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.
> What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools
My students are shocked (horrified?) to learn that they're basically running 50-yr old Fortran code when they use scipy.minimize to train their fancy little neural nets.
I always chuckle at how Python became the dominant language for AI / ML / data science etc but wonder why it is that Fortran and Python became the golden combo, it could have been done with any other language, no complaints, I love Python, but its just amusing to me.
For Fortran, I have the concept of 'immortal code' - code that is generally hard to write, is compatible with everything, and implements an algorithm in a way that's impossible to improve on - or at least doing so would be celebrated as a minor breakthrough.
A lot of numerical optimization code is this - it conforms to a strict 'C' ABI - taking (arrays of) simple floats and ints and outputting the same, so binding it to another higher level language is trivial, so rewriting it makes little sense. If the same algorithm were written in Java, most people would not want to bring in Java as a dependency for their Python/C++/whatever project, but since this is just a tiny C object file, it's happily integrated into everything.
They also tend to be very tricky to get right, I remember reading a paper where the author was adamant that changing the order of a multiply and an add (a mathematically invariant operation) would cause the algorithm to blow up due to the different scales of floating point values involved causing a major loss of precision. I'm sure there's tons of stories like this.
This is the sort of code which took PhD's who studied this exact topic years to get right, even though the actual code often looks unassuming, I would dread the day when I was required to touch it (but I never do - since it always does what it says on the tin)
It's really just that it's a pretty easy language to learn that finds a good balance between structure and brevity. It has very good support for the data structures you need and libraries for everything. A lot of people love the language and that built up a lot of momentum and eventually people started adding stuff like numpy and scipy and pandas and before long you had this giant scientific computing environment that almost anyone can get into.
I tried out most of the scripting languages out there (Ruby, Perl, Tcl, Groovy, R, and many more) and Python just seemed to click more and it has a whole lot less to worry about upfront than languages like C# and Java. In comparison to languages like C and C++, it's a godsend for those with typical automation needs.
In my eyes it seems like a pretty straightforward development. There have been plenty of other tools that may have made sense throughout history too. Matlab could have done this, but by that time nobody was going to build out massive libraries for something expensive and partly closed off.
It’s really a story of pragmatism and momentum while FORTRAN (and other math-related languages) were the first to come into existence, Python came along as the perfect “glue” language as it is more widely regarded, taught, readable, flexible, and easy to wrap around these legacy language's powerful functions.
Fortran has been a research language used by people like physicists and mathematicians that know what they're doing and have been developing that tool for decades and Python is perfect for people who have no idea what they're doing.
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 remember the Sun monitors (21" I think) were about 80 lbs. I've read that part of that was a metal frame to hold all of the wires in front of the screen.
They were fun monitors - we had a lab full of them, they would degauss on startup, and the degausser would induct into the monitor next to it (and a little bit into the monitor after that).
The weight from a CRT is mostly about the amount of glass required to keep the atmosphere out, as it's essentially a vacuum bottle with better marketing. On that 21" display, you've got about 6000 pounds of force trying to push the face inward, not to mention the sides, neck, etc.
Right. Bought two out of a University lab and lived in an apartment six stories high with only stairs. Moved out those monitors even and they were more difficult to get down than the couch...
Don't let me get started about fixed frequency, X11 modeline guessing (wrong of course) and needing a second monitor to even get back to the original config.
That article is being disingenuous and wrong. It's comparing the lightest possible Civic configuration with the heaviest possible Accord of a different body type.
The 2000 Accord sedan is 2,712lbs, not 2,987lbs (which would be the wagon).
The 2019 Civic sedan is 2,743–2,923lbs depending on equipment/trim.
So yes, the Civic compared to an older car of similar size did get heavier.
The Miata proves that cars don't have to be heavier, but the Miata also took advantage of much more aluminum compared to the older models. Maybe mainstream cars should also switch to use more aluminum to keep weight down, and you're right that the reason they don't is because oil is cheap enough where weight isn't a priority enough to use more expensive aluminum instead of steel.
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.
Every software company I've worked at that is more than 5 years old had major features that nobody understood anymore, even features that were core to the product.
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 think it is not always about an age gap. A friend has a distribution company with many trucks and many times they need to use a manual machine, and soldering for fixing truck issues.
> 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.
> You can hire way more developers with battle tested tooling, than some bleeding edge thing you don't know if it can even scale.
There's a crucial difference!
You can hire expensive developers on battle tested tooling... or you can hire a shit ton of juniors that want to work on $BUZZWORD for cheap in exchange for the CV creds of "worked on $BUZZWORD".
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.
That's pretty much what I told the student, along with "everything you're studying in every other class is also older than your dad, and that's why you study it."
A shockingly rare question to be asked. As best as I can tell, the biggest threat to civilization isn't AI, it's our culture of "that's not my problem" leaving otherwise patch-able holes in critical systems.
The biggest threat to civilization is, in fact, AI. It's a new problem, and one with an utterly ridiculous lethality at its limit. It makes the atomic bomb look benign.
"That's not my problem" is something humans have been dealing with since before they mastered the art of sharpening a stick.
Exactly: the new process becomes the lowest bid, new NRE goes forward, and the old process finally gets to drift off into the sunset. It happens all the time and people (sometimes the same people) complain about that too.
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)
I was recently talking to the head clockmaker at the Chelsea Clock Company, one of the very few, if not the only, remaining original New England clock companies still operating. He showed me some pictures of clock making tools being used during WWII, and then the very same tools in perfect shape still being used today. He also had one tool that dated back to when they were the Boston Clock Company (circa 1894) that was still in active use. In this new world of disposable tools, it was pretty neat to see.
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.
How do you end up with 10-15 years? China is almost perfectly vertically integrated from raw materials to highly advanced finished products. Their industrialization started in the 70s. Getting to that level would require a lot of planning as well as the kind of hard constraints imposed on China through embargo.
We're not even getting back to that level, we've never reached iPhone level of manufacturing in the US or Europe.
It was not linear growth. The 70s and 80s were essentially write-offs. Things began to move in the mid-1990s and it has been a continual evolution and process over the last 30 years. Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping's teams all did wildly different things for China. The vertical integration you mention was basically non-existent prior to 2020, it came about as part of the New Development Pattern (新发展格局) for the Inner Loop (国内双循环)
China today is virtually unrecognizable compared to even 10 years ago, though.
bollocks. there is profound unity and direction in US leadership, and has been for years -- it's all written by the Heritage Foundation and funded by a few oil and tech billionaires.
it's been like that since before George W Bush was lock-step with Fox News and a GOP led Congress.
the only difference is in 2025 the billionaires funding these things are as foreign as they are domistic
Citation very much needed ;) Even our current voting systems are far from being the best we can come up with in term of fairness. The population most certainly wants to remain in an environment humans can comfortably live in, somehow that's not what our democracies are selecting for these days.
In fairness while people do obviously want them they also want all the current conveniences of modern life and more. Completely off the cuff but I'm pretty sure the sum of those desires vastly dwarfs concern over longer term environmental effects. Essentially I think the average joe prioritizes their job and lifestyle over nagging climate concerns just like the gov does.
I don't know what kind of citation you expect. It's clear that political participation was never more direct and organized than now in the age of social media. The fools and resentful who always were numerous have found a way to unite and bypass the establishment and educational filters which were effectively restraining politics before. All the cowards, short termists, wannabe dictators, conspiracists and anti-intellectualists who are being elected squarely and fairly represent the people who voted for them.
I'm not from the US and I'm not arguing that the current US gov wasn't elected fairly. It's not a law of physics that leaders of democracies do what the people want, they are selected by a system that was designed to estimate the preference of a population (more likely the preference of the ones who designed it). A democratic system designed differently would have a different outcome, there are good examples of what happens when the system favors consensus for instance [0][1], albeit not at the same scale.
Yet people actively decided as they did, while almost fully knowing where it leads. It could also have been worse given progressing senility, attempt to overthrow government etc. We are not in a new territory after all, just continuation. Tariffs are new mexican wall.
At least accept how your nation thinks on average, no weaseling around simple fact of today's reality.
This uh valiant defense of China misses my point entirely. People in democracies have no excuse hiding their personal responsibility behind flawed leadership.
Musk apparently stood up a brand new raw to finished goods manufacturing for Starlink kits in 2-3 years in America/Texas. Non trivial, but doable in niches at least, per a factory engineer:
"The main function of this site is to produce our standard Starlink kits. Right now, we’re producing 15,000 a day straight out of the factory.
Raw plastic palettes come in, raw aluminum comes in and we make those into the Starlink kits and ship them right out to the customer zones."
So they form the plastic (already processed) using machines they've imported, and then put pre-populated PCBs with components made in China inside them? Hardly soup to nuts manufacturing.
I've worked in a niche assembly line in North America where we populated some of the board components in-house, but they were etched in batches off-site.
This certainly is not a "raw to finished goods" plant, it's a typical Musk exaggeration.
The housing, maybe. Makes sense to produce that domestically at the volume SpaceX requires, less shipping costs because the dishes do take up volume.
But the PCB? Almost certainly not. With any luck they're making and assembling the PCB in house, but the components originate from a lot of suppliers and there are a lot of components on it [1]. Personally, I'd guess the latter, given that the PCB contains a lot of pretty novel tech [2] of which I'm certain that SpaceX wants to be able to iterate on as fast as they can, without having to wait for even a day or two for a new plane full of PCBs from China.
Wars are won or lost in 5 years, not 15. I agree that it's possible to reverse the trend, but we have to decide that we want to independently of a physical conflict, before someone else teaches us that deindustrialization is not advancement. Otherwise the lesson will come too late.
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.
Tell that to the people who lost FOGBANK, or rather, the knowledge and most importantly the practical experience on how to make it. Or Emmentaler cheese - the one with the bubbles. Turns out, you need something only discovered when someone noticed the bubbles began to vanish... small contaminations from microscopic hay particles [1] that went away when manufacturing switched to fully sealed vats.
There is always, always undocumented steps and unknown implicit assumptions involved in any manufacturing process. No matter how good the documentation is, you need the practical experience.
And that, in turn, is also why the US is producing so much military surplus - should there ever be a full blown war with Russia or China, or there be any other need for a massive invasion land war for whatever cause, there is a shit ton of stuff on stockpile and the production can be rapidly scaled up by experienced personnel training fresh recruits. That would be outright impossible to do if there were no experienced personnel.
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.
'brittle' here, I interpret as: not simple to restore, the knowledge to get them stood up again is brittle. A bus factor of one, to get back in SWE parlance.
If that factory burns down or a forklift crashes into the machine, it might be gone with no chance of recovery because the knowledge is gone.
It is brittle, or at least it's got a limited life. When you don't have these things, you lose the knowledge that set up the system in the first place, and you can be SOL when something breaks. I'm not saying just change things willy-nilly, but if you don't have an active process of understanding and interacting with the way that your factory is set up, you're going out of business, you just don't know when.
The ecosystems are an approximation of the people that run them. The ecosystems want to get rich quick and cash out with no regard for economic sustainability in the medium or long term because that's what the people who run them want.
This is fascinating. I really don't know much about the world you're describing, so thank you for sharing your perspective.
Don't customer needs change over time? How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.
Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're probably not making or selling very many of them. But they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock, and eventually they'll run out so they'll need to make new parts. Assuming low volume (I say this just in case I've accidentally picked the one weird thing that does sell like hotcakes), they're not going to spend any engineering time evolving that design. The input materials aren't going to stop being made. It is what it is, it does what it does, some people buy it, and so the name of the game becomes how do you make that specific thing they want with the least overhead? You use the same tooling you've used for the last 50 years. When you need a new batch of parts, you pull out that tooling, stamp out a bunch of leaves, and put the tooling away until you need it again.
There are many many manufactured items that fall into this category.
For those not familiar, Starrett has a reputation of quality. If you want the best you buy Starrett and pay the price. Often those Amazon alternatives are good enough, but often they have minor usability issues such that they are not as nice. Sometimes those Amazon alternatives are wrong in ways that matter and they can't be used at all.
> not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done.
For sure, but how do you know?
If it's only via:
> 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.
...then I worry about the efficiency of improvement. Sure, manufacturing equipment salespeople definitely are in touch with what consumers want ("Everyone is buying lamb now, buy our new breed of high-birth-rate sheep!"), but that's under the assumption that manufacturers never improve/iterate on their own processes ("Our farm is competitive because we've found that feeding sheep our special high-protein diet increases birth dates").
Rather than relying on the consumers-experimenters-manufacturers game of telephone, it seems likely to me that many manufacturing improvements have been driven by marginal tweaks/improvements made on the factory floor.
In actual engineering, one can work out the theoretical limits (strength, expansion, etc) and measure the current product's performance against the limits. A new widget-making machine or process cannot imbue widgets with physics-defying properties. Any fundamental improvements can only be made on the outside, auch as new alloys; but that would be an entirely different product, nor the one you've been selling for 40 years that your customers trust and love.
Improvement is usually done via competition. Sometimes the competition is price based, and sometimes quality based. In the best of worlds, both.
For example, there are a ton of cheap crappy woodworking tools. Think Stanley etc. They barely do the job if at all. Then there are a group of vendors like Wood River that constantly create newer tools that are much more expensive than what you find in a big box tool store. And then farther up the food chain are vendors like Lie Nielsen who craft luxury tools that are amazing to use.
This market segmentation extends to most tools; someone like Woodpecker comes up with a ton of clever tools for marking/measuring etc for woodworking, then others copy them. Oldest story in capitalism.
The manufacturing improvements in this process are non-stop. For some really good examples in consumer electronics, read "Apple in China" to see how China transformed into a power house in a relatively short amount of time.
Well, I would suggest if a thing is around that long and still does the job, it’s close enough to done. Something going missing in the pushback here is this is a physical machine shop. My grandfather was the shop foreman for a jewelry maker and he was intensely proud of the fact he was the one person on the floor who still had all his fingers. Intact. Different jobs have different ideas about good Developer Experience.
> 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.
I don't think "mucking around" is the correct perspective there.
It's hard to argue that most if not all of the recent innovations in manufacturing concern making chains more modulable, and easier and cheaper to modifywhich you could see as bringing manufacturing closer and closer to software engineering and this is probably to be even more true in the year to come.
Large scale automation using mostly wireless technology, easily reconfigurable pick-and-place machine and robot conveyor, cheap additive manufacturing, easy to use and cheap CNC machining with precision which were until recently limited to very expensive models, we are quickly getting to a point where configuring a mostly automated short run is both manageable and cost effective provided you have invested in the tooling and have the engineers able to put it in place efficiently.
I think that when people talk about bringing back manufacturing, most think Ford Model T assembly line in 1900 when the norm is quickly becoming a SpaceX-like pacing. That's basically what you are competing against in South East Asia and it sadly has far less need for an uneducated workforce than many expect.
That sounds catchy but I think it doesn't survive further inspection. People mucking around with machines and processes were rather instrumental in creating lathes, steam power, rockets, computers, looms, software, CNC-machines and all those other puzzle pieces we have available to make stuff. They are also instrumental in developing those things further.
I'm also kind of curious as to know what kind of machine shops you base this on. Most production companies, labs and even small fabricators I've seen have continued to develop and to optimize their infrastructure and processes. To take the numbers discussed here: 50 years ago, (C)NC machines, CAD and CAM were in their infancy. And that stuff certainly has changed some things in the world of fabrication.
Machine shops, and serious software shops don't fo their mucking about in prod. Any machine shop experimentation that takes fown the production line is like Google or Meta going partially or fully offline - which has happened - but is also financially painful, so they do all they can to avoid it.
