I toured Unitree's factory. I'm more bullish on the West
josef.cn
josef.cn
1) Unitree robots are largely made by hand.
2) Labor is approximately 8% of cost of manufacturing these robots. Because these costs are not prohibitive, there is little incentive to automate.
3) Labor costs are higher in America.
4) Therefore, American companies have higher incentive to automate.
5) Therefore, the West will capture most of the robotics opportunity.
Arguments 1-4 are reasonable, but 5 is a non-sequitur. Higher incentive to automate does not imply a better ability to automate & scale manufacturing.
I believe Unitree is currently assembling robots by hand for practical reasons:
1) Labor is still relatively cheap.
2) Humanoids and robots are evolving rapidly, changing every few months.
3) Custom assembly lines are expensive, and become obsolete when the product changes. It's difficult to maintain an assembly line when the product is rapidly evolving.
4) Tooling is inadequate. Some robotic parts are delicate, complicated, and difficult to automate manufacturing of. American companies have hit the exact same problem: Tesla is assembling the hand/forearm of Optimus by hand because it hasn't figured out how to automate manufacturing them. https://www.theverge.com/tech/1016492/tesla-optimus-robots-p... . Apparently, Tesla has hundreds of handless Optimus robots just standing around, waiting for hand manufacturing to catch up.
5) Demand is still relatively niche, these are not mass market products. Unitree only sold 5,500 robots last year. There is not enough demand to justify massive automated lines.
The author also ignores the biggest counterpoint: the Chinese have already demonstrated mastery in automated manufacturing, and have proven they can run dark factories (factories without humans) at a better scale than the west.
When humanoid robots become a mass market product (they are not ready today because the software side is majorly lacking), Chinese manufacturers are in an excellent position to rapidly automate.
Motor winding is an amusing problem. Everybody making motors has a powered winder. It's handling the wire ends that can be either manual or automatic. If you look at videos of winders, automating the wire end handling is most of the machinery.
Here's an overview of winding automation:
Full auto, robotic transfer.[1]
Full auto, manual transfer [2].
Semi auto. [3].
Manual, powered. [4]
Manual, unpowered motor overhaul.[5] (Country girl in China who fixes motors and engines.)
Those winding machines are all from the same company, NIDE. You can buy as much automation as you want, depending on your labor costs. Option [4] is cost-effective if you can have one machine tender per machine.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FiCQX0y7-A
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wZvSem4Cd8
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4vqLxMlvk0
1. The terrible quality of the locally manufactured items. I am in Sydney and will absolutely not buy anything marked Made In Australia. I have been burnt too many times.
2. The nearly 100% mortality rate among the companies.
Australian made products unfortunately do not pass that initial hurdle..
No, that is only one customer. There need to be lots of customers for a company to survive. So, ideally you recommend, based on good quality.
You take a bit of a gamble if you need warranty or customer service later on.
Some sort of network effect again, I suppose. There's a better term that's can't find now.
Also really difficult to do, with huge tradeoffs depending on whether the construction is 2-core, 4-core, interpoled 4-core, coreless, slot-wound, salient poles, and many more configs and winding types. In particular cheap salient-pole motors can be wound directly with automated machinery while better slot-wound motors need to have the coils formed first, then inserted into the rotor slots, which is a manual process and complicated further by the fact that the coils are skewed to minimize torque ripple, no-one's really managed to automate that process yet.
So if you saw a factory making a mixture of salient-pole motors for toys and slot-wound motors for serious use you'd see exactly what TFA is describing, salient-pole automated, slot-wound with human operators.
If you want to see what real highly-automated Chinese manufacturing is like, look at one of Bunny Huang's videos on electronics assembly. Then for contrast look at the videos of how it's done in Pakistan.
Just to extend your point - chinese car manufacturers are not only producing more cars, they're innovating at a faster pace too. While I'm not an expert, there is enough and more on social media around this. Eg: https://x.com/dhh/status/2113500613082329576?a=fscIadYr4U1xm...
The key parts are R&D, design, intellectual property, engineering talent. The question is, how well are Chinese organizations doing in those capacities in regard to robotics. My impression is that the answer is, quite well.
The focus on manufacturing is (in many cases) a twisted approach of economics. In the mid-20th century the West did very well with mass production. It was an innovative technology at the top of the value chain. But in early-to-mid 21st century, it's (often) an old, ~commodity technology and the ROI is poor. It's also physically not good for workers in many cases. When looking for economic growth you want to aim for top of the value change, for the future, not what was done 70 years ago - it won't work the same way economically anymore. In economics, you can't return to what worked before.
