work casual jobs that are dead ends. At the factory you start with a decent wage and benefits and within a year you’re promoted and salary increases noticeably. If you can put 5 responsible years in you’re certainly recruited to the management development path. These skills are highly transferable between companies.
Instead of blaming the workers, they should figure out how to make workers want to show up and find out the incentives they need.
Here’s a start: daily pay (there are a bunch of fintechs out there that will do this for you). My buddy who does construction does this. It filters out people who need a quick fix of cash on day 1 instead of wasting two weeks on them.
View labour unions as a friend, not an enemy, who will figure out where to get more workers and how to keep them willing to show up to the job.
Pretty weird that our society doesn't want immigrants if we could use more workers.
Well... sure. Capitalists are looking for the best rate of return when they deploy their investments, they're looking at the money to be made financing datacenters vs other things, datacenters are winning.
Instead of industrial base for national security priority, Americans are served extra slop with a side of spammy content once these AI are done ingesting.
It all drives ads
All we're doing is building platforms for ads, pits for advertisers to pitch dollars, nothing is getting made, all it does is drive consumerism. Google, Meta, Amazon, aside from now NVidia the whole economy is increasingly built around selling slop that we decreasingly know how to make anymore.
I actually think infrastructure and competence in AI is going to be huge for national security in a a few years.
Basically, I think future wars will be fought with AI drone swarms. If your AI is crappy, then your drones will suck and you'll lose the war.
It's true that today's use cases are about AI slop content. Then again, a lot of modern internet technology was spear-headed by porn sites.
"we're all pursuing Ai to prepare ww3" isn't the argument you think it is
Hallucinating "AI" is going to take friendly fire to a whole new level.
And AI does not create anything, compared to factories.
Manufacturing was hard to do 2 decades ago, and is harder now.
I started, grew, and exited a modern manufacturing-based business, and I can confirm that almost everything about modern capitalism in this cycle is biased -against- any business that manufactures in 1st world economies. The business, Spoonflower, was and is an innovative marketplace of textile design, mated to on-demand manufacture, and had factories in Durham NC and Berlin Germany.
Three factors made this very difficult:
-- raising funding or debt to support old-fashioned capital equipment. Building factories was once the backbone of the US economy but is now pretty close to impossible for an entrepreneur. Raising money to write software is straightforward and well understood. Raising money to purchase industrial equipment the size of a city bus is not what our startup economy is optimized for, or even understands or has models for. Confusion about this is nearly universal.
-- operating a labor-intensive (anything where the largest component of cost is the labor component) manufactory. As others have noted, making stuff is physically demanding. Some people love hard work, but culturally this is rare. If you are crazy successful, the reward is another shift of harder, potentially more efficient work.
-- exiting investors / providing ROI. Our business fit in two categories: creative digital marketplaces (Ebay, Etsy...) valued at 4-6x revenue, or makers like Cimpress or Shutterfly at .5 to 1x revenue. Who buys factories.... even really interesting ones? The short answer: only those that already own factories. When you have a very short list of potential acquisitors, its hard to create an auction market for your equity.
In general, we did okay. But every step from launch to growth to exit felt very much like swimming into a strong current. The same very hard working and resourceful group of colleagues could have done anything. I'm proud of the work, but a lot of that pride is sheer contrariness at having executed on something so unlikely and having survived.
This would be much harder now.
Sourcing is harder. Friends working in the space now rely on a global sourcing network just as we did, that is in utter disarray. Operating on thin margins with a factory that must be fed raw materials to make money is terrifying on a normal day. These days the threat to supply chains is existential.
Launching consumer brands is harder. As has been widely noted, access to the top of the funnel has now been fully monetized (or fully enshittified) by Google, Facebook etc, and because of AI, that funnel now shrinks. Something will break loose here, but nothing has yet.
A post-pandemic employment environment is even more difficult for manufacturers. I think it is safe to say that demand for jobs that require 8-12 hours of physically demanding work surrounded by colleagues and industrial machinery is at an all time low.