I don't think it's weird, it's just a feature of their/our tools. For software people, experimentation is cheap and easy. Version control means rollbacks are easy and fast. If you do break something, completely rebuilding the application from scratch is something that happens dozens of times per day anyway. When trying a new tool, it arrives with almost no lead time and often at zero cost, so the only price is a few person-hours of work.
> 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.
> 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.
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
I find your perspective to be very software centric, and I expect many people who work in heavy industry to have a very different perspective about this.
I was on the implementation end of a considerable amount of industrial automation and technological advancement about 10 years ago. When we were on site the result of making mistakes started at the death of a team member. There were a plethora of things that could kill you horribly, falls, hazardous environment, rotating equipment, etc.
Yet we all survived overhauling processes in hundreds of plants. Working in hazardous environments isn't untenable, or even particularly difficult to do safely. In fact we worked at a much faster pace (with fewer mistakes) than corporate world I work in now.
> 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.
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
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?
I don't want to be picky, but there is still a lot of value left in "not modern" tasks, like video encoding/transcoding. If somewhere the trickle-down effect is real, then it is computing hardware. Take Hetzner's server auction. If the hardware is physically deployed and running, you just need to find appropriate payloads/customers. https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
We have a box at work for employees bring hardware in they’re getting rid of, along with hardware we’re throwing out that we don’t need anymore.
It has a pile of GPUs that are completely obsolete for any task: they use way too much power, have a large form factor that burns up a PCIe x16 slot, are loud, some need extra power cables, lack driver support on modern operating systems, and in return for all that don’t have as much power as something much better you could get for $100.
Value on eBay seems to be about $10-$15, mostly for people with a retro computing hobby or people removing semiconductor components for other purposes.
An obsolete data centre isn’t worth much either. (We have a small one made from equipment being liquidated from local data centres that have been upgraded.) The power consumption is too high and it is not set up for efficient HVAC for modern ultra high power draw workloads.
The V100 is ~8 years old and AFAIK mostly not that common anymore, but the A100 is ~5.5 years old now and is still very commonly used, it's maybe the most common HPC cluster GPU. On the consumer side, 3090s are still very popular, representing a good balance between cost, performance and efficiency (this is mostly due to 4090s and 5090s being much more expensive).
Exactly, I'm a mechanical engineer and I still have tools given to me by my machinist great uncle from WWII that are not only functional, they're identical to a new tool I'd buy today for that purpose, from the same manufacturer. This is the difference the OP was highlighting
We've also been doing machining in the modern sense for at least a hundred and fifty years. The GPU as a concept is about 30 years old, and in the modern sense much younger than that.
Innovation occurs on a sigmoid curve, we're still very early in the sigmoid for software and computer hardware, and very late in the sigmoid for machining, unless you include CNC, in which case, we're back to software and computer hardware being the new parts.
A better example would be the tape out and lifetime for semiconductor fabs, which are only about 70 years old and have lifetimes measured in the decade range.
Interesting thought but is it that the sigmoid curve can represent the developments in SW and/or HW? To reach the saturation point we need to be able to define a system up to the point where there are almost no more unknowns (variables), no? I am thinking that this probably isn't possible in the context of {SW, HW}.
Are those tools functional? Have you ever checked? I'm not sure what tools you are talking about, but likely some of them are measurement tools and they can seem to work perfect while giving the wrong measurement. Other might be cutting tools that cut, but they are a bit dull and if you don't know how to check you won't realize the cuts are not as good as new anymore (or maybe you have sharpened them and they now cut the wrong profile...). There are many ways a tool can seem functional but be wrong.
> I'm not sure what tools you are talking about, but likely some of them are measurement tools
If you don't know something for sure, it's best to not make assumptions. We're not LLMs and don't need to spit out something confidently without understanding it.
They are things like:
-Measurement tools that can be checked easily against Measurement standards (its taught as good practice to check this anyway each use)
-files
-transfer punches
-feeler gages (again, easily checked)
-bore gages
-gage pins
- 123 blocks
- on and on...
When someone says machine tools I assume it assumes the measurement tools. It doesn't have to, but you can't do much work without measuring. (unless you build to fit - which works okay but there is a reason it went obsolete 100+ years ago)
No they don't. The 3 year number came from some random person on the internet who claimed to be a Google employee and was denied by Google, as you can see on any of the articles about this claim:
> Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware utilization and service life expressed by an “unnamed source” were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize Nvidia’s technology, and do not represent our experience.
No they don't. 5-8 years is common. The source for the 3 year number is an unnamed random person claiming to be a Google engineer, and Google specifically reached out to all the journalists publishing that claim with this response.
> Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware utilization and service life expressed by an “unnamed source” were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize Nvidia’s technology, and do not represent our experience.
And you're confusing all of these terms. The "3 years" is the standard warranty and typically gets extended to 5 years (and maybe 7 or 8 depending on the vendor). This is consistent with Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, etc. servers. Nvidia GPUs on the other hand...there likely could be different terms, but idk because they are not typical purchases for 95% of the companies who make server hardware purchases.
Source - I regularly work with IT departments and review their contracts as part of diligence.
A lot of these tax codes were written when computers were outdated within a year. The turnover of computers slowed a lot in the last two decades, but the tax codes haven’t changed.
> 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 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
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.
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.
> There’s no economic sense to build a factory in the states…
That isn't how it works. Details matter.
A local factory can save a ton of money because it can be more just in time - you don't have to build excess because of shipping times. (shipping costs can also save a lot of money for a local factory).
The states have lots of cheap reliable power (not perfectly reliable, but close enough). If your production line is mostly automated (or could be) the states are cheaper - there isn't much labor anyway.
Production close to engineering makes for a lot of savings because when a part is designed you can get a prototype to testing faster.
there are lots of other factors, and most are not in the favor of local production but there are several that are. Where you fall is an optimization problem and there is no one right answer for everything.
> The states have lots of cheap reliable power (not perfectly reliable, but close enough).
Industrial electricity rates are pretty much the same in China and the US, from 8-9c/kWh. In both countries, however, electricity is going to face upward price pressure from AI datacenters.
> Production close to engineering makes for a lot of savings because when a part is designed you can get a prototype to testing faster.
This already exists in the US. In California, for example, there are many specialty prototype manufacturing companies that focus on this problem specifically. They are adjacent to the r&d firms designing the products.
That's not the type of manufacturing that the recent debate over reshoring is about. It's about production scale manufacturing - creating an American Shenzen with an equivalent amount of jobs - and very soon. But any such capability will be heavily automated, so it won't produce the equivalent jobs.
Tariffs are used all over the world for this exact reason, which is what is being attempted now. It will take time for it to pay off, more time than the current administration has, which is likely why business will drag their feet.
I think economic benefit goes beyond just having the lowest price. Having good jobs for people in the country means they have money to spend. If people make next to nothing, all they can afford is Temu quality. This is bad for the citizens, bad for US businesses, and bad for the environment. The only winner is China.
But there is a good jobs in the country. His brother has to travel 100 miles to work it.
Tariffs won't resolve this issue. Either the goods becomes too expensive to import and are made here or the aren't.
In the case that they're made here then some other good will no longer be produced (if you could magically make both then you would've in the first place). And so your citizens are worse off because they produce the same amount (or less) and pay more for it.
In the case that they're not made here then you just pay more in tariffs and are worse off.
The problem with global trade is that when you trade 10 apples for 10 bananas it doesn't need to be distributed to your citizens equally. So if you go from an economy producing 5 apples and 5 bananas where everybody gets one of each to one where 3 people get 8 apples and 10 bananas the other 2 get 2 apples the GDP still grew from 10 to 20 but people are worse off. Throwing in tariffs to get back to the 5 apples 5 bananas will cause a recession.
The better solution is to increase the top tax rate and redistribute 2 additional apples and bananas to the bottom 2 and then everybody is still better off.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out why Trump & Republicans want tariffs as opposed to a higher tax rate.
> 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.
I watched some videos 10GTek published. Rather “boring” stuff of a life in the day of various employees.
But I was shocked by how efficient and modernised their factory was, including really rigorous quality control, advanced testing setups, dedicated jigs everywhere just for the testing… and then one video was of an office worker who spent her day making sure everything runs smoothly, juggling customers, orders for parts from vendors, and getting ahold of the right people when something was going wrong.
Incidentally none of my 10GTek stuff has ever failed.
From the American point of view there's something to be said for doing a job where the money is. Like you'll make more in finance or as an AI engineer than making stuff in a factory.
I London where I live you can't really afford to buy a house or things like that if you got a job manufacturing anything that's globally competitive which is why manufacturing is basically gone here and people get jobs in finance and the like. We used to have a factory in the London outskirts but it got knocked down and replaced with apartments long ago.
I don't know if it's addicted to easy money so much as the people earning easy money push up the cost of living and force others to do similar to afford to live in the same area.
Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling items.
Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with scale orders.
There is a demographic implosion coming soon. You look at a video like this and count how many humans there are to make this $20-30 speaker and you realize that this $20 speaker is not going to be automated, its just going to go away as an option.
Here's the evidence. Not a sudden implosion but a slow decline that will particularly impact the younger population groups who have typically done most of the manual labor in factories.
It really just depends. There might short/small runs which are easily automated, and there might be a large scale production which are not and need hand assembly. The very same product might see both during production – fully automated robots and hand assembly etc.
> 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).
I was thinking the issue might be its much better for factories to automate sections of production over time.
It must be a huge expense with risk to design a new factory, automate it end to end and push live hoping the market expectation for the product exists and the automation is as good as planned.
Whereas if you have a manual production line you could have a massive advantage as they can automate out sections ongoing and it allows engineers to build skills in this also as they go.
Not that I would doubt the guy who let Mike Tyson hit him in the head or anything, but don’t we have decades of research showing the negative effects of those?
Yeah, and you’re going to be poorer as a whole. People in backwards places like rural and urban ‘hoods live reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively speaking.
I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car.
When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.
There are backward rural places in America. However the vast majority of rural people have had reliable electric since the 1950s, along with phone (though those lines may not longer work since everyone has gone cellular). They bought their first color TV in the 1960s like everyone else. They drive cars (the image of a red neck mowing his grass and finding a car - they drove that car 30 years ago, when it wore out they go a different one and quit driving it). Most of the backward in America are groups like the Amish who have every ability to be modern but choose not to.
In rural Asia there are a lot of people who don't have electric, they don't have cars.
Though I don't know why rural is even a topic here. Factories don't exist in rural areas, this exist in cities and towns where the workers live.
In the US? Whenever possible, we build industrial facilities in rural areas for a cheaper workforce and to avoid unionization. Meat packing is the textbook example. Distribution centers are the more modern one.
It’s always important to talk about rural citizens because politicians pretend that they don’t exist. The rural poor have a lot in common with the urban poor, but are separated both deliberately and by inertia.
>When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.
Would the rest of the world even care anymore? Everyone from Canada to New Zealand is now making plans for long term disconnection from the US. They will not let the next Trump boss them around like they have been this past year. The reputation is torched and so if the US launches another populist movement that leads nowhere and collapses the country as a result why should the other 95% of the planet care?
The other 95% of the planet has mostly been relying upon the USA as the global hegemon to provide the security guarantees and financial infrastructure necessary for large scale free trade since the end of WWII. If the USA steps back from that then global trade networks will gradually break down because no other country or stable coalition has the desire or resources to step into that role. The situation will revert to something more like what we saw pre-war when most trade was regional. New Zealand in particular is in a weak position as they are heavily reliant on agriculture exports, and lack any ability to project power beyond their own borders.
There’s interdependence, which is a system that benefits the world and the US. The US taxes the world with inflationary currency, and most of the planet has been relatively peaceful.
Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make. There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about an Indian man who found a math book and went on to define groundbreaking math from what he extrapolated. I don't know the details, but I don't think the film made that up.
A bit of googling suggests that the model for the mathematician in the film was George Dantzig, and he was actually studying mathematics at college level.
The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan fits your sentence, although early 20th C. He studied mathematics from a revision book he had access to in a small place in India then wrote a letter to GW Hardy a professor at Oxford with a range of new and strange results but expressed in the idiom of the revision book.
I don't necessarily agree with GPs, but I do think we're near the tipping point where the whole Eastern half of Asia combined is nearing or passing the Europe+US on the big progress-o-meter.
Some parts of East and Southeast Asia might have been working on paving roads and building schools even just one generation ago. To think they still are "like that" is legitimately an insult to them. That part is largely done and they're moving on.
> 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.
> Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force.
Unions need to quit their management is evil message as well. Unions can do good, but when they call all management evil and breed resentment I can't blame companies for not wanting unions around.
The above is US centrist - in other countries the Unions don't do this.
I have no involvement with the plant directly. My understanding is the best luck they had was getting in good graces with local probation officers & craigslist classifieds. Job portals were pretty useless from my understanding.
> the best luck they had was getting in good graces with local probation officers & craigslist classifieds.
I appreciate the answer. And I understand that you may not have more-granular info than this.
But I am wondering what how jobs were advertised prior to utilizing ProbOff/CL. Maybe the answer is this. There was no avenue to get job listings in front of the most likely eyeballs.
> There was no avenue to get job listings in front of the most likely eyeballs
Bit of an aside, but if anyone else is in this position and trying to reach the eyeballs of jobseekers who aren't actively using portals, I really can't recommend local Facebook groups enough.
A post from a real account (not the business) saying "Gizmo Plastics are hiring line workers for $18/h, anyone interested?" will get some guaranteed traction. In my small town Ontario groups, I've never seen a post looking for laborers go ignored.
Also they’ll do local job fairs on site, at local community colleges. You’d be surprised how many people still listen to FM in their car so ads go up there too locally.
> Companies go to ManPower or other job staffing agencies
Son #1 got employed there early but it turned out that a small group had a deal with management and got 100% of the work. New hires went out on one job immediately and then never again.
I don't understand why Craigslist is being framed as a some step down here (while probation clearly is). Craiglist is exactly where you instantly have many eyes on your ad and people will send in resumes without the bullshit filtering of the various portals.
Outside of an urban area, you won't necessary be overwhelmed with resumes. If you portray your job realistically, you'll get people realistically interested in your job.
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.
I work in manufacturing. There are a few instances where watching YouTube may not be a huge hazard, but 98% of the roles I've seen the are reasonable reasons to not permit that. If nothing else, it'd be easy to let quality suffer which causes many bigger headaches.
I went to a panel discussion at a conference last year. Operations managers agreed labor was their biggest challenge. The manager for the promotional materials company who was probably around 60 discussed how he has loosened up a bit the last ~15 years. If someone sends a couple texts and it slightly impacts the units they (personally) do per hour, it was better than being super strict and losing employees. He had to adapt because the mentality was far different than when he started in the workforce.
He just needs to wait a decade, the Chinese workers will be retiring and will not be replaced. Entire product segments probably just go away or the inflation raises the table such that the managers situation now is the norm. Problem solved.
You seem obsessed with the “China population collapse” propaganda (which is put out by the usual suspects, btw). Anyways, I hate to break it to you, but this is also the trend throughout the entire Western world. Besides, automation and AI is going offset a lot of those worker losses (which is actually a win). And in 20 years the Chinese will still be giving birth to as many if not more people than the entire combine West.
I think mainly on the pensions side of things, and perhaps a lot of empty real estate and infra maintenance issues. But they will still be graduating more engineers than the West combined and in general, a better educated and more socially cohesive workforce. I think they are gonna be just fine, even if we don't like their political system (which will likely evolve, anyways).
So how is that a disaster? Wasn't one of the big concerns a decade or go about over population? This means less agriculture required, more land for nature, less pollution, fewer energy needs, etc.
It's a disaster for China's economy in the long term unless they automate themselves, which they'll very much want to do. It isn't a disaster for the natural ecosystem obviously.