But the economy is in equilibrium which means as this decreases, it's going to change the value of other things, and open the door for new things. Whoever can take what LLMs offer, and then most successfully build on top of that will probably be 'the winner.' I'm not sure exactly what this will translate to in practice, but it seems reasonable to predict that manufacturing is going to be a huge part of it.
"But as the cost of 'cognitive work' in general starts approach $0, the value of such, in and of itself, is also going to approach $0."
When the pirate party was big in EU, there was much talk about copying approaching the cost of 0, and therefor we would never pay for copying data, only creating new data.
I guess this all due to copyright law, and it will not disappear anytime soon, but still. I would not be too quick to draw that same conclusion.
Imagine all the work involved in, for instance, trigonometry and its basic applications in the past. And the later on with the advent of kinematics and so forth. These things involved a lot of computation and so there were literal human calculators whose job it was to work out all of the calculations.
But with the advent of electrical calculators, we literally no longer know that these jobs even existed. It's very easy to see the same in a future where, for instance, computer programs can be efficiently written from description alone. At that point the idea of a 'programmer' would seem like quite an odd concept.
I'd also look at what it did to the value of such work. Now computations, even quite complex, are mostly worth exactly $0. But we built extensive systems on top of those computations that became worth quite a lot indeed!
However, we do have Wikipedia. Wikipedia was never valued at the peak sales price of Encyclopedia Britannica times the number of people online, if it was it would be worth around $16 trillion.
But it's difficult to leap ahead from step 0 to step 3, as you need the gains from step 0 to achieve step 1, the benefits from step 1 to achieve step 2, etc. Some of those benefits are food, shelter, healthcare, education (hard to have engineers without it, for example), physical infrastructure, finance, honest and skilled government, etc.
Yes, absolutely. You can see many places have followed that path; you can skip the economic policy and technological R&D and just use mature solutions - South Korea and Taiwan, for example.
The 'cheating' - I assume you mean about IP - is nonsense to me. Who made the rules? The people who want to preserve their IP, and they would make different rules if they didn't have IP themselves. China didn't make those rules.
You're attributing that to Chinese business? Isn't that what enshittification is, an American capitalist vision?
It is the intention of Atomic Machines to make that not true.
The argument is that Unitree's assembly process is currently very manual because there is no incentive to automate, which is because labor cost isn't the bottleneck here, where in the US labor cost are much higher, therefore the US will have incentive to automate more. Those are reasonable so far, until you try to use that as a conclusion that this is why the West will win?
First of all, what does he think the other 92% of the cost of manufacturing is? A small portion of that is materials and electricity, but the biggest part of the remaining cost is assembly tooling/fixtures for the assembly line, and a fully automated assembly line is much, much more expensive compared to a semi-automated or manual production line.
In other words: it's not that Unitree couldn't build fully automated assembly lines if they wanted to, but spending tens of millions of dollars fully automated assembly line that takes up floor space and requires even more labor for manual maintenance for a product that is only being produced by the hundreds to thousands in quantity every month rather than millions simply does not make economic sense to begin with.
Second, why is he assuming that a fully automated assembly line will be cheaper to build in the US than in China, especially since he toured a factory with fully automated assembly lines at BYD in China immediately after? And sure, I would absolutely argue that American software engineering is more efficient than Chinese when looked at as a whole, but the cost of programming an assembly line is a minor portion of the cost compared to actually getting the assembly line fixtures and tooling built.
Third, his cost estimate is way off if he thinks you can get the same product manufactured in the US for only 50% more. From my own anecdotal experience, a more realistic cost for US manufacturing for pretty much anything is minimum 300% to 1000% more expensive if you are to make the in the US, and the lack of a mature parts supply chain in the US is honestly a bigger issue than worker wage.
If instead just creating few of the tools, Destin pushed to create $1T worth of it, then maybe the supplychain will automatically build around it.
If China's labor cost risen to the level that makes Unitree robots more appealing, then Unitree will figure out ways to automate their production line more to keep up with the demand.
All and all, it's not a capability problem, it's a "why do it, and why now" problem. Just like, say, sending people to Mars. The tech is already here, but why send people to a planet that (currently) don't even have enough stuff needed to support living? Except of course, Mars will probably stay this way much longer than a country changing course.
Also, just a sidenote: I think Destin misread the market. He wanted to create a "high-quality", "durable" product. Sure, it make sense to do it most of the time, but a brush? You know, that thing gets dirty in an dark and oily way very quickly. With a durable brush that's expensive to replace, then you have will a problem of maintenance, clean it etc. And grill oil is not easy to clean, do you now also have to buy another product just to maintain the brush? How about now I offer you a cheap made in China brush that will disintegrate in your hands after 5 times of use, but then you just throw it away and get a new one, no maintenance required. Of course, throwing away too many trash is bad for the environment, but guess how the other trash gets handled, including, say, toothbrush?
