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Comment by daedrdev | Hacker News Reader

The truth is that a lot of current American manufacturing sees little investment / engineering towards the automation that could save it and is in a holding pattern where it will eventually be shut down or moved to a country with cheaper labor costs.

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Automation has been buoying it. We are producing as much as we have in the past but at 10% of the workforce.

It’s a completely financial thought process. Nobody is going to invest capital to make pencils 7% cheaper when I can dump money in monkey NFTs and yield a big short term gain. China has incentives to make pursuing those opportunities attractive.

The glory days of manufacturing that people think of are their grandparents union jobs in the 1960s. The problem is the leadership people like Musk and Bezos are thinking more 1860 than 1960 :)

Seems like that already happened for industries susceptible for that. You don’t need ai to automate a factory. You could do that by 1950. Labor costs have been cheap elsewhere for a while too. Plenty of manufacturing already left for these reasons. What remains stateside probably has some sticking factor that is highly context specific and impossible to generalize.

Last time I visited a Chinese factory (which was before covid) it was heavily automated without much staff. They also did have a few foreign laborers who didn't speak the local language, ironically.

I visited a US factory more recently,o and it was all about A.I., automation, and engineers (who maintained and operated the robots). Availability of cheap unskilled labor was not a relevant factor in the business.

This is known as Lights-Out Manufacturing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)

Aside from what happened in 2008, American manufacturing has effectively only ever grown by leaps and bounds, even while manufacturing jobs have cratered. It is quite apparent that American manufacturing has fully embraced automation where it is sensible to do so.

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