Want to do? They’re doing it now, and are ahead of the west in some processes already. It’s a made up concern because they are a geopolitical rival. And their economy is already a major success story; they’ve lifted something like 800 million people out of abject poverty in the last 25 years.
I don't disagree about the economic outcome today, but I don't understand how you can say that demographics issues are made up - either they are made up in the west, too, or they aren't. Nobody knows what will happen in the next 25 years, maybe nothing much, maybe we'll all be replaced by humanoid robots in the west, in the east and in the third world, too.
From my limited experience working in a factory environment, listening to music can be a real workplace safety issue if it reduces your ability to hear forklifts or coworkers shouting warnings.
that's not a problem if the people who will be interacting with fork lifts stay in designated areas as do the forklift operators. Nothing is ever going to b 0% chance of an accident but simply adhering to basic rules should keep people on an assembly line listening to spotify from taking a forklift to the knee. Have you ever worked on a factory floor at all? Sure some positions would be impossible but not for 80-90% of them.
> US employers cannot discriminate against a deaf person and must make reasonable accommodations to make it safe for them to do their job.
> US employers are not legally required to make accommodations for people who simply want to listen to music at work.
So it would be reasonably possible, but since it's not legally required they'd rather make their workers miserable for no benefit, and then complain how difficult it is to hire people?
Well, just because an employer can make reasonable accommodations for one or a few deaf people, doesn't necessarily mean that it would be reasonable or safe for the entire organization to operate in the same way. A "reasonable accommodation" could be something like a modified job role. E.g. you might move someone from a role that can't safely be done while deaf into a role that they could do. That's something that you could do for one or a couple of people, but you couldn't do for everybody.
I do agree with the sentiment that employers should take more efforts to make their jobs enjoyable to do. But some job sites have things that can kill people. The reason that heavy machinery beeps when it backs up is because people died at work before it did.
If you have even the slightest amount of situational awareness sound deadening or infotainment gizmos will not render you unaware of an approaching emergency vehicle. Scan your mirrors, scan your instruments, scan the horizon, repeat. The problem is unqualified, uneducated drivers.
Sound is great because it does not require line of sight. There's a reason why emergency vehicles have both lights and sirens, and it isn't because all of them have unnecessary equipment.
Agreed, but the root cause of the issue the emergency vehicle operator are noticing isn't sound deadening or infotainment gizmos, it's inattentive distracted drivers. Probably playing with their cell phones instead of driving. Similarly, in a manufacturing situation playing with your phone or watching tv is likely to cause problems. Inattention and inability to focus on the job is the problem. You can't solve that with technology, but you can with education.
But, have you ever driven a quiet vehicle in an urban area where there are plenty of objects to block your line of sight? It is quite easy for a emergency vehicle to sneak up on you in a modern vehicle even when you are paying attention.
It's really a simple relationship -- if you block sound, it makes it harder to hear things.
This is exactly the reason why newer emergency vehicles have things like rumbler sirens. These sirens don't do anything to make people more attentive, but what they do is generate frequencies that are more likely to penetrate into modern vehicles.
I think you may start to understand the requirement once you realize the issue is where attention is and is not placed, instead of what sense is being exercised.
I mean, think about it. The recommendation was to consume forms of entertainment. In the factory I worked, there was a mandatory safety rule where you were required to establish eye contact with forklift drivers. Why is that a requirement?
Music might be allowed - though the factory is often loud enough that it isn't really practical. You still need to be able to hear the safety signals though.
YouTube cannot be allowed - you need to be ready to work when the line moves the next part to you. There are also safety concerns with watching youtube instead of the various hazards which are always there.
Yeah I guess it’s probably not realistic for most factory jobs. I am just thinking that “get paid $20 an hour to do a simple task and watch YouTube/listen to music” is actually kind of appealing to many people.
This is a lot of security guard and front desk jobs. if a boss doesn't like smartphones on the job, I know people who read books or knit between tasks.
When I was 18 I got paid below minimum wage to sit in my car delivering pizzas while listening to the radio. Far better than the higher paid shop job I tried at university.
Today with not just unlimited music (with no adverts), but the vast amounts of audio books you can listen to, it's even more appealing for people with limited financial obligations.
Having worked at a very simple factory job that involved hot-pressing plastic-aluminium film into shapes, yeah, that would end badly. It's unskilled job, that doesn't mean it's mindless.
If you look away from your job you might lose a finger,.. or *gasp* even worse, stop production!
I grew up doing homework with the TV on and still sometimes work with a tiny video overlay showing some anime or tv show.
You basically pay attention to a small part of it, and switch focus as needed (pause your task or pause the video). You'll still miss a lot of the video but you just don't care.
I know this is unthinkable to some people but I've met more than one person who does it, so it's not ultra-rare. Possibly related to ADD/ADHD? I don't know.
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...
The job being monotonous is clearly enough of a downside that significantly higher pay and benefits are needed to attract talent.
Paying higher wages might help retain employees (or not! there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay) but doing so could easily increase costs to the point where your product is uncompetitive in the market. It also might just be worth having higher turnover in order to keep prices low.
We need actual data to decide how significant is "significant." Otherwise you will just have businesses complaining no one wants to work for "significantly" higher pay (a whole $0.05/hour more).
I’m sorry but this is a ridiculous take. $0.05/hr is $104 a year for a full-time job. Zero people are going to have that be the tipping point for them to take on a monotonous, often physically draining job that they’d otherwise turn down.
Except you can't just zone away in a factory job. Workers need to pay attention if they don't like injuries. It the job doesn't need much skill, it doesn't necessarily mean it's easy or safe.
Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where more people will decide to do some job. But for practical purposes the pay needs to be in line with still being able to price your products competitively in a global marketplace.
Even $10,000/yr more might not be enough to move the needle all that much on a job that’s backbreaking, monotonous, and with little prospects for career growth. Especially if you have a limited pool of applicants due to your location.
Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where more people will decide to do some job
Ludicrous only from the perspective of the employer. Everyone wants something for nothing.
The fact is that regular Americans (i.e. not exploited, immigrant labor, or oppressed out-groups) used to do manual labor and manufacturing in the United States. They took pride in their labor. People haven't changed, the economics have.
As for your last paragraph, the oil fields have been able to meet their need for employees for the most part, and that ticks every one of your undesirable factors. So what gets workers there? Pay.
You used to be able to buy a nice house in the suburbs with car in the garage and a white picket fence, support a stay-at-home wife with three kids, put them all through college, and take annual vacations to Disneyland or the Caribbean, and cover the healthcare needs of the whole family, all on the salary of a high school educated factory worker. Now all that sounds impossible. You’d have to pay factory workers well into six figures for a lifestyle like that.
What happened? Cost disease [1]. All of the big ticket things in that lifestyle (except for the car) skyrocketed in price relative to inflation.
That was never the reality for most factory workers. Usually the car was cramped with a single bathroom, the wife picked up some part-time work, most vacations were road trips to go camping, and not all the kids went to college. Inflation and growing income inequality are legitimate problems but let's not paint an unrealistic picture of "the good old days".
Pay, plus a willingness to hire workers who might not be tolerated in other jobs due to background check issues or HR policy violations. (I am not claiming this is necessarily a bad thing.)
Theoretically, an utterly horrible job with great pay would attract a lot of workers who do it for some time to get a financial boost before moving on.
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).
I bust out loud laughing the other day when I saw two jobs listed here in rusty southern Ohio.
One was for a semi-skilled manufacturing position. A little more than just assembly line, but nothing super special or niche. The other was a janitor position at the local public school system.
The differential was not huge, but the janitor paid more. Probably less hours too.
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.
The issue is of course there is no market for US made goods at a good salary when other countries were selling their goods in the US market without impediment.
Tariffs were supposed to fix that, but now I don’t know if they are effective at all.
Yes that is usually point of the tariffs. Not this time as they are too broad (include products like coffee) and not stable (announced one day than delayed/dismissed etc.). Point of tariffs that current regime made is to destabilize both domestic and foreign markets.
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.
I think you're being too hard. Working at a Wal-Mart is much easier than a factory job, considering the latter is usually dangerous, and has more RSI risk.
It'd have to pay at least double, and me being in a predicament, for me to gamble with my health, and only until I find a better option.
Some jobs are just inherently bad. People do them, if there are no better jobs available. If you increase the wage, people will do the job for a while, until they have reached sufficient financial stability. Then they can afford to switch to another job that pays less but provides a better quality of life. Or to retire early in extreme cases.
That's fantastic! Wouldn't it be tyranny to make people spend their whole lives doing such a job? It's good that people do it for a while for a good wage and then move on.
It's not enough to do the job. You also need to produce value. Many attempts at onshoring production fail, because employee attrition is too high. Costs are high, productivity remains low, and the quality of the products may also be low.
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.
I’m not the OP. Heavy labor is… a lot of work. It’s rough in the body and some people aren’t cut for it.
In the 90s as a high school kid, I made $14/hr as a farmhand when the minimum wage was $4.75. They’d hire 4 crews of 4 guys each and we’d lose about half through the summer. They were great family to work for, but the work was hella hard. You could go retrieve shopping carts for $4.75 an hour and smoke weed all day, and many of my former coworkers did.
I'm not sure I agree. Tariffs adds cost, unless domestic manufacturing can be done in a more or less cost effective way. Manufacturing works benefit of course but that's a overall small proportion of the population and ought to be (we probably don't want most people to be doing manufacturing work). But the added costs end up be a tax on everyone and a regressive one at that.
I also don't see offshoring manufacturing as inherently problematic or being out of sight, out of mind (of course exploitation can happen, but that's not inherently a part of offshoring manufacturing).
Workers in China, Vietnam etc are paid significantly less, but their cost of living is less as well. Plus unlike in the west, where manufacturing jobs are not desirable, in places where those manufacturing jobs land they typically provide an economic opportunity that isn't otherwise there.
Basically, why not have high cost of living places produce higher cost goods that pay more, and low cost of living places produce lower cost goods that pays less?
why does this arbitrage exist? Why is the cost of energy, the fundamental input into every economy, cheaper in Asia? Tractors consume fuel, fertilisers do too. Human labour is the least efficient at converting fuel into energy. When you dig a little deeper, you'd find an economy structured around keeping rentiers away from the basics: housing, energy and food.
Wrong. Kids brains are fried from phones / social media so much that they struggle with repetitive labor.
I see this all the time at an automotive plant. UAW wages are good, especially after the last contract, but we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an hour straight before their break or task switch.
So are you saying China doesn't have smartphones or social media?
UAW wages are "good" but you have to realize that you are competing with a service economy's leftover labor pool. All the good candidates left your manufacturing town already to get a job in an office tower where "good" UAW wages aren't really much to write home about.
For the last multiple decades graduating students have been facing a declining manufacturing job market where it makes just about no sense to get into manufacturing when they can get a degree and work a desk job with better pay and actually be in a job market that's growing over time rather than shrinking.
UAW wages are "good" but only compared to other jobs that are probably in the bottom 50% of desirability, and you're under constant threat of plant closures or the shift toward non-union plants in places like Alabama and South Carolina.
And oh yeah, you're stuck in some declining semi-rural rust belt manufacturing town rather than getting to live your best life in a vibrant growing urban area.
A full 35% of Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher, and those numbers are even higher when you are looking at states/counties that have the major population centers. The county map makes it look like basically every urban area has at least 40-50% bachelor's degree attainment, with standouts like the Boston area having some counties with over 60% attainment.
Almost 30% of Americans work remotely at least some time during the week.
So, basically half of the urbanized population has better options than working in a factory.
In China, working a factory is being compared to a much worse prior standard of living that was much more recent. Today's factory workers were yesterday's subsistence farmers. Americans haven't experienced that level of widespread poverty in at least 100 years.
> we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an hour straight before their break or task switch.
That seems wholly reasonable to me. Expecting humans to be able to do work like that, and especially to get satisfaction from such work, seems like the aberration.
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)
Typically as economies advance there is a shift to services and higher value add / higher skill manufacturing anyways. That can be the explicit strategy for the US as well. Focus on renewables, high tech, aerospace etc instead of the lower margin / lower skill manufacturing.
They're not mutually exclusive of course. There can be some national protection via tariffs on some types of manufacturing, while investing in automating some other types and just completely ignoring others and keeping those offshore. Problem currently is there doesn't seem to be a much of a strategy.
It seems like the US in particular isn't able to pick one path and stick with it. The shift towards services has already happened. But investment in silicon, renewables etc is on again off again. There now seems to be a desire to bring all manufacturing jobs back to the US, although it's not clear who wants this or why. e.g. who actually wants clothing and toy manufacturing back in the US?
So we have a set of ad hoc policies (or EOs), that don't seem to have an overarching goal.
A great deal of investment in renewables just meant importing solar panels and wind turbines from China that will wear out in 19 years. Outside of a few jobs in trucking to moving parts and a few jobs to install them, it does not create a solid labour base nor good careers.
I certainly want clothing manufacture back in the U.S. with a focus on using renewable (ie. not microplastic based) textiles to make articles of clothing that don’t wear out in a year or two. I have a handmade pair of pants I bought at a local thrift store that were locally made from domestically produced denim. Got them for $4. New ones from the person who makes them would be around $40-$75. They are custom fitted to you, although I got lucky and the thrift store had one in exactly my width and height.
So far they don’t have any rips, years, and the cuffs aren’t fraying.
My brand new Levi’s and Wrangler’s have fraying cuffs and are much more prone to getting tears because of the thinner fabric. They also seem to stretch after washing or wearing them a long time and then don’t fit as well.
Toys? I want toys for my kids that aren’t full of lead or cadmium, and are something besides battery operated beeping rubbish or something with a screen. I’m glad to pay $25 for a wooden toy. I bought one locally made in Chico, CA at a store called “Chicomade” where everything was locally made.
I don’t see why fast fashion with clothes you need to throw out sooner due to planned obsolescence and plastic trash toys.
Japan used that strategy very successfully for at least a century. The high cost of imported goods encouraged consumers to buy domestic at prices that were also high, which subsidized exports at competitive prices. The Japanese public is less docile now, but this is one example where import restrictions worked well. I believe you can find other examples from the 20th century, but I'm not sure whether they would work well in the current global environment.
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.
My sister has been at a family owned small factory for 30+ years now. Eventually loyalty to family becomes a thing, especially when they’re loyal to you.
They are gradually not replacing staff as they retire or the occasional person quits on the factory floor due to automation. Their biggest challenge is who will own it in the future - the son and grandson have fully taken over from the founder, but nobody else in the family is really interested.
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
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.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the extra wealth ends invested in the house market. This increases the cost of terrains for both old and new homes. It is also not very productive just to buy one thing to extract rents from it. ( There is value in handling the rent, building or reforming and old house).
The urban land is limited and requires government infrastructure to connect it.
Agreed. For that economy to come back, you need all possible competitors to be weak and poor, in the mid 20th century that meant either still agrarian (China) or rebuilding after war (Japan and Europe). It was a unique moment and it's never coming back.
China wasn't a factor in global economics until the 90s, and Europe only was relevant for US growth for a very short time following WW2 and the Marshall Plan.
This doesn't make any sense at all. The reason China is dominant in manufacturing isn't because the other countries of the world were weak and agrarian and rebuilding after war.
What would be awesome is if half-assed finance bro speeches weren't being thrown around as serious macro.