How about, invent a grill that don't need to be brushed? Just a rinse and it's done? Just a Smarter way to think about inventing, you know.
If I were to design it to be manufactured in the states, I would probably go for a simple wooden handle with off the shelf wire mesh instead of chainmail, and the fastening would just be mechanical fit between wrapped wire and handle with no additional fastener, which should massively improve price and manufacturability.
“”” America has run this experiment before. In 1964 about half a million Mexican farmworkers were shut out. In 1965, 20% of California's tomatoes were picked by machine; by 1970 the figure was 99.9%.“””
I honestly had not considered closing down (legal) immigration as a forcing function for automation. Industrial policy as immigration law.
But I don’t think I get the rest …
Higher costs onshore mean machines give us an advantage - i get that. The rest I may be missing
5 years ago I was trying to get a custom aluminium enclosure for some circuit boards manufactured. We found potential suppliers in Taiwan, but they basically would have needed an expert onsite to be able to set up all the jigs. They also could have supported us through rapid scaling by switching to moulded raw stock which then was post machined, and would bring down unit prices a lot.
However, one guy knew a local SoCal machine shop that supplied parts to the auto modding scene and had a bunch of 5-axis milling machines. For 200 units they would beat Taiwan on every metric: cost, time, effort on our side, flexibility for changes.
We're engineers. From this lens, the difference between us and cavemen are the tools we have. We should lean into this.
So industrial policy should be focused on high end engineering quality, more than bringing jobs back
(Might be spotting a political problem there but in general I think I agree)
People are much more likely to try something if they see peers and role models doing it. Even better if it’s something fun and exciting that they want to be a part of.
I think to convince someone to run a factory instead of trying to become MTS @ lab, they should know 1. it’s not a binary “make it or break it” where failure means doing some boring, poorly paid job (the downside is good but not so guaranteed that it’s abused/attracts the wrong people ) 2. it’s interesting and challenging and enjoyable at times 3. it’s meaningful at a societal or personal level. That's what made tech/AI/finance work and it's the competing pitch.
Why should someone with other options want to work in or operate a factory?
(Again apropos of nothing I am assuming the rise of “on the vine tomatoes” in packets is presumably because cutting four off the branch is quicker and easier than twisting four or five.
And even possibly there is a robot doing it. Would be interested to know
I'm seeing this in India. Some really smart students are doing some fascinating startups at home because emigrating to the west has become really hard.
Still a very small effect, but one that gives me a lot of hope and cause for excitement.
Defense contractors charge maintenance fees both domestic and abroad. For abroad, the maintenance contract is a requirement of getting the deal passed through congress and is frequently more expensive than the gear itself.
SaaS charge monthly instead of one upfront fee for a well tested product that used to be the norm
Video games similarly have been transitioning to day 1 paid DLCs and monthly fees
Even the movie industry is a subscription now (streaming providers aside). There's not one movie, there's the MCU pumping out 3 movies a year for the last 20. How many movies from last year have a number in their name?
Then there's of course, the actual rents. And insurance. And taxes. Something has to give, but I fear it will be the humans.
(I'm not affiliated with the site in any way; I just found it useful and thought I'd share it here.)
The conference venues have concrete flooring, so I just suddenly hear loud rhythmic thumping as these things stomp around a corner.
After the initial "huh that's a cool robot thing" thought, it really started giving me the heebeejeebees.
Uncanny Valley is an evolutionary advantage, I’ve surmised
Awkward to think about why tho
Probably too many pinch points though.
> the robots that make robots will be Western.
is quite reminiscent of the dismissive attitude of many tech people here towards stuff that doesn't originate in the US. It really feels strange to have lived through this change, from a place that used to be pretty cosmopolitan and focused on tech, to a place one can't browse without reading daily jingoistic comments.
It also feels like an atmosphere change rather than a deliberate one, in that people say that stuff casually, almost without thinking about it or the implications thereof. These ideas have permetated so much into the discourse that people don't really scrutinize them before repeating them.
Ok, but what drives the cost of the parts? I am sure the parts manufacturers spend on labor, and the parts the part makers buy depend on labor. Labor drives all vast majority of the expense if you go all the way down the supply chain.
If we automate more and more of that labor with robots, then it drives down all the costs.
If we get truly autonomous robots that have the mobility and precision of humans, they could replace all of the labor. The 'switching' cost goes way down compared to the machines that do the work today.