I spent 15 years in service to a vision of domestic making, and while we were not defeated, I understand deeply the uphill battle any manufacturing entrepreneur faces.
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 line.
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 manufacturing at scale is that you want a person or machine that follows a tiny instruction set (at least in comparison to the potential flexibilities of an LLM) and nails the execution every time. This seems to me like the complete opposite of the strengths of an AI system like the ones that Wall Street are cheering.
I've heard that the general transformer architecture (not specifically LLMs, which imply a language model, but applied to sensory perceptions and outputting motor commands) has actually been fairly successful when applied to robotics. You want your overall assembly line to have a tiny, repeatable instruction set, but inside each of those individual instructions is oftentimes a complex motion that's very dependent upon chaotic physical realities. Think of being able to orient a part or deal with a stuck bolt, for example. AI Transformers potentially would allow us to replace several steps in the assembly that currently require human workers with robots, and that in turn makes the rest of the assembly much more reproducible (and cheaper).
Training these models takes a bunch more time, because you first need to build special hardware that allows a human to do these motions while having a computer record all the sensor inputs and outputs, and then you need to have the human do them a few thousand times, while LLMs just scrape all the content on the Internet. But it's potentially a lot more impactful, because it allows robots to impact the physical world and not just the printed word.
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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 you could get around those constraints.
The video models are the ones that seem to be attracting the most attention in this area as it seems do similar to sight recognition.
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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 to do.
The more we can bring down all the difficulty of all these processes, the more we can accelerate manufacturing locally.
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That's not how the LLMs should be used in manufacturing. It is still the current assembly lines robots that will do that. LLMs can be used by the humans who design the automation workflow, as coding assistants. That can lower the breakeven number of items that can be automated. Maybe if today it only makes sense to automate the manufacturing of a widget only if you can sell more than 100000 of those widgets, then with LLM assistance that number can be reduced to 1000. Whenever you have a 10x improvement of something, there's scope for a mini-revolution to happen.
I'm not even clear on what people mean when they say 'AI' anymore
This is why I don't like the term "AI". Because it leads to people thinking that ChatGPT is somehow relevant to the field of robotics.
To some, this is a feature of the term, not a bug.
Journalists keep conflating LLMs with AI. You don't use an entire DC with its own power plant to keep a line of robotic welders online and working.
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.
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Someone has to run the robots. And i bet it's not going to be the educated but spoiled workforce of the developed western world, but that will be outsourced to offshore destinations.
I think there's something cultural about wanting office jobs related to power over people, where you can always slack instead of waking up every day at 8 to go to the factory
Right. There is no reason why "AI-enabled" factories would be built in countries that struggle to build and run normal factories, and where the cost of materials is high.
> 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.
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we're talking about what really matters here, the investors
This is assuming that "AI" isn't already being used extensively on manufacturing lines. Computer Vision has used "AI" neural networks for years for various tasks. The issue is that it is a lot of investment to implement automated assembly and there are still enough places in the world where labour is cheap enough to make it not worth it. As I said to one of my suppliers recently when they asked how their factory compared to others, "Automation is nice to have, but at the end of the day I'm choosing a vendor based on who can get me the product cheapest, quickest, and with high quality."
China has been building robots and robotic manufacturing without AI. So why AI? Because the AI is a grift for those who can get exposure to its potential gains during the exuberance, while China builds actual capabilities. Profits and fiat are shared delusions, monetarily speaking, robots and factories are real, and will build real things.
Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified - https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec... - August 28th, 2024
> Now covering 64 critical technologies and crucial fields spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas, the Tech Tracker’s dataset has been expanded and updated from five years of data (previously, 2018–2022) to 21 years of data (2003–2023). These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.
AI isn't directly a grift, however it's going to be backstopped by the president, and top investors know, so market discipline is out the window. Robotics is the thing that will let China dump money into AI sustainably (in addition to their energy supremacy). That was the point of AI is Too Big to Fail.