You won't hear me say that the housing market doesn't need an overhaul, but I'm not sure that the "a factory job could buy you a home out of high school" meme is entirely accurate. If you look at home ownership rates, the rates today are higher than (though not by much) the rates in the 1960s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
I can't find numbers from earlier than 1980, but 18-44 _is_ lower, though again the rate in 1980 was just a few percentage points higher, and not nearly high enough to imply that home ownership out of high school was in reach for the majority:
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf
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
Conservatives don’t want unionized labor - they want 1890’s style manufacturing at best, no unions and rampant exploitation of labor. At worst, no people in the factory of any sort - dark factories end to end. There’s little room in the conservative morality for people not working, or for people who are working.
You are correct and I sincerely apologize. I have always had immense respect for my conservative peers. This is something else carrying the mantle of conservative, cowing the conservatives to silence.
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.
They don't realize that making good money in a factory was due to a particular tech/economic environment and the US' position inside it.
People thinking they can go back to making good money in a widget factory is like thinking because you had an ascendant economy in 1836 exporting wood before global electrification, then that lucrative job is always waiting for you even in 2025.
Homer Simpson exemplifies this. Heres a guy that never went to college being the lead safety inspector for a nuclear power plant. He owns his home with three kids a stay at home wife and two cars and two pets(with the occasional elephant that comes and goes). A lot has changed since the writing of these characters and the world now.
That guy did retail shoe sales too. I’ve known some people to survive off those type of jobs, but they sure as hell weren’t living with a sitcom family in the burbs.
Yes absolutely! I was never too much into Married with Children as a kid hence I jumped straight to the simpsons but the idea of a shoe salesman having all of that today? Not possible.
> 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.
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.
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.
If China wants to play hardball then Vietnam can make the goods. This is the great system we had until Trump decided he'd piss off every country. We had a very much you vs the world when doing diplomacy as USA but now it's just you vs USA which is a much weaker position.
Chinas been around for a few thousand years, what's something they can do that nobody else has been able to replicate?
There's always a Vietnam.
Even now with all the talk about "rare earth minerals". They're not rare, everybody has them, its just nobody else wants to pollute their rivers mining and refining them when China is willing to.
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.
> China disintegrates into another civil war within the next few decades
I'm curious about your reasoning on this. China was not the one at the top of my list of "Major world powers likely to have a civil war sooner than later"
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
thats not true. in most manufacturing industries we produce fewer units than we did 20 or 30 years ago, and in most of those industries the total value produced has been pretty flat. this is something a lot of economists have known about all along. you can read about it here:
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.
He's your captain, not mine. I prefer intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate, moral people to random rich guys who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
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.
And it's a nice problem to solve with AI of many kinds because you can forward-solve the kinematic solution and check for "hallucinations": collisions, exceeding acceleration limits, etc. If your solution doesn't "pass", generate another one until it does. Then grade according to "efficiency" metrics and feed it back in.
As long as you do that, the penalty for a a slop-based fuckup is just a less efficient toolpath.
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.
> existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints
Rather the opposite, I'd say: existing manufacturing automation is built around repetitive motions because an assembly line is making multiples of the same product. Having AI reinvent the wheel for every individual item is completely pointless.
One-off manufacturing can to a certain extent be automated. We're already seeing that with things like 3D printing and dirt-cheap basic PCB assembly. However, in most cases economies of scale prevent that from widespread generalization to entire products: ordering 100 or 1000 is always going to be have significantly lower per-unit costs than ordering 1, and if you're ordering 1000 you can probably afford a human spending some time on setting up robots or optimizing the design for existing setups.
There are undoubtedly some areas where the current AI boom can provide helpful tooling, but I don't expect it to lead to a manufacturing revolution.
What if everything in the economy could be efficiently produced through one-off manufacturing methods? This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately as i've been working on 3d printing/CNC/aluminum casting.
It avoids the need for any sort of parts shipping, and can be easily retooled to make war machines in a time of emergency (which is one of the motivations to bring back american manufacturing).
The main problem with this is that you still need surface-mount components if you are going to make PCBs, and you still need magnets to make motors, etc.
I think you could make an analogy to the difference between ASICs and general-purpose CPUs. ASICs are great, but CPUs have flexibility and massive economies of scale. Similarly, a specialized machine might be more efficient than a humanoid robot at a particular task, but advanced humanoid robots could theoretically do all the tasks and as a result would likely end up being manufactured in very high volume.
Imagine a future where any hardware startup could design and provision an assembly line as easily and cheaply as software startups today use cloud computing. Maybe after a certain scale it becomes economical to consider replacing steps of the manufacturing process with "ASIC" solutions, but maybe there'd be a long tail of things which would continue to remain best served by general-purpose robots indefinitely.
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 at odds with everything I know about manufacturing robotics, having worked with people doing that work. The complexity of the environment is irrelevant because the robot is programmed to make a specific motion and to adjust that motion in predictable ways based on the appearance of specific features. That is by design, not because (or at least not just because) the robot is incapable of planning its own motion. The whole system is designed to be predictable instead of adaptable because that's what you need to do to do the same thing millions of times.
> The whole system is designed to be predictable instead of adaptable because that's what you need to do to do the same thing millions of times.
That final "millions" is the problem. Automation is great and easy when you will do the same thing millions of times. Sure it might cost half a million to program the robot (which itself cost half a million) - but that is $1.00 per part, and it goes down as you make more. When you are only building 10 though a million dollars is a lot of money and so you want humans - or robots that are "CAPABLE of plannings its own motion".
Costs have been going down. In high school I took the class on how to write g-code (I have one free period so I took shop for non-college bound kids for fun even though I was college bound - it was a great time that I highly recommend even though it was only for fun). These days almost everyone just uses their CAD/CAM and isn't even aware that the g-code is supposed to be a human readable programming language. (it probably isn't)
> 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.
Not really. The robots are programmed by having a human manually guide it, so the robot itself doesn't really have to do any navigation - it just has to follow a predefined path.
Want to install different variants of dash components? Split it up into methods and have the robot return to a neutral position after each method. You're literally programming it.
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 beg to differ. Journalists are supposed to do their own investigation and analysis of the people, institutions, and events that they report on. If they just parrot the talking points of executives, then they’re producing advertisements, not journalism.
Fair, but there have never been very many journalists in the world. Between lazy fact checkers and there being more money in sensationalist reporting (My American history classes covered this back in the 1800s, and I have no doubt other history classes of earlier times will as well) there has never been much.
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.
If that's true, why isn't unrestricted immigration[1] good for them? It means that the citizens don't have to do the boring immigrant jobs, but still get the benefits for vast amounts of immigrant-produced goods and services.
The only ones who will lose out are ones who 'want to'[2] do the boring immigrant jobs.
AI can't just handwave all this shit away because 'technology good'. Whether or you agree with these concerns or not, there's a massive backlash from various flavors of nativists about jobs. Why isn't it directed at all of these pie in the sky AI promises?
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[1] Or, you know, just buying imports from China. What difference does it make to me where a factory is located, when that factory doesn't employ me or my neighbours? The people collecting profits from it aren't going to share them with us.
[2] What does it mean to 'want to' do a 'boring' job? Rent's due in two weeks, 'wants' don't enter into it much.
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.
Decision makers are certainly quicker to opt for workforce reductions in response to tariff uncertainty / high interest rates, because they believe that LLMs can pick up the slack.
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.
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.
Because intelligence is so much more than stochastically repeating stuff you've been trained on.
It needs to learn new information, create novel connections, be creative.. We are utterly clueless as to how the brain works and how intelligence is created.
We just took one cell, a neuron, made the simplest possible model of it, made some copies of it and you think it will suddenly spark into life by throwing GPUs at it ?
If AGI is built from LLMs, how could we trust it? It's going to "hallucinate", so I'm not sure that this AGI future people are clamoring for is going to really be all that good if it is built on LLMs.
Humans who repeatedly deny LLM capabilities despite the numerous milestones they've surpassed seem more like stochastic parrots.
The same arguments are always brought up, often short pithy one-liners without much clarification. It seems silly that despite this argument first emerging when LLM's could barely write functional code, now that LLM's have reached gold-medal performance on the IMO, it is still being made with little interrogation into its potential faults, or clarification on the precise boundary of intelligence LLM's will never be able to cross.
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 AGI argument assumes there is a 0 -> 1 moment where the model suddenly becomes "AGI" and starts performing miraculous tasks, accompanied by recursive self-improvement. So far, our experience shows that we are getting incremental improvements over time from different companies.
These things are being commoditized, and we are still at the start of the curve when it comes to hardware, data centers, etc.
Arguing for an all-in civilization/country bet on AGI given this premise, is either foolish or a sign that you are selling "AGI"
All of that stuff takes time and resources. Self-improvement may not be easy, e.g. if they end up in a local maximum that doesn't extend, and it probably won't be cheap or fast (if it's anything like frontier LLMs it could be months of computation on enormous numbers of cutting-edge devices, costing hundreds of millions or billions, or it may not even be possible without inventing and mass-manufacturing better hardware). Another company achieving a slightly different form of AGI within a few years will probably be at least competitive, and if they have more resources or a better design they could overtake.
Unless AGI includes a speed requirement, AGI is not sufficient to win the market. Take any genius in human history, the impact they had has been hugely limited by their lifespan, they didn’t solve every problem, and each discovery took them decades. The first AGIs will be the same, hyper slow for a while, giving competitors a chance to copy and stay in the race
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.).
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.
It's just as possible that they need to invest more and more for negligible improvements to model performance. These companies are burning through money at an astonishing rate.
And as the internet deteriorates due to AI slop, finding good training material will become increasingly difficult. It's already happening that incorrect AI generated information is being cited as source for new AI answers.
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
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.
> What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools
My students are shocked (horrified?) to learn that they're basically running 50-yr old Fortran code when they use scipy.minimize to train their fancy little neural nets.
I always chuckle at how Python became the dominant language for AI / ML / data science etc but wonder why it is that Fortran and Python became the golden combo, it could have been done with any other language, no complaints, I love Python, but its just amusing to me.
For Fortran, I have the concept of 'immortal code' - code that is generally hard to write, is compatible with everything, and implements an algorithm in a way that's impossible to improve on - or at least doing so would be celebrated as a minor breakthrough.
A lot of numerical optimization code is this - it conforms to a strict 'C' ABI - taking (arrays of) simple floats and ints and outputting the same, so binding it to another higher level language is trivial, so rewriting it makes little sense. If the same algorithm were written in Java, most people would not want to bring in Java as a dependency for their Python/C++/whatever project, but since this is just a tiny C object file, it's happily integrated into everything.
They also tend to be very tricky to get right, I remember reading a paper where the author was adamant that changing the order of a multiply and an add (a mathematically invariant operation) would cause the algorithm to blow up due to the different scales of floating point values involved causing a major loss of precision. I'm sure there's tons of stories like this.
This is the sort of code which took PhD's who studied this exact topic years to get right, even though the actual code often looks unassuming, I would dread the day when I was required to touch it (but I never do - since it always does what it says on the tin)
It's really just that it's a pretty easy language to learn that finds a good balance between structure and brevity. It has very good support for the data structures you need and libraries for everything. A lot of people love the language and that built up a lot of momentum and eventually people started adding stuff like numpy and scipy and pandas and before long you had this giant scientific computing environment that almost anyone can get into.
I tried out most of the scripting languages out there (Ruby, Perl, Tcl, Groovy, R, and many more) and Python just seemed to click more and it has a whole lot less to worry about upfront than languages like C# and Java. In comparison to languages like C and C++, it's a godsend for those with typical automation needs.
In my eyes it seems like a pretty straightforward development. There have been plenty of other tools that may have made sense throughout history too. Matlab could have done this, but by that time nobody was going to build out massive libraries for something expensive and partly closed off.
It’s really a story of pragmatism and momentum while FORTRAN (and other math-related languages) were the first to come into existence, Python came along as the perfect “glue” language as it is more widely regarded, taught, readable, flexible, and easy to wrap around these legacy language's powerful functions.
Fortran has been a research language used by people like physicists and mathematicians that know what they're doing and have been developing that tool for decades and Python is perfect for people who have no idea what they're doing.
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.
Relational databases are from the 70's
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.
Yes.. try moving that 36 inch Sony Trinitron from the car inside the house.. weighs 200 pounds+ IIRC....you need at least 2 strong people
I remember the Sun monitors (21" I think) were about 80 lbs. I've read that part of that was a metal frame to hold all of the wires in front of the screen.
They were fun monitors - we had a lab full of them, they would degauss on startup, and the degausser would induct into the monitor next to it (and a little bit into the monitor after that).
The weight from a CRT is mostly about the amount of glass required to keep the atmosphere out, as it's essentially a vacuum bottle with better marketing. On that 21" display, you've got about 6000 pounds of force trying to push the face inward, not to mention the sides, neck, etc.
Right. Bought two out of a University lab and lived in an apartment six stories high with only stairs. Moved out those monitors even and they were more difficult to get down than the couch...
Don't let me get started about fixed frequency, X11 modeline guessing (wrong of course) and needing a second monitor to even get back to the original config.
Cars haven't gotten any lighter. Rather the reverse. Battery packs are quite heavy.
Even non-EVs have gotten quite a bit heavier due to the inclusion of more structural safety features and creature comforts.
arguably the biggest driver is simply the cost of oil. crumple zones made of styrofoam and plastic bumpers arn't making things heavy.
e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2019/01/03/new-ve...
That article is being disingenuous and wrong. It's comparing the lightest possible Civic configuration with the heaviest possible Accord of a different body type.
The 2000 Accord sedan is 2,712lbs, not 2,987lbs (which would be the wagon).
The 2019 Civic sedan is 2,743–2,923lbs depending on equipment/trim.
So yes, the Civic compared to an older car of similar size did get heavier.
The Miata proves that cars don't have to be heavier, but the Miata also took advantage of much more aluminum compared to the older models. Maybe mainstream cars should also switch to use more aluminum to keep weight down, and you're right that the reason they don't is because oil is cheap enough where weight isn't a priority enough to use more expensive aluminum instead of steel.
Almost like changing the energy source causes a step change in energy optimization priorities . . .
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.
Every software company I've worked at that is more than 5 years old had major features that nobody understood anymore, even features that were core to the product.
This happens in tech as well. It's called COBOL and it refuses to go away, despite lots of people's best efforts.
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 think it is not always about an age gap. A friend has a distribution company with many trucks and many times they need to use a manual machine, and soldering for fixing truck issues.
> 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.
> You can hire way more developers with battle tested tooling, than some bleeding edge thing you don't know if it can even scale.
There's a crucial difference!
You can hire expensive developers on battle tested tooling... or you can hire a shit ton of juniors that want to work on $BUZZWORD for cheap in exchange for the CV creds of "worked on $BUZZWORD".
Resume Driven Development...
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.
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.
This is known as the Lindy Effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Yeah I have students who ask me "Why are we learning C++? My dad said it's older than him!"
Ask that question in language arts, and you'll get some very weird looks.
That's pretty much what I told the student, along with "everything you're studying in every other class is also older than your dad, and that's why you study it."
My first thought is: "when that wears out or fails what the fuck are you replacing it with".
A shockingly rare question to be asked. As best as I can tell, the biggest threat to civilization isn't AI, it's our culture of "that's not my problem" leaving otherwise patch-able holes in critical systems.
The biggest threat to civilization is, in fact, AI. It's a new problem, and one with an utterly ridiculous lethality at its limit. It makes the atomic bomb look benign.
"That's not my problem" is something humans have been dealing with since before they mastered the art of sharpening a stick.
> "That's not my problem" is something humans have been dealing with since before they mastered the art of sharpening a stick.
Yes, and that's why civilizations have kept rising and falling throughout history.
I've seen this sentiment shared before and I just don't get it. What is the logical progression of "AI" to "more dangerous than the atomic bomb"?
You machine a new part.