I’ve really become fascinated by the hypothesis that outlawing slavery supercharged industrialization, and that the global crusade against slavery is why we had this whole technology explosion.
Rome knew about steam power. There’s some tantalizing evidence some ancient cultures played with electricity and maybe even simple forms of electric lights. There’s Greek stories about automatons. But why try to build machines to do real work? Just have a slave do it.
If we’d abolished slavery in ancient Roman times maybe we’d be looking at photos of habitable exoplanets from probes arriving in the Tau Ceti system by now.
Tocqueville wrote a bit about this in Democracy in America. Despite the South having an edge in terms of "free" labor the institution of slavery greatly suffocated human potential to such an extent that the non-Southern states still had higher productivity.
What do you have in mind here? The Dendera light is a carving of a lotus.
The non-woowoo proposals I’ve read call for very primitive apparati that would have been possible with metallurgy of the time. If some, I dunno, bored priests and scribes over thousands of years figured out some neat tricks. It’s before the big medieval alchemy craze but thousands of years is a long time.
I also forgot about early optics, the Antikythera mechanism which could not have been a one off, early use of fossil fuel, etc.
I don’t think the thesis I referenced argues that abolition is the only thing that made tech take off, just that it supplied an economic forcing function missing for most of the rest of history.
"But the demand for robotics is being driven by government agencies and research institutions, rather than everyday consumers, for whom the products are still too expensive and not yet practical for home use. Humanoid robotics and robotic dogs have been popular in the entertainment industry but are yet to be useful in home settings.
Shares in Unitree, China’s leading robot-maker, have halved since they started trading in August."*
What do you mean by this?
Labouring for the sake of doing labour is stupid. If robots can do it cost effectively, they should.
It's all well and good to say that people shouldn't have to do menial labor. But unless you have something to fill the void, it's going to be a bad time for everyone involved.
Western culture ties the value of people to their work. The unemployed are "lazy" (itself a pejorative). The first question you ask someone you meet is "what do you do?" A lawyer is naturally more valuable than a postal clerk. (Despite an obvious example to the contrary. )
A lot of western jobs now are menial, or worse, useless. Lots of office jobs are, frankly, meaningless. Endlessly generating reports that no-one needs, or reads, isn't a path to massive self-worth.
In the US no job means no income. No health care. Your worth as a human approaches zero. In Europe, post war, there are far more social supports for the unemployed. That's a fundamental cultural difference. Asia is also culturally different in ways which are hard for US folk to comprehend.
For example there are 3 major political viewpoints; US capitalism, European socialism, and Chinese communism. Each appears to function well, and yet the US vilifies the others, while barely being able to tell them apart.
So, to return to your hypothesis of what "humans need", it may be less of that and more of "my culture needs". Which is perhaps going to come into play when predicting a post-labor economy in other cultures.
The people will always have something to do. What those somethings are is entirely up to the ruling class.
Ultimately, the whole point of an economy is to direct labour and resources in a way which allows people to have a good standard of living. If most labor can really be automated, then people can just spend more of their time enjoying their lives instead of working. The technology itself is not the problem. The only reason this becomes a crisis under capitalism is because the means of production are privately owned, and the people who own them require the rest of the population to sell their labor in order to live. Automation under private ownership frees people from a paycheck, while the owners keep the gains.
Western voting systems work more or less because the parties are in a mexican standoff when counting the ballots. This requires at least two parties and doesn't translate very well to electronic voting or vote-by-mail where a comparatively small minority (programmers or postal workers) can heavily skew the results in their favor.
Meanwhile, Western voting systems are much more of a game of hot potato than a Mexican standoff. Each party just blames the other party for all the problems, and you just a revolving door policy with no accountability. With a one party system, there's no scapegoat to blame. The very legitimacy of the party hangs on it delivering on the promises.
Multiple parties do hold guns at each other's heads in every voting station. Party 1 ensures that Party 2 doesn't steal any votes and vice versa. A party that does not have representatives in any given station will most likely lose some votes there.
You can shit on western democracy all you want, and you are probably correct in most cases however a single party system is not and cannot be democratic. In that case, the legitimacy of the party is guaranteed by the lack of alternatives that can fill the political power vacuum.
https://allianceofdemocracies.org/democracy-perception-index
What makes this report interesting is that the organization publishing it was started by an ex-NATO chief and claims to unite democracies, meaning Western liberal style democracies. So it can’t be accused of having some sort of anti-Western bias. Their methodology is also straightforward, where they simply ask people if they feel their government works in their interest and whether they can hold it accountable. That’s the whole ballgame, because if people don’t believe the system is democratic then it inherently lacks legitimacy no matter what the constitution says. While people will surely attack this methodology, the sheer fact that a NATO-connected group published such a report gives its claims a certain credence given how dire these results are for the Western model of democracy. France now ranks alongside Kazakhstan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe in its own citizens’ eyes while the U.S. is split down the middle with about half of Americans saying they don’t think they live in a democracy anymore. China, on the other hand, sits up there with the Scandinavians and Switzerland, and Chinese people overwhelmingly say the system works for them. Notably, we can also see that perceptions of transparency, rule of law, and free speech are on the rise across the board in China.