What if it contributes to an evisceration of the middle class, instead? Hiring for new grads is already dead because of it, and it's not going to be coming back.
It's having the same sort of impact as unlimited immigration, except that in this case, the workers don't need weekends, or pay taxes.
Hiring new grads is dead because companies are cutting their spending while they wait to see how Trump's erratic behavior shakes out and for interest rates to drop.
AI is making almost no difference in hiring at all.
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EDIT: To the idiots downvoting: Why?
The US is committing economic suicide, based on a misguided belief in something that'll never happen.
The new superpowers will be the EU, which was smart enough not to make the same gamble, and China, which will structurally survive it.
zero growth in the eu in 2 decades, meanwhile the US powered on ahead. I'm all for optimism, but only realism matters. Hopefully the US has a manufacturing revival for the sake of working class folk, but that isn't so relevant to its growth since services/product aren't antithetic.
EU regs will ensure that never happens
EU regs will ensure that happens. They are a power projection tool. We've bent Apple to our will, we've made the whole world follow GDPR.
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America will get what it deserves soon enough.
The AI crash will be a catalyst for general instability and chaos with a fascist at the helm.
Whoever gets AGI first owns the future though, any GDP put into manufacturing not essential to that goal is a geopolitical opportunity cost
It really shows how desperate some people are, sacrificing everything, present and future, in the quest of a digital god that might not even exist.
Why is that the case?
If a company gets to AGI a month later, why does that matter so much?
We’re not talking super intelligence here, just human level intelligence.
OpenAI was first to ChatGPT yet other companies are still in the game.
My argument is based on
1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on
2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job)
3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so due to a mix of architectural tricks that can be applied to any general-purpose model, including chip design, tactical intelligence, persuasion, beating the stock market, etc
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The argument is something like AGI or its owner wouldn't want other AGIs to exist. So it would destroy the capabilities of other AGI before it could evolve(by things like hacking, manipulation etc.).
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Even assuming that's the case, everyone's acting like throwing more GPUs at the problem is somehow gonna get them to AGI
Far more is being done than simply throwing more GPU's at the problem.
GPT-5 required less compute to train than GPT-4.5. Data, RL, architectural improvements, etc. all contribute to the rate of improvement we're seeing now.
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I have seen no credible explanation on how current or proposed technology can possibly achieve AGI.
If you want to hand-wave that away by stating that any company with technology capable of achieving AGI would guard it as the most valuable trade secret in history, then fine. Even if we assume that AGI-capable technology exists in secret somewhere, I've seen no credible explanation from any organization on how they plan to control an AGI and reliably convince it to produce useful work (rather than the AGI just turning into a real-life SHODAN). An uncontrollable AGI would be, at best, functionally useless.
AGI is --- and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be --- science fiction.
We have an AI promoter here. AGI isn't the future of anything right now. It could be. But so could a lot of things, like vaccine research (we're making promising development on HIV and cancer). Try saying those people would own the future in the 1980s-1990s. Sure, that'd be an obvious outcome, but it wasn't on the horizon for the people in the field at the time (unless your family owned the company).
Even if you could cure cancer or HIV with a vaccine it would have a relatively negligible impact compared to AGI.
There are far more signals that AGI is going to be achieved by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the next 5-10 years than there were of any other hyped breakthrough in the past 100 years that ultimately never came to fruition. Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen, but to ignore the multitude of trends which show no signs of stopping, it seems naive in Anno Domani 2025 to discount it as a likely possibility.
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Thats a nice assertion, but do you have any facts?
There is no proof "AGI" is a real thing. Any GDP put towards that goal is a huge gamble and the US is all-in, with potentially ruinous results.
Whoever gets AGI first will just be another biobattery to power the matrix.
Even AI can be used as "a factory" by creating code or workflows/automation that will create value long after the generation. Instead, most users treat them like generic chat bots and/or highly inefficient interfaces to machines.
Using LLMs to generate texts for inefficient communication (to other humans or machines) is just so wrong.