Exactly: the new process becomes the lowest bid, new NRE goes forward, and the old process finally gets to drift off into the sunset. It happens all the time and people (sometimes the same people) complain about that too.
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)
I was recently talking to the head clockmaker at the Chelsea Clock Company, one of the very few, if not the only, remaining original New England clock companies still operating. He showed me some pictures of clock making tools being used during WWII, and then the very same tools in perfect shape still being used today. He also had one tool that dated back to when they were the Boston Clock Company (circa 1894) that was still in active use. In this new world of disposable tools, it was pretty neat to see.
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.
How do you end up with 10-15 years? China is almost perfectly vertically integrated from raw materials to highly advanced finished products. Their industrialization started in the 70s. Getting to that level would require a lot of planning as well as the kind of hard constraints imposed on China through embargo.
We're not even getting back to that level, we've never reached iPhone level of manufacturing in the US or Europe.
It was not linear growth. The 70s and 80s were essentially write-offs. Things began to move in the mid-1990s and it has been a continual evolution and process over the last 30 years. Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping's teams all did wildly different things for China. The vertical integration you mention was basically non-existent prior to 2020, it came about as part of the New Development Pattern (新发展格局) for the Inner Loop (国内双循环)
China today is virtually unrecognizable compared to even 10 years ago, though.
I remember when there was a big push to make ball point pen tips, and how a but less than 10 years later they succeeded in making them domestically.
It would also require a degree of consensus and quality of leadership which is completely lacking.
A degree of consensus and unity in leadership which is foreign to current American culture.
bollocks. there is profound unity and direction in US leadership, and has been for years -- it's all written by the Heritage Foundation and funded by a few oil and tech billionaires.
it's been like that since before George W Bush was lock-step with Fox News and a GOP led Congress.
the only difference is in 2025 the billionaires funding these things are as foreign as they are domistic
The leadership in democracy does what the population wants, even more so in the past couple decades.
Citation very much needed ;) Even our current voting systems are far from being the best we can come up with in term of fairness. The population most certainly wants to remain in an environment humans can comfortably live in, somehow that's not what our democracies are selecting for these days.
In fairness while people do obviously want them they also want all the current conveniences of modern life and more. Completely off the cuff but I'm pretty sure the sum of those desires vastly dwarfs concern over longer term environmental effects. Essentially I think the average joe prioritizes their job and lifestyle over nagging climate concerns just like the gov does.
I don't know what kind of citation you expect. It's clear that political participation was never more direct and organized than now in the age of social media. The fools and resentful who always were numerous have found a way to unite and bypass the establishment and educational filters which were effectively restraining politics before. All the cowards, short termists, wannabe dictators, conspiracists and anti-intellectualists who are being elected squarely and fairly represent the people who voted for them.
I'm not from the US and I'm not arguing that the current US gov wasn't elected fairly. It's not a law of physics that leaders of democracies do what the people want, they are selected by a system that was designed to estimate the preference of a population (more likely the preference of the ones who designed it). A democratic system designed differently would have a different outcome, there are good examples of what happens when the system favors consensus for instance [0][1], albeit not at the same scale.
[0] https://democracy-technologies.org/participation/consensus-b...
1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...
Yet people actively decided as they did, while almost fully knowing where it leads. It could also have been worse given progressing senility, attempt to overthrow government etc. We are not in a new territory after all, just continuation. Tariffs are new mexican wall.
At least accept how your nation thinks on average, no weaseling around simple fact of today's reality.
Yet somehow the desires of the population is fulfilled to a higher degree in authoritarian China than in the beacon of democracy USA.
This uh valiant defense of China misses my point entirely. People in democracies have no excuse hiding their personal responsibility behind flawed leadership.
Musk apparently stood up a brand new raw to finished goods manufacturing for Starlink kits in 2-3 years in America/Texas. Non trivial, but doable in niches at least, per a factory engineer:
"The main function of this site is to produce our standard Starlink kits. Right now, we’re producing 15,000 a day straight out of the factory.
Raw plastic palettes come in, raw aluminum comes in and we make those into the Starlink kits and ship them right out to the customer zones."
https://www.teslaoracle.com/2025/03/06/spacex-bastrop-factor...
So they form the plastic (already processed) using machines they've imported, and then put pre-populated PCBs with components made in China inside them? Hardly soup to nuts manufacturing.
I've worked in a niche assembly line in North America where we populated some of the board components in-house, but they were etched in batches off-site.
This certainly is not a "raw to finished goods" plant, it's a typical Musk exaggeration.
The housing, maybe. Makes sense to produce that domestically at the volume SpaceX requires, less shipping costs because the dishes do take up volume.
But the PCB? Almost certainly not. With any luck they're making and assembling the PCB in house, but the components originate from a lot of suppliers and there are a lot of components on it [1]. Personally, I'd guess the latter, given that the PCB contains a lot of pretty novel tech [2] of which I'm certain that SpaceX wants to be able to iterate on as fast as they can, without having to wait for even a day or two for a new plane full of PCBs from China.
[1] https://wccftech.com/starlink-user-terminal-apple-supplier-t...
[2] https://hackaday.com/2021/01/11/starlink-satellite-dish-x-ra...
Wars are won or lost in 5 years, not 15. I agree that it's possible to reverse the trend, but we have to decide that we want to independently of a physical conflict, before someone else teaches us that deindustrialization is not advancement. Otherwise the lesson will come too late.
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.
> The knowledge is still there
Tell that to the people who lost FOGBANK, or rather, the knowledge and most importantly the practical experience on how to make it. Or Emmentaler cheese - the one with the bubbles. Turns out, you need something only discovered when someone noticed the bubbles began to vanish... small contaminations from microscopic hay particles [1] that went away when manufacturing switched to fully sealed vats.
There is always, always undocumented steps and unknown implicit assumptions involved in any manufacturing process. No matter how good the documentation is, you need the practical experience.
And that, in turn, is also why the US is producing so much military surplus - should there ever be a full blown war with Russia or China, or there be any other need for a massive invasion land war for whatever cause, there is a shit ton of stuff on stockpile and the production can be rapidly scaled up by experienced personnel training fresh recruits. That would be outright impossible to do if there were no experienced personnel.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mystery-of-disappearing-hole...
Modern shipbuilders know all about that.
Smarter Every Day did a great video on that.
what's it?
Likely this one on the tooling & die industry, and the process knowledge that has evaporated from America over time. https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=SgZMaXmhydWHfb52
Probably this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDzBE6vz5r0
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.
'brittle' here, I interpret as: not simple to restore, the knowledge to get them stood up again is brittle. A bus factor of one, to get back in SWE parlance.
If that factory burns down or a forklift crashes into the machine, it might be gone with no chance of recovery because the knowledge is gone.
It is brittle, or at least it's got a limited life. When you don't have these things, you lose the knowledge that set up the system in the first place, and you can be SOL when something breaks. I'm not saying just change things willy-nilly, but if you don't have an active process of understanding and interacting with the way that your factory is set up, you're going out of business, you just don't know when.
> but some newer ecosystems can't understand.
The ecosystems are an approximation of the people that run them. The ecosystems want to get rich quick and cash out with no regard for economic sustainability in the medium or long term because that's what the people who run them want.
This is fascinating. I really don't know much about the world you're describing, so thank you for sharing your perspective.
Don't customer needs change over time? How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.
It depends on the item. Let's take this screw pitch gage: https://www.starrett.com/details?cat-no=155
Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're probably not making or selling very many of them. But they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock, and eventually they'll run out so they'll need to make new parts. Assuming low volume (I say this just in case I've accidentally picked the one weird thing that does sell like hotcakes), they're not going to spend any engineering time evolving that design. The input materials aren't going to stop being made. It is what it is, it does what it does, some people buy it, and so the name of the game becomes how do you make that specific thing they want with the least overhead? You use the same tooling you've used for the last 50 years. When you need a new batch of parts, you pull out that tooling, stamp out a bunch of leaves, and put the tooling away until you need it again.
There are many many manufactured items that fall into this category.
For those not familiar, Starrett has a reputation of quality. If you want the best you buy Starrett and pay the price. Often those Amazon alternatives are good enough, but often they have minor usability issues such that they are not as nice. Sometimes those Amazon alternatives are wrong in ways that matter and they can't be used at all.
> not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done.
For sure, but how do you know?
If it's only via:
> 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.
...then I worry about the efficiency of improvement. Sure, manufacturing equipment salespeople definitely are in touch with what consumers want ("Everyone is buying lamb now, buy our new breed of high-birth-rate sheep!"), but that's under the assumption that manufacturers never improve/iterate on their own processes ("Our farm is competitive because we've found that feeding sheep our special high-protein diet increases birth dates").
Rather than relying on the consumers-experimenters-manufacturers game of telephone, it seems likely to me that many manufacturing improvements have been driven by marginal tweaks/improvements made on the factory floor.
> For sure, but how do you know?
In actual engineering, one can work out the theoretical limits (strength, expansion, etc) and measure the current product's performance against the limits. A new widget-making machine or process cannot imbue widgets with physics-defying properties. Any fundamental improvements can only be made on the outside, auch as new alloys; but that would be an entirely different product, nor the one you've been selling for 40 years that your customers trust and love.
Improvement is usually done via competition. Sometimes the competition is price based, and sometimes quality based. In the best of worlds, both.
For example, there are a ton of cheap crappy woodworking tools. Think Stanley etc. They barely do the job if at all. Then there are a group of vendors like Wood River that constantly create newer tools that are much more expensive than what you find in a big box tool store. And then farther up the food chain are vendors like Lie Nielsen who craft luxury tools that are amazing to use.
This market segmentation extends to most tools; someone like Woodpecker comes up with a ton of clever tools for marking/measuring etc for woodworking, then others copy them. Oldest story in capitalism.
The manufacturing improvements in this process are non-stop. For some really good examples in consumer electronics, read "Apple in China" to see how China transformed into a power house in a relatively short amount of time.
Well, I would suggest if a thing is around that long and still does the job, it’s close enough to done. Something going missing in the pushback here is this is a physical machine shop. My grandfather was the shop foreman for a jewelry maker and he was intensely proud of the fact he was the one person on the floor who still had all his fingers. Intact. Different jobs have different ideas about good Developer Experience.
> 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.
I don't think "mucking around" is the correct perspective there.
It's hard to argue that most if not all of the recent innovations in manufacturing concern making chains more modulable, and easier and cheaper to modifywhich you could see as bringing manufacturing closer and closer to software engineering and this is probably to be even more true in the year to come.
Large scale automation using mostly wireless technology, easily reconfigurable pick-and-place machine and robot conveyor, cheap additive manufacturing, easy to use and cheap CNC machining with precision which were until recently limited to very expensive models, we are quickly getting to a point where configuring a mostly automated short run is both manageable and cost effective provided you have invested in the tooling and have the engineers able to put it in place efficiently.
I think that when people talk about bringing back manufacturing, most think Ford Model T assembly line in 1900 when the norm is quickly becoming a SpaceX-like pacing. That's basically what you are competing against in South East Asia and it sadly has far less need for an uneducated workforce than many expect.
That sounds catchy but I think it doesn't survive further inspection. People mucking around with machines and processes were rather instrumental in creating lathes, steam power, rockets, computers, looms, software, CNC-machines and all those other puzzle pieces we have available to make stuff. They are also instrumental in developing those things further.
I'm also kind of curious as to know what kind of machine shops you base this on. Most production companies, labs and even small fabricators I've seen have continued to develop and to optimize their infrastructure and processes. To take the numbers discussed here: 50 years ago, (C)NC machines, CAD and CAM were in their infancy. And that stuff certainly has changed some things in the world of fabrication.
Machine shops, and serious software shops don't fo their mucking about in prod. Any machine shop experimentation that takes fown the production line is like Google or Meta going partially or fully offline - which has happened - but is also financially painful, so they do all they can to avoid it.
I don't think it's weird, it's just a feature of their/our tools. For software people, experimentation is cheap and easy. Version control means rollbacks are easy and fast. If you do break something, completely rebuilding the application from scratch is something that happens dozens of times per day anyway. When trying a new tool, it arrives with almost no lead time and often at zero cost, so the only price is a few person-hours of work.
> 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.
> 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.
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
I find your perspective to be very software centric, and I expect many people who work in heavy industry to have a very different perspective about this.
I was on the implementation end of a considerable amount of industrial automation and technological advancement about 10 years ago. When we were on site the result of making mistakes started at the death of a team member. There were a plethora of things that could kill you horribly, falls, hazardous environment, rotating equipment, etc.
Yet we all survived overhauling processes in hundreds of plants. Working in hazardous environments isn't untenable, or even particularly difficult to do safely. In fact we worked at a much faster pace (with fewer mistakes) than corporate world I work in now.
> 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.
It's wild to think we used to build things to last decades. Now we build them to chase benchmarks for the next quarter
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
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?
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?
I don't want to be picky, but there is still a lot of value left in "not modern" tasks, like video encoding/transcoding. If somewhere the trickle-down effect is real, then it is computing hardware. Take Hetzner's server auction. If the hardware is physically deployed and running, you just need to find appropriate payloads/customers. https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
We have a box at work for employees bring hardware in they’re getting rid of, along with hardware we’re throwing out that we don’t need anymore.
It has a pile of GPUs that are completely obsolete for any task: they use way too much power, have a large form factor that burns up a PCIe x16 slot, are loud, some need extra power cables, lack driver support on modern operating systems, and in return for all that don’t have as much power as something much better you could get for $100.
Value on eBay seems to be about $10-$15, mostly for people with a retro computing hobby or people removing semiconductor components for other purposes.
An obsolete data centre isn’t worth much either. (We have a small one made from equipment being liquidated from local data centres that have been upgraded.) The power consumption is too high and it is not set up for efficient HVAC for modern ultra high power draw workloads.
The V100 is ~8 years old and AFAIK mostly not that common anymore, but the A100 is ~5.5 years old now and is still very commonly used, it's maybe the most common HPC cluster GPU. On the consumer side, 3090s are still very popular, representing a good balance between cost, performance and efficiency (this is mostly due to 4090s and 5090s being much more expensive).
The GPUs have a much shorter lifecycle, on the order of ~3 years.
Exactly, I'm a mechanical engineer and I still have tools given to me by my machinist great uncle from WWII that are not only functional, they're identical to a new tool I'd buy today for that purpose, from the same manufacturer. This is the difference the OP was highlighting
We've also been doing machining in the modern sense for at least a hundred and fifty years. The GPU as a concept is about 30 years old, and in the modern sense much younger than that.
Innovation occurs on a sigmoid curve, we're still very early in the sigmoid for software and computer hardware, and very late in the sigmoid for machining, unless you include CNC, in which case, we're back to software and computer hardware being the new parts.
A better example would be the tape out and lifetime for semiconductor fabs, which are only about 70 years old and have lifetimes measured in the decade range.
Interesting thought but is it that the sigmoid curve can represent the developments in SW and/or HW? To reach the saturation point we need to be able to define a system up to the point where there are almost no more unknowns (variables), no? I am thinking that this probably isn't possible in the context of {SW, HW}.
Are those tools functional? Have you ever checked? I'm not sure what tools you are talking about, but likely some of them are measurement tools and they can seem to work perfect while giving the wrong measurement. Other might be cutting tools that cut, but they are a bit dull and if you don't know how to check you won't realize the cuts are not as good as new anymore (or maybe you have sharpened them and they now cut the wrong profile...). There are many ways a tool can seem functional but be wrong.
> I'm not sure what tools you are talking about, but likely some of them are measurement tools
If you don't know something for sure, it's best to not make assumptions. We're not LLMs and don't need to spit out something confidently without understanding it.
Yes, and yes.