And before you start trying to claim that people in China are simply afraid to speak their mind, the same report shows Russia at -21 points and Belarus at -9, so that whole excuse falls apart. Turns out that people living in states the West labels as being authoritarian do, in fact, complain when they’re unhappy. Various other western publications have reported the same thing for many years.
https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-...
https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democr...
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilif...
On the other hand, your claim that multiple parties hold guns at each other's heads is directly at odds with empirical research on the subject:
> What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
Single party democratic model is a well defined principle known as Democratic Centralism and all the actual data shows that the way it is implemented in China produces far better tangible results than the western attempt at democracy. I'm sorry this hurts your feelings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism
That just proves how nonsensical the numbers are. People have different standards, and peoples perceptions are not accurate.
Looking are the two countries I have lived in, people in one are “very positive” because journalists are no longer disappearing and they are confident the government will accept an election defeat. In the other, people are “neutral” because many feel the political class are out of touch, or that freedom of speech has been compromised by things like hate speech laws, or other issues at that level.
Perceptions are shaped by the media too. Other things being equal effective state control of media will make people more positive.
The definition of "sucks" varies wildly. People whose country experienced a terrible famine, followed by chaos and brutality, in living memory will have a very different idea of their life sucking from people who have had decades of wealth.
> Meanwhile, the distinction between state media and oligarch owned media is completely meaningless.
Its a massive difference. It means different media will have different view points. It means no one monopoly view. It means access to foreign media for other viewpoints. It means some media that is structured or owned differently (the BBC, The Guardian, Reuters.....). It means the government is criticised from many points of view.
> No amount of media can paper over the fact that your life sucks.
1. A Chinese citizen experiences rising living costs.
2. Their social media feed is filled with videos of Americans struggling with medical bills, homelessness and housing costs.
3. They start feeling like they're better off by comparison.
4. Their satisfaction with their own country may increase without any improvement in their personal circumstances.
If media ownership was meaningless, governments and oligarchs wouldn't spend so much effort controlling it.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop...
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jone...
Social mobility in China being far better than in the US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/ch...
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-ri...
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w231...
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growt...
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019...
And your whole narrative falls apart when we look at how MAGA actively voted against Trump once the war hit them in the wallet. Also, look at the riots happening all across Europe where the media tells people things are going great.
China's rise has been nothing short of meteoric, and I applaud them for it. I'm certain that their average standard of living is very high by most metrics, quite comparable and maybe even better than western countries. IT IS STILL NOT A DEMOCRACY!
At any rate, I'm going to stop arguing because you seem way too invested in praising the dragon, and not just in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50386836
You appear to have an infantile understanding of democracy equating it with simply having the ability to vote.
It's also hilarious that you think you understand Chinese system better than people who actually live in China and call their system a democracy. The sheer amount of chauvinism required to hold such beliefs is astounding.
At any rate, stick to subjects you have a clue about in the future as to avoid making a clown of yourself in public.
No, its not. Democracy means rule by the people. A benevolent dictatorship is not a democracy.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/democra...
largely because their living standards had fallen massively in the previous decades. Of course living standards are far higher than they used to be, because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
> 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world.
Only slightly higher than India, lower than Kazakhstan
> The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015,
What was the same number for 1949 to 1978?
> Only slightly higher than India, lower than Kazakhstan
This India? https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/abs/pii/S1...
One has to have utter lack of intellectual integrity to pretend that there is any comparison in standards between China and India.
> What was the same number for 1949 to 1978?
See the first link I provided.
That is sooooo close to my point but you missed it. High house ownership is not a sign of economic development, quite the opposite.
> See the first link I provided.
You think infant mortality and inflation adjusted incomes are the same number?
That is completely out of touch with reality. Infant mortality fell EVERYWHERE in that period which flatters the numbers.
Now provide the actual number I asked for for the period I asked for. It debunks your argument?
You just keep cherry picking data that suits your case and ignoring everything else.
I think that you're an artless troll, and it's frankly pathetic that you think you've debunked something here.
But you keep on doing you, if the clown shoes fit might as well embrace the act.
They have some political dilemma: people only accept the government because of economical growth, but