They are things like: -Measurement tools that can be checked easily against Measurement standards (its taught as good practice to check this anyway each use) -files -transfer punches -feeler gages (again, easily checked) -bore gages -gage pins - 123 blocks - on and on...
> but likely some of them are measurement tools
where and why did you come to this conclusion?
When someone says machine tools I assume it assumes the measurement tools. It doesn't have to, but you can't do much work without measuring. (unless you build to fit - which works okay but there is a reason it went obsolete 100+ years ago)
Why the but? Measurement tools are tools
No they don't. The 3 year number came from some random person on the internet who claimed to be a Google employee and was denied by Google, as you can see on any of the articles about this claim:
> Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware utilization and service life expressed by an “unnamed source” were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize Nvidia’s technology, and do not represent our experience.
So like, up to 100 months.
Data centre hardware is more like 3 years.
No they don't. 5-8 years is common. The source for the 3 year number is an unnamed random person claiming to be a Google engineer, and Google specifically reached out to all the journalists publishing that claim with this response.
> Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware utilization and service life expressed by an “unnamed source” were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize Nvidia’s technology, and do not represent our experience.
Data centers might be, GPUs not really. No one needs GPUs from 8 years, and hardly even 5.
A100s are over 5 years old and still widely used for HPC. 8 year old V100s are still available on cloud providers for low-intensity workloads.
It dropped down, but is now being extended to 5 years.
The 3 year number was reported by the FT this year from a bunch of companies, where they were saying their accountants are extending to 5 years.
Another example, MS just moved from 4 years to 5.
You are confusing depreciation (which is mostly driven by tax reasons) with service lifecycle.
And you're confusing all of these terms. The "3 years" is the standard warranty and typically gets extended to 5 years (and maybe 7 or 8 depending on the vendor). This is consistent with Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, etc. servers. Nvidia GPUs on the other hand...there likely could be different terms, but idk because they are not typical purchases for 95% of the companies who make server hardware purchases.
Source - I regularly work with IT departments and review their contracts as part of diligence.
A lot of these tax codes were written when computers were outdated within a year. The turnover of computers slowed a lot in the last two decades, but the tax codes haven’t changed.
> 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.
The heavy presses produced in 1955 are still in use today https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-pr...
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.
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
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.
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.
America will retire after AI?
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.
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.
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.
> There’s no economic sense to build a factory in the states…
That isn't how it works. Details matter.
A local factory can save a ton of money because it can be more just in time - you don't have to build excess because of shipping times. (shipping costs can also save a lot of money for a local factory).
The states have lots of cheap reliable power (not perfectly reliable, but close enough). If your production line is mostly automated (or could be) the states are cheaper - there isn't much labor anyway.
Production close to engineering makes for a lot of savings because when a part is designed you can get a prototype to testing faster.
there are lots of other factors, and most are not in the favor of local production but there are several that are. Where you fall is an optimization problem and there is no one right answer for everything.
> The states have lots of cheap reliable power (not perfectly reliable, but close enough).
Industrial electricity rates are pretty much the same in China and the US, from 8-9c/kWh. In both countries, however, electricity is going to face upward price pressure from AI datacenters.
> Production close to engineering makes for a lot of savings because when a part is designed you can get a prototype to testing faster.
This already exists in the US. In California, for example, there are many specialty prototype manufacturing companies that focus on this problem specifically. They are adjacent to the r&d firms designing the products.
That's not the type of manufacturing that the recent debate over reshoring is about. It's about production scale manufacturing - creating an American Shenzen with an equivalent amount of jobs - and very soon. But any such capability will be heavily automated, so it won't produce the equivalent jobs.
Tariffs are used all over the world for this exact reason, which is what is being attempted now. It will take time for it to pay off, more time than the current administration has, which is likely why business will drag their feet.
I think economic benefit goes beyond just having the lowest price. Having good jobs for people in the country means they have money to spend. If people make next to nothing, all they can afford is Temu quality. This is bad for the citizens, bad for US businesses, and bad for the environment. The only winner is China.
But there is a good jobs in the country. His brother has to travel 100 miles to work it.
Tariffs won't resolve this issue. Either the goods becomes too expensive to import and are made here or the aren't.
In the case that they're made here then some other good will no longer be produced (if you could magically make both then you would've in the first place). And so your citizens are worse off because they produce the same amount (or less) and pay more for it.
In the case that they're not made here then you just pay more in tariffs and are worse off.
The problem with global trade is that when you trade 10 apples for 10 bananas it doesn't need to be distributed to your citizens equally. So if you go from an economy producing 5 apples and 5 bananas where everybody gets one of each to one where 3 people get 8 apples and 10 bananas the other 2 get 2 apples the GDP still grew from 10 to 20 but people are worse off. Throwing in tariffs to get back to the 5 apples 5 bananas will cause a recession.
The better solution is to increase the top tax rate and redistribute 2 additional apples and bananas to the bottom 2 and then everybody is still better off.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out why Trump & Republicans want tariffs as opposed to a higher tax rate.
> minimum wage there pays for 10 people
More like 2-4 at this point, if we're talking about China.
Asian factories particularly China are deploying robots at a rate that puts the rest of the world in the shadows
> 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
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.
I watched some videos 10GTek published. Rather “boring” stuff of a life in the day of various employees.
But I was shocked by how efficient and modernised their factory was, including really rigorous quality control, advanced testing setups, dedicated jigs everywhere just for the testing… and then one video was of an office worker who spent her day making sure everything runs smoothly, juggling customers, orders for parts from vendors, and getting ahold of the right people when something was going wrong.
Incidentally none of my 10GTek stuff has ever failed.
From the American point of view there's something to be said for doing a job where the money is. Like you'll make more in finance or as an AI engineer than making stuff in a factory.
I London where I live you can't really afford to buy a house or things like that if you got a job manufacturing anything that's globally competitive which is why manufacturing is basically gone here and people get jobs in finance and the like. We used to have a factory in the London outskirts but it got knocked down and replaced with apartments long ago.
I don't know if it's addicted to easy money so much as the people earning easy money push up the cost of living and force others to do similar to afford to live in the same area.
Eh I wouldnt overstate this. I have seen production line videos from 2025 showing chinese workers hand assembling items.
Chinas value imho is that they are willing to take on shorter and shorter production runs. They have figured out retraining and logistics to the point that they can have 20 customers who only need 1000 - 12000 parts per year, on the back of their 3-4 flagship clients who keep the place running with scale orders.
There is a demographic implosion coming soon. You look at a video like this and count how many humans there are to make this $20-30 speaker and you realize that this $20 speaker is not going to be automated, its just going to go away as an option.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U
India will gladly accept those factories for a few decades.
If that's true then why hasn't India changed government policy to make it a more attractive location for manufacturing?
Because of socialism, go look at how its two socialist (and most industrial states) treat capital investment!
>Population implosion
Still fail to see evidence of that. I wouldnt go around making such a huge blanket statement, without even london horse manure crisis level evidence.
Here's the evidence. Not a sudden implosion but a slow decline that will particularly impact the younger population groups who have typically done most of the manual labor in factories.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts...
It really just depends. There might short/small runs which are easily automated, and there might be a large scale production which are not and need hand assembly. The very same product might see both during production – fully automated robots and hand assembly etc.
> 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).
I was thinking the issue might be its much better for factories to automate sections of production over time.
It must be a huge expense with risk to design a new factory, automate it end to end and push live hoping the market expectation for the product exists and the automation is as good as planned.
Whereas if you have a manual production line you could have a massive advantage as they can automate out sections ongoing and it allows engineers to build skills in this also as they go.
They're automating the production of many items not just cars
https://archive.ph/DuZGe
>The overall number of robots added in China last year was 295,000, compared to 27,000 in Germany, 34,000 in the US and just 2,500 in the UK.
Or you could have trade borders.
Not that I would doubt the guy who let Mike Tyson hit him in the head or anything, but don’t we have decades of research showing the negative effects of those?
Sure, decades of research by think-tanks hell-bent on pumping the assets of their sponsors at any cost to others.
"Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis is a good counterpoint.
I have never had anybody make this reference before!
Yeah, and you’re going to be poorer as a whole. People in backwards places like rural and urban ‘hoods live reasonably well with very low labor productivity relatively speaking.
I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia. Basic survival for rural poor is a car.
When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.
>I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia.
>People in backwards places like rural...
That's not actually true. You want to visit rural Asia and compare.
There are backward rural places in America. However the vast majority of rural people have had reliable electric since the 1950s, along with phone (though those lines may not longer work since everyone has gone cellular). They bought their first color TV in the 1960s like everyone else. They drive cars (the image of a red neck mowing his grass and finding a car - they drove that car 30 years ago, when it wore out they go a different one and quit driving it). Most of the backward in America are groups like the Amish who have every ability to be modern but choose not to.
In rural Asia there are a lot of people who don't have electric, they don't have cars.
Though I don't know why rural is even a topic here. Factories don't exist in rural areas, this exist in cities and towns where the workers live.
In the US? Whenever possible, we build industrial facilities in rural areas for a cheaper workforce and to avoid unionization. Meat packing is the textbook example. Distribution centers are the more modern one.
It’s always important to talk about rural citizens because politicians pretend that they don’t exist. The rural poor have a lot in common with the urban poor, but are separated both deliberately and by inertia.
>When you take away cheap clothes and cheap TVs, all made in modern Asian factories and replace them with shitty American products at 3x the price, the current populist movement will look like a party in comparison.
Would the rest of the world even care anymore? Everyone from Canada to New Zealand is now making plans for long term disconnection from the US. They will not let the next Trump boss them around like they have been this past year. The reputation is torched and so if the US launches another populist movement that leads nowhere and collapses the country as a result why should the other 95% of the planet care?
The other 95% of the planet has mostly been relying upon the USA as the global hegemon to provide the security guarantees and financial infrastructure necessary for large scale free trade since the end of WWII. If the USA steps back from that then global trade networks will gradually break down because no other country or stable coalition has the desire or resources to step into that role. The situation will revert to something more like what we saw pre-war when most trade was regional. New Zealand in particular is in a weak position as they are heavily reliant on agriculture exports, and lack any ability to project power beyond their own borders.
Nope… the US has been relying on the rest of the world to fund it's deficit, provide land for military bases to project it's 'power'
There’s interdependence, which is a system that benefits the world and the US. The US taxes the world with inflationary currency, and most of the planet has been relatively peaceful.
> I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia.
Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really claiming that American society is more primitive than that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu?
Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush toilets.
Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make. There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about an Indian man who found a math book and went on to define groundbreaking math from what he extrapolated. I don't know the details, but I don't think the film made that up.
I’m guessing Ramanujan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
20 years ago, we had a server named after him. It was always fun explaining how to pronounce it and the who exactly he was.
The Music of Primes by Marcus du Sautoy has a chapter on him
Book is a bit heavy going but well worth a read
A bit of googling suggests that the model for the mathematician in the film was George Dantzig, and he was actually studying mathematics at college level.
The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan fits your sentence, although early 20th C. He studied mathematics from a revision book he had access to in a small place in India then wrote a letter to GW Hardy a professor at Oxford with a range of new and strange results but expressed in the idiom of the revision book.
I don't necessarily agree with GPs, but I do think we're near the tipping point where the whole Eastern half of Asia combined is nearing or passing the Europe+US on the big progress-o-meter.
Some parts of East and Southeast Asia might have been working on paving roads and building schools even just one generation ago. To think they still are "like that" is legitimately an insult to them. That part is largely done and they're moving on.
This might be a shocker for you, but flush toilets are really not that big a deal compared to the Asian kind.
[dead]
> 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.
> Unions should do a better job of marketing to employers that they can supply a trained work force.
Unions need to quit their management is evil message as well. Unions can do good, but when they call all management evil and breed resentment I can't blame companies for not wanting unions around.
The above is US centrist - in other countries the Unions don't do this.
> 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.
> job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).
It rather feels lately like civilization is the project of putting up as many catch-22's as we can.
I have no involvement with the plant directly. My understanding is the best luck they had was getting in good graces with local probation officers & craigslist classifieds. Job portals were pretty useless from my understanding.
> the best luck they had was getting in good graces with local probation officers & craigslist classifieds.
I appreciate the answer. And I understand that you may not have more-granular info than this.
But I am wondering what how jobs were advertised prior to utilizing ProbOff/CL. Maybe the answer is this. There was no avenue to get job listings in front of the most likely eyeballs.
> There was no avenue to get job listings in front of the most likely eyeballs
Bit of an aside, but if anyone else is in this position and trying to reach the eyeballs of jobseekers who aren't actively using portals, I really can't recommend local Facebook groups enough.
A post from a real account (not the business) saying "Gizmo Plastics are hiring line workers for $18/h, anyone interested?" will get some guaranteed traction. In my small town Ontario groups, I've never seen a post looking for laborers go ignored.
Also they’ll do local job fairs on site, at local community colleges. You’d be surprised how many people still listen to FM in their car so ads go up there too locally.
Companies go to ManPower or other job staffing agencies when they need X number of low level employees or temps
> Companies go to ManPower or other job staffing agencies
Son #1 got employed there early but it turned out that a small group had a deal with management and got 100% of the work. New hires went out on one job immediately and then never again.
I don't understand why Craigslist is being framed as a some step down here (while probation clearly is). Craiglist is exactly where you instantly have many eyes on your ad and people will send in resumes without the bullshit filtering of the various portals.
Outside of an urban area, you won't necessary be overwhelmed with resumes. If you portray your job realistically, you'll get people realistically interested in your job.
Uh... The newspaper.
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.
Marysville
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.
I work in manufacturing. There are a few instances where watching YouTube may not be a huge hazard, but 98% of the roles I've seen the are reasonable reasons to not permit that. If nothing else, it'd be easy to let quality suffer which causes many bigger headaches.
I went to a panel discussion at a conference last year. Operations managers agreed labor was their biggest challenge. The manager for the promotional materials company who was probably around 60 discussed how he has loosened up a bit the last ~15 years. If someone sends a couple texts and it slightly impacts the units they (personally) do per hour, it was better than being super strict and losing employees. He had to adapt because the mentality was far different than when he started in the workforce.
He just needs to wait a decade, the Chinese workers will be retiring and will not be replaced. Entire product segments probably just go away or the inflation raises the table such that the managers situation now is the norm. Problem solved.
You seem obsessed with the “China population collapse” propaganda (which is put out by the usual suspects, btw). Anyways, I hate to break it to you, but this is also the trend throughout the entire Western world. Besides, automation and AI is going offset a lot of those worker losses (which is actually a win). And in 20 years the Chinese will still be giving birth to as many if not more people than the entire combine West.
That's true that West has population decline as well, but due to 1 child policy the decline in China is going to be much steeper.
I think mainly on the pensions side of things, and perhaps a lot of empty real estate and infra maintenance issues. But they will still be graduating more engineers than the West combined and in general, a better educated and more socially cohesive workforce. I think they are gonna be just fine, even if we don't like their political system (which will likely evolve, anyways).
China demographics are disastrous, this is not propaganda, it’s facts. That doesn’t mean western aren’t disastrous.
I agree it won’t matter too much, they’ll automate more so they won’t need this many people.
So how is that a disaster? Wasn't one of the big concerns a decade or go about over population? This means less agriculture required, more land for nature, less pollution, fewer energy needs, etc.
It's a disaster for China's economy in the long term unless they automate themselves, which they'll very much want to do. It isn't a disaster for the natural ecosystem obviously.
Want to do? They’re doing it now, and are ahead of the west in some processes already. It’s a made up concern because they are a geopolitical rival. And their economy is already a major success story; they’ve lifted something like 800 million people out of abject poverty in the last 25 years.
I don't disagree about the economic outcome today, but I don't understand how you can say that demographics issues are made up - either they are made up in the west, too, or they aren't. Nobody knows what will happen in the next 25 years, maybe nothing much, maybe we'll all be replaced by humanoid robots in the west, in the east and in the third world, too.
From my limited experience working in a factory environment, listening to music can be a real workplace safety issue if it reduces your ability to hear forklifts or coworkers shouting warnings.
that's not a problem if the people who will be interacting with fork lifts stay in designated areas as do the forklift operators. Nothing is ever going to b 0% chance of an accident but simply adhering to basic rules should keep people on an assembly line listening to spotify from taking a forklift to the knee. Have you ever worked on a factory floor at all? Sure some positions would be impossible but not for 80-90% of them.
Do you hire deaf people?
I always found the laws prohibiting drivers from wearing earplugs (some exemptions for motorcycles) and the like pretty funny.
US employers cannot discriminate against a deaf person and must make reasonable accommodations to make it safe for them to do their job.
US employers are not legally required to make accommodations for people who simply want to listen to music at work.
Today's vehicles already have a lot of sound deadening (and good stereos) and it is becoming a problem for emergency vehicles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lvTBmBDPno
> US employers cannot discriminate against a deaf person and must make reasonable accommodations to make it safe for them to do their job.
> US employers are not legally required to make accommodations for people who simply want to listen to music at work.
So it would be reasonably possible, but since it's not legally required they'd rather make their workers miserable for no benefit, and then complain how difficult it is to hire people?
Well, just because an employer can make reasonable accommodations for one or a few deaf people, doesn't necessarily mean that it would be reasonable or safe for the entire organization to operate in the same way. A "reasonable accommodation" could be something like a modified job role. E.g. you might move someone from a role that can't safely be done while deaf into a role that they could do. That's something that you could do for one or a couple of people, but you couldn't do for everybody.
I do agree with the sentiment that employers should take more efforts to make their jobs enjoyable to do. But some job sites have things that can kill people. The reason that heavy machinery beeps when it backs up is because people died at work before it did.
If you have even the slightest amount of situational awareness sound deadening or infotainment gizmos will not render you unaware of an approaching emergency vehicle. Scan your mirrors, scan your instruments, scan the horizon, repeat. The problem is unqualified, uneducated drivers.
Sound is great because it does not require line of sight. There's a reason why emergency vehicles have both lights and sirens, and it isn't because all of them have unnecessary equipment.
Agreed, but the root cause of the issue the emergency vehicle operator are noticing isn't sound deadening or infotainment gizmos, it's inattentive distracted drivers. Probably playing with their cell phones instead of driving. Similarly, in a manufacturing situation playing with your phone or watching tv is likely to cause problems. Inattention and inability to focus on the job is the problem. You can't solve that with technology, but you can with education.
Distracted driving is certainly a problem.
But, have you ever driven a quiet vehicle in an urban area where there are plenty of objects to block your line of sight? It is quite easy for a emergency vehicle to sneak up on you in a modern vehicle even when you are paying attention.
It's really a simple relationship -- if you block sound, it makes it harder to hear things.
This is exactly the reason why newer emergency vehicles have things like rumbler sirens. These sirens don't do anything to make people more attentive, but what they do is generate frequencies that are more likely to penetrate into modern vehicles.
> Do you hire deaf people?
I think you may start to understand the requirement once you realize the issue is where attention is and is not placed, instead of what sense is being exercised.
I mean, think about it. The recommendation was to consume forms of entertainment. In the factory I worked, there was a mandatory safety rule where you were required to establish eye contact with forklift drivers. Why is that a requirement?
Funny - eye contact is my "secret" to crossing the road in places like south east asia
Music might be allowed - though the factory is often loud enough that it isn't really practical. You still need to be able to hear the safety signals though.
YouTube cannot be allowed - you need to be ready to work when the line moves the next part to you. There are also safety concerns with watching youtube instead of the various hazards which are always there.
Listening to music should work, no pun intended. Watching YouTube though?
Yeah I guess it’s probably not realistic for most factory jobs. I am just thinking that “get paid $20 an hour to do a simple task and watch YouTube/listen to music” is actually kind of appealing to many people.
This is a lot of security guard and front desk jobs. if a boss doesn't like smartphones on the job, I know people who read books or knit between tasks.
When I was 18 I got paid below minimum wage to sit in my car delivering pizzas while listening to the radio. Far better than the higher paid shop job I tried at university.
Today with not just unlimited music (with no adverts), but the vast amounts of audio books you can listen to, it's even more appealing for people with limited financial obligations.
Having worked at a very simple factory job that involved hot-pressing plastic-aluminium film into shapes, yeah, that would end badly. It's unskilled job, that doesn't mean it's mindless.
If you look away from your job you might lose a finger,.. or *gasp* even worse, stop production!
> Watching YouTube though?
Yeah, I can't make that work. Only my most routine work can be done with the TV on (and providing it's my 5th rewatch).
It's a matter of habit and personal traits.
I grew up doing homework with the TV on and still sometimes work with a tiny video overlay showing some anime or tv show.
You basically pay attention to a small part of it, and switch focus as needed (pause your task or pause the video). You'll still miss a lot of the video but you just don't care.
I know this is unthinkable to some people but I've met more than one person who does it, so it's not ultra-rare. Possibly related to ADD/ADHD? I don't know.
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...
The job being monotonous is clearly enough of a downside that significantly higher pay and benefits are needed to attract talent.
Paying higher wages might help retain employees (or not! there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay) but doing so could easily increase costs to the point where your product is uncompetitive in the market. It also might just be worth having higher turnover in order to keep prices low.
We need actual data to decide how significant is "significant." Otherwise you will just have businesses complaining no one wants to work for "significantly" higher pay (a whole $0.05/hour more).
I’m sorry but this is a ridiculous take. $0.05/hr is $104 a year for a full-time job. Zero people are going to have that be the tipping point for them to take on a monotonous, often physically draining job that they’d otherwise turn down.
You underestimate the low end of the labor market. People may not jump for a nickel, but they absolutely will for $0.25-0.30.
Yes that is my point. What business owners consider "significant" and what sane people consider significant are often quite different.
A lot of folks like repeatable, monotonous jobs. They can loose themselves in a trance doing the same thing for hours.
The problem is that American bosses will never hire these kind of people. They can never pass the interview game.
Except you can't just zone away in a factory job. Workers need to pay attention if they don't like injuries. It the job doesn't need much skill, it doesn't necessarily mean it's easy or safe.
there are jobs people just won’t keep doing no matter the pay
I do not believe this common claim.
Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where more people will decide to do some job. But for practical purposes the pay needs to be in line with still being able to price your products competitively in a global marketplace.
Even $10,000/yr more might not be enough to move the needle all that much on a job that’s backbreaking, monotonous, and with little prospects for career growth. Especially if you have a limited pool of applicants due to your location.
Obviously there is some ludicrous threshold of pay where more people will decide to do some job
Ludicrous only from the perspective of the employer. Everyone wants something for nothing.
The fact is that regular Americans (i.e. not exploited, immigrant labor, or oppressed out-groups) used to do manual labor and manufacturing in the United States. They took pride in their labor. People haven't changed, the economics have.
As for your last paragraph, the oil fields have been able to meet their need for employees for the most part, and that ticks every one of your undesirable factors. So what gets workers there? Pay.
You used to be able to buy a nice house in the suburbs with car in the garage and a white picket fence, support a stay-at-home wife with three kids, put them all through college, and take annual vacations to Disneyland or the Caribbean, and cover the healthcare needs of the whole family, all on the salary of a high school educated factory worker. Now all that sounds impossible. You’d have to pay factory workers well into six figures for a lifestyle like that.
What happened? Cost disease [1]. All of the big ticket things in that lifestyle (except for the car) skyrocketed in price relative to inflation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
That was never the reality for most factory workers. Usually the car was cramped with a single bathroom, the wife picked up some part-time work, most vacations were road trips to go camping, and not all the kids went to college. Inflation and growing income inequality are legitimate problems but let's not paint an unrealistic picture of "the good old days".
Obviously it was only for white people. And for sure not a regular factory worker who is doing simple tasks. Maybe floor manager...
Not a sprinter van clearly if it was cramped with a single bathroom.
Whoops too late to edit I meant house.
Pay, plus a willingness to hire workers who might not be tolerated in other jobs due to background check issues or HR policy violations. (I am not claiming this is necessarily a bad thing.)
Theoretically, an utterly horrible job with great pay would attract a lot of workers who do it for some time to get a financial boost before moving on.
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).
I bust out loud laughing the other day when I saw two jobs listed here in rusty southern Ohio.
One was for a semi-skilled manufacturing position. A little more than just assembly line, but nothing super special or niche. The other was a janitor position at the local public school system.
The differential was not huge, but the janitor paid more. Probably less hours too.
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.
“MBA shrinkflated garbage”
I’m definitely going to find a way to slip this into a conversation.
> 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.
The issue is of course there is no market for US made goods at a good salary when other countries were selling their goods in the US market without impediment.
Tariffs were supposed to fix that, but now I don’t know if they are effective at all.
Yes that is usually point of the tariffs. Not this time as they are too broad (include products like coffee) and not stable (announced one day than delayed/dismissed etc.). Point of tariffs that current regime made is to destabilize both domestic and foreign markets.
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
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I think you're being too hard. Working at a Wal-Mart is much easier than a factory job, considering the latter is usually dangerous, and has more RSI risk.
It'd have to pay at least double, and me being in a predicament, for me to gamble with my health, and only until I find a better option.
> There's nothing wrong with "western workers"
Yeah nothing other than not being willing to work 9/9/6 for $2/day
Some jobs are just inherently bad. People do them, if there are no better jobs available. If you increase the wage, people will do the job for a while, until they have reached sufficient financial stability. Then they can afford to switch to another job that pays less but provides a better quality of life. Or to retire early in extreme cases.
That's fantastic! Wouldn't it be tyranny to make people spend their whole lives doing such a job? It's good that people do it for a while for a good wage and then move on.
It's not enough to do the job. You also need to produce value. Many attempts at onshoring production fail, because employee attrition is too high. Costs are high, productivity remains low, and the quality of the products may also be low.
What is your alternative, except slavery?
> 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.
It's all full time 4x10 work with the employer covering 100% of health insurance premiums.
There's somethhing you're not telling us or not being honest about.
It's common. People would rather work in a Wal-Mart as it is more social and less demanding. The physical space is nicer.
It’s probably the hours. A lower middle class income is not worth losing my every waking hour over.
Decent chance given that it's a plastics plant probably not unionized and probably in a red state that the air is not healthy to breathe.
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.
I’m not the OP. Heavy labor is… a lot of work. It’s rough in the body and some people aren’t cut for it.
In the 90s as a high school kid, I made $14/hr as a farmhand when the minimum wage was $4.75. They’d hire 4 crews of 4 guys each and we’d lose about half through the summer. They were great family to work for, but the work was hella hard. You could go retrieve shopping carts for $4.75 an hour and smoke weed all day, and many of my former coworkers did.
That just tells me that the pay was bad for the job.
If job A pays 80k and job B pays 100k, but job A is 40h and job B is 60h, then job B pays worse. They pay more but not better.
They wrote per hour rates though, it is just more difficult per hour
I'm not sure I agree. Tariffs adds cost, unless domestic manufacturing can be done in a more or less cost effective way. Manufacturing works benefit of course but that's a overall small proportion of the population and ought to be (we probably don't want most people to be doing manufacturing work). But the added costs end up be a tax on everyone and a regressive one at that.
I also don't see offshoring manufacturing as inherently problematic or being out of sight, out of mind (of course exploitation can happen, but that's not inherently a part of offshoring manufacturing).
Workers in China, Vietnam etc are paid significantly less, but their cost of living is less as well. Plus unlike in the west, where manufacturing jobs are not desirable, in places where those manufacturing jobs land they typically provide an economic opportunity that isn't otherwise there.
Basically, why not have high cost of living places produce higher cost goods that pay more, and low cost of living places produce lower cost goods that pays less?
why does this arbitrage exist? Why is the cost of energy, the fundamental input into every economy, cheaper in Asia? Tractors consume fuel, fertilisers do too. Human labour is the least efficient at converting fuel into energy. When you dig a little deeper, you'd find an economy structured around keeping rentiers away from the basics: housing, energy and food.
Wrong. Kids brains are fried from phones / social media so much that they struggle with repetitive labor.
I see this all the time at an automotive plant. UAW wages are good, especially after the last contract, but we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an hour straight before their break or task switch.
So are you saying China doesn't have smartphones or social media?
UAW wages are "good" but you have to realize that you are competing with a service economy's leftover labor pool. All the good candidates left your manufacturing town already to get a job in an office tower where "good" UAW wages aren't really much to write home about.
For the last multiple decades graduating students have been facing a declining manufacturing job market where it makes just about no sense to get into manufacturing when they can get a degree and work a desk job with better pay and actually be in a job market that's growing over time rather than shrinking.
UAW wages are "good" but only compared to other jobs that are probably in the bottom 50% of desirability, and you're under constant threat of plant closures or the shift toward non-union plants in places like Alabama and South Carolina.
And oh yeah, you're stuck in some declining semi-rural rust belt manufacturing town rather than getting to live your best life in a vibrant growing urban area.
A full 35% of Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher, and those numbers are even higher when you are looking at states/counties that have the major population centers. The county map makes it look like basically every urban area has at least 40-50% bachelor's degree attainment, with standouts like the Boston area having some counties with over 60% attainment.
Almost 30% of Americans work remotely at least some time during the week.
So, basically half of the urbanized population has better options than working in a factory.
In China, working a factory is being compared to a much worse prior standard of living that was much more recent. Today's factory workers were yesterday's subsistence farmers. Americans haven't experienced that level of widespread poverty in at least 100 years.
> we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an hour straight before their break or task switch.
That seems wholly reasonable to me. Expecting humans to be able to do work like that, and especially to get satisfaction from such work, seems like the aberration.
Then long hours of repetitive labor are a skill which needs to be attracted for.
finally a positive framing on social media addiction
“Get addicted to this phone, son, or you’ll end up working in a factory!”
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)
Typically as economies advance there is a shift to services and higher value add / higher skill manufacturing anyways. That can be the explicit strategy for the US as well. Focus on renewables, high tech, aerospace etc instead of the lower margin / lower skill manufacturing.
They're not mutually exclusive of course. There can be some national protection via tariffs on some types of manufacturing, while investing in automating some other types and just completely ignoring others and keeping those offshore. Problem currently is there doesn't seem to be a much of a strategy.
The USA and the west in general is 40 years deep into this crisis and recent developments have not actually made a shift in that trajectory.
It seems like the US in particular isn't able to pick one path and stick with it. The shift towards services has already happened. But investment in silicon, renewables etc is on again off again. There now seems to be a desire to bring all manufacturing jobs back to the US, although it's not clear who wants this or why. e.g. who actually wants clothing and toy manufacturing back in the US?
So we have a set of ad hoc policies (or EOs), that don't seem to have an overarching goal.
A great deal of investment in renewables just meant importing solar panels and wind turbines from China that will wear out in 19 years. Outside of a few jobs in trucking to moving parts and a few jobs to install them, it does not create a solid labour base nor good careers.
I certainly want clothing manufacture back in the U.S. with a focus on using renewable (ie. not microplastic based) textiles to make articles of clothing that don’t wear out in a year or two. I have a handmade pair of pants I bought at a local thrift store that were locally made from domestically produced denim. Got them for $4. New ones from the person who makes them would be around $40-$75. They are custom fitted to you, although I got lucky and the thrift store had one in exactly my width and height.
So far they don’t have any rips, years, and the cuffs aren’t fraying.
My brand new Levi’s and Wrangler’s have fraying cuffs and are much more prone to getting tears because of the thinner fabric. They also seem to stretch after washing or wearing them a long time and then don’t fit as well.
Toys? I want toys for my kids that aren’t full of lead or cadmium, and are something besides battery operated beeping rubbish or something with a screen. I’m glad to pay $25 for a wooden toy. I bought one locally made in Chico, CA at a store called “Chicomade” where everything was locally made.
I don’t see why fast fashion with clothes you need to throw out sooner due to planned obsolescence and plastic trash toys.
> it's not clear who wants this or why. e.g. who actually wants clothing and toy manufacturing back in the US?
Politicians who are optimizing for votes from a large and ignorant base that hasn’t thought through any of this.
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.
Japan used that strategy very successfully for at least a century. The high cost of imported goods encouraged consumers to buy domestic at prices that were also high, which subsidized exports at competitive prices. The Japanese public is less docile now, but this is one example where import restrictions worked well. I believe you can find other examples from the 20th century, but I'm not sure whether they would work well in the current global environment.
They also became experts at automation and at producing high quality goods.
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.
My sister has been at a family owned small factory for 30+ years now. Eventually loyalty to family becomes a thing, especially when they’re loyal to you.
They are gradually not replacing staff as they retire or the occasional person quits on the factory floor due to automation. Their biggest challenge is who will own it in the future - the son and grandson have fully taken over from the founder, but nobody else in the family is really interested.
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
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.
Without post WW2 taxes.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the extra wealth ends invested in the house market. This increases the cost of terrains for both old and new homes. It is also not very productive just to buy one thing to extract rents from it. ( There is value in handling the rent, building or reforming and old house).
The urban land is limited and requires government infrastructure to connect it.
Another big cost is the university.
Agreed. For that economy to come back, you need all possible competitors to be weak and poor, in the mid 20th century that meant either still agrarian (China) or rebuilding after war (Japan and Europe). It was a unique moment and it's never coming back.
China wasn't a factor in global economics until the 90s, and Europe only was relevant for US growth for a very short time following WW2 and the Marshall Plan.
This doesn't make any sense at all. The reason China is dominant in manufacturing isn't because the other countries of the world were weak and agrarian and rebuilding after war.
What would be awesome is if half-assed finance bro speeches weren't being thrown around as serious macro.
They were talking about economic boom, not manufacturing dominance.
You won't hear me say that the housing market doesn't need an overhaul, but I'm not sure that the "a factory job could buy you a home out of high school" meme is entirely accurate. If you look at home ownership rates, the rates today are higher than (though not by much) the rates in the 1960s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
I can't find numbers from earlier than 1980, but 18-44 _is_ lower, though again the rate in 1980 was just a few percentage points higher, and not nearly high enough to imply that home ownership out of high school was in reach for the majority: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf
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
Conservatives don’t want unionized labor - they want 1890’s style manufacturing at best, no unions and rampant exploitation of labor. At worst, no people in the factory of any sort - dark factories end to end. There’s little room in the conservative morality for people not working, or for people who are working.
Can we not call those people "Conservatives". There is very little conservative about them.
You are correct and I sincerely apologize. I have always had immense respect for my conservative peers. This is something else carrying the mantle of conservative, cowing the conservatives to silence.
>Why on earth are we trying to bring it back?
The main argument would be if you are relying on other countries and you can't produce anything yourself then you need to rely on other countries being good trading partners. If the relationship with those trading partners fails your economy is in trouble.
What does that actually look like, though? And at what cost?
No single country can produce everything it currently imports much less compete globally on every product.
Does the government just prop up every industry with subsidies? Or use tariffs to make everything as expensive as domestic goods?
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.
They don't realize that making good money in a factory was due to a particular tech/economic environment and the US' position inside it.
People thinking they can go back to making good money in a widget factory is like thinking because you had an ascendant economy in 1836 exporting wood before global electrification, then that lucrative job is always waiting for you even in 2025.
What's missed in that nostalgia: the house was crap; the appliances, if any, were crap; the car(if you had one, and only one), was crap. On and on.
Homer Simpson exemplifies this. Heres a guy that never went to college being the lead safety inspector for a nuclear power plant. He owns his home with three kids a stay at home wife and two cars and two pets(with the occasional elephant that comes and goes). A lot has changed since the writing of these characters and the world now.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp2Ey0H7OUE
My go-to example is Al Bundy. He was a loser, but most zoomers can only dream of having a house, a few kids, a car project in the garage et cetera
That guy did retail shoe sales too. I’ve known some people to survive off those type of jobs, but they sure as hell weren’t living with a sitcom family in the burbs.
Yes absolutely! I was never too much into Married with Children as a kid hence I jumped straight to the simpsons but the idea of a shoe salesman having all of that today? Not possible.
Back then before manufacturing jobs were sent overseas
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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.
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.
Russia doesn't need to use nukes for that.
clearly they do
> So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet?
Russia is not fighting for their survival in Ukraine, even though Ukraine is.
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.
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.
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.
But you don't have to build it yourself.
If China wants to play hardball then Vietnam can make the goods. This is the great system we had until Trump decided he'd piss off every country. We had a very much you vs the world when doing diplomacy as USA but now it's just you vs USA which is a much weaker position.
There won't always be a Vietnam or an India.
Chinas been around for a few thousand years, what's something they can do that nobody else has been able to replicate?
There's always a Vietnam.
Even now with all the talk about "rare earth minerals". They're not rare, everybody has them, its just nobody else wants to pollute their rivers mining and refining them when China is willing to.
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.
> China disintegrates into another civil war within the next few decades
I'm curious about your reasoning on this. China was not the one at the top of my list of "Major world powers likely to have a civil war sooner than later"
Agree. At this point, a civil war is more likely in the United States than in China.
> 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.
also a literal gold rush
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.
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
So funding research education and renewable energy would be the move as a country right .... ?
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.
AI labor fixes this.
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.
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).
This is eerily similar to the Enron business model... @.@
They orchestrate partners!
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.
> 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!
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.
thats not true. in most manufacturing industries we produce fewer units than we did 20 or 30 years ago, and in most of those industries the total value produced has been pretty flat. this is something a lot of economists have known about all along. you can read about it here:
https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/10/03/how-gdp-hides-indust...
down is down
Hardly a boom.
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
He's your captain, not mine. I prefer intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate, moral people to random rich guys who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
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
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.
And AI does not create anything, compared to factories.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And it's a nice problem to solve with AI of many kinds because you can forward-solve the kinematic solution and check for "hallucinations": collisions, exceeding acceleration limits, etc. If your solution doesn't "pass", generate another one until it does. Then grade according to "efficiency" metrics and feed it back in.
As long as you do that, the penalty for a a slop-based fuckup is just a less efficient toolpath.
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.
> existing manufacturing automation requires that specificity due to technical constraints
Rather the opposite, I'd say: existing manufacturing automation is built around repetitive motions because an assembly line is making multiples of the same product. Having AI reinvent the wheel for every individual item is completely pointless.
One-off manufacturing can to a certain extent be automated. We're already seeing that with things like 3D printing and dirt-cheap basic PCB assembly. However, in most cases economies of scale prevent that from widespread generalization to entire products: ordering 100 or 1000 is always going to be have significantly lower per-unit costs than ordering 1, and if you're ordering 1000 you can probably afford a human spending some time on setting up robots or optimizing the design for existing setups.
There are undoubtedly some areas where the current AI boom can provide helpful tooling, but I don't expect it to lead to a manufacturing revolution.
What if everything in the economy could be efficiently produced through one-off manufacturing methods? This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately as i've been working on 3d printing/CNC/aluminum casting.
It avoids the need for any sort of parts shipping, and can be easily retooled to make war machines in a time of emergency (which is one of the motivations to bring back american manufacturing).
The main problem with this is that you still need surface-mount components if you are going to make PCBs, and you still need magnets to make motors, etc.
I think you could make an analogy to the difference between ASICs and general-purpose CPUs. ASICs are great, but CPUs have flexibility and massive economies of scale. Similarly, a specialized machine might be more efficient than a humanoid robot at a particular task, but advanced humanoid robots could theoretically do all the tasks and as a result would likely end up being manufactured in very high volume.
Imagine a future where any hardware startup could design and provision an assembly line as easily and cheaply as software startups today use cloud computing. Maybe after a certain scale it becomes economical to consider replacing steps of the manufacturing process with "ASIC" solutions, but maybe there'd be a long tail of things which would continue to remain best served by general-purpose robots indefinitely.
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 at odds with everything I know about manufacturing robotics, having worked with people doing that work. The complexity of the environment is irrelevant because the robot is programmed to make a specific motion and to adjust that motion in predictable ways based on the appearance of specific features. That is by design, not because (or at least not just because) the robot is incapable of planning its own motion. The whole system is designed to be predictable instead of adaptable because that's what you need to do to do the same thing millions of times.
> The whole system is designed to be predictable instead of adaptable because that's what you need to do to do the same thing millions of times.
That final "millions" is the problem. Automation is great and easy when you will do the same thing millions of times. Sure it might cost half a million to program the robot (which itself cost half a million) - but that is $1.00 per part, and it goes down as you make more. When you are only building 10 though a million dollars is a lot of money and so you want humans - or robots that are "CAPABLE of plannings its own motion".
Costs have been going down. In high school I took the class on how to write g-code (I have one free period so I took shop for non-college bound kids for fun even though I was college bound - it was a great time that I highly recommend even though it was only for fun). These days almost everyone just uses their CAD/CAM and isn't even aware that the g-code is supposed to be a human readable programming language. (it probably isn't)
> 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.
Not really. The robots are programmed by having a human manually guide it, so the robot itself doesn't really have to do any navigation - it just has to follow a predefined path.
Want to install different variants of dash components? Split it up into methods and have the robot return to a neutral position after each method. You're literally programming it.
And yet China already has 100% automated vehicle production lines.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/12/why-western-...
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.
I beg to differ. Journalists are supposed to do their own investigation and analysis of the people, institutions, and events that they report on. If they just parrot the talking points of executives, then they’re producing advertisements, not journalism.
Fair, but there have never been very many journalists in the world. Between lazy fact checkers and there being more money in sensationalist reporting (My American history classes covered this back in the 1800s, and I have no doubt other history classes of earlier times will as well) there has never been much.
They've been trained by a decade of referring to advanced cruise control as "full self-driving".
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.
> The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative.
Yes! I'm pretty sure the guy working his ass of at the factory does so because brain surgeon doesn't pay enough...
Is this the next version of "trickle down economics"?
> Those goods should be cheap as well because they are mass produced with little labor costs.
If only. In reality they'll be as expensive as they can make them without completely killing sales, just like they are right now.
> The only ones who lose are those who are want to do boring work instead of something creative.
Aren’t the creative jobs also being taken by LLMs and image generators?
> This is great for ordinary Americans.
If that's true, why isn't unrestricted immigration[1] good for them? It means that the citizens don't have to do the boring immigrant jobs, but still get the benefits for vast amounts of immigrant-produced goods and services.
The only ones who will lose out are ones who 'want to'[2] do the boring immigrant jobs.
AI can't just handwave all this shit away because 'technology good'. Whether or you agree with these concerns or not, there's a massive backlash from various flavors of nativists about jobs. Why isn't it directed at all of these pie in the sky AI promises?
---
[1] Or, you know, just buying imports from China. What difference does it make to me where a factory is located, when that factory doesn't employ me or my neighbours? The people collecting profits from it aren't going to share them with us.
[2] What does it mean to 'want to' do a 'boring' job? Rent's due in two weeks, 'wants' don't enter into it much.
Unrestricted immigration is good - they just want a 'boogyman' to blame unrelated problems on.
Sarcasm much I hope
The truth. If you think otherwise you have been mislead by people who have been good at pushing a narrative and never been challenged.
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563018 - October 2025
Was Made in China 2025 Successful? [pdf] - https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/Was-Made-in-China... - May 5th, 2025
ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker: The rewards of long-term research investment - 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.
Decision makers are certainly quicker to opt for workforce reductions in response to tariff uncertainty / high interest rates, because they believe that LLMs can pick up the slack.
EDIT: To the idiots downvoting: Why?
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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.
The world will bow down to mandatory cookie banners
Cookie banners are ePrivacy directive, not GDPR. GDPR is a lot more.
See here for all the rights it grants you: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/i...
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.
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.
The very idea that AGI will arise from LLMs is ridiculous at best.
Computer science hubris at its finest.
Why is it ridiculous that an LLM or a system similar to or built off of an LLM could reach AGI?
Because intelligence is so much more than stochastically repeating stuff you've been trained on.
It needs to learn new information, create novel connections, be creative.. We are utterly clueless as to how the brain works and how intelligence is created.
We just took one cell, a neuron, made the simplest possible model of it, made some copies of it and you think it will suddenly spark into life by throwing GPUs at it ?
If AGI is built from LLMs, how could we trust it? It's going to "hallucinate", so I'm not sure that this AGI future people are clamoring for is going to really be all that good if it is built on LLMs.
Because LLMs are just stochastic parrots and don't do any thinking.
Humans who repeatedly deny LLM capabilities despite the numerous milestones they've surpassed seem more like stochastic parrots.
The same arguments are always brought up, often short pithy one-liners without much clarification. It seems silly that despite this argument first emerging when LLM's could barely write functional code, now that LLM's have reached gold-medal performance on the IMO, it is still being made with little interrogation into its potential faults, or clarification on the precise boundary of intelligence LLM's will never be able to cross.
Call me back when LLMs stop "hallucinating" constantly.
Which novel idea have LLMs brought forward so far?
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
The AGI argument assumes there is a 0 -> 1 moment where the model suddenly becomes "AGI" and starts performing miraculous tasks, accompanied by recursive self-improvement. So far, our experience shows that we are getting incremental improvements over time from different companies.
These things are being commoditized, and we are still at the start of the curve when it comes to hardware, data centers, etc.
Arguing for an all-in civilization/country bet on AGI given this premise, is either foolish or a sign that you are selling "AGI"
All of that stuff takes time and resources. Self-improvement may not be easy, e.g. if they end up in a local maximum that doesn't extend, and it probably won't be cheap or fast (if it's anything like frontier LLMs it could be months of computation on enormous numbers of cutting-edge devices, costing hundreds of millions or billions, or it may not even be possible without inventing and mass-manufacturing better hardware). Another company achieving a slightly different form of AGI within a few years will probably be at least competitive, and if they have more resources or a better design they could overtake.
Wait, but why would an AGI be better at improving itself compared to an AI researcher doing it?
AGI is not super intelligence.
Unless AGI includes a speed requirement, AGI is not sufficient to win the market. Take any genius in human history, the impact they had has been hugely limited by their lifespan, they didn’t solve every problem, and each discovery took them decades. The first AGIs will be the same, hyper slow for a while, giving competitors a chance to copy and stay in the race
These companies already have access to the best meat-brains in the world and what tasks do they work on? Advertisement mostly?
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.).
Oh, so the goal is to create an insane and predatory piece of software that is out of the control of its creators? Sounds wonderful.
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.
Thats a nice assertion, but do you have any facts?
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.
> 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
So agi before autonomous tesla? "Just two more years guys I promise", how can people keep falling for these lol
There is a beautiful irony in your misspelling of Anno Domini as Anno Domani, for the Italian speakers in the room.
It's just as possible that they need to invest more and more for negligible improvements to model performance. These companies are burning through money at an astonishing rate.
And as the internet deteriorates due to AI slop, finding good training material will become increasingly difficult. It's already happening that incorrect AI generated information is being cited as source for new AI answers.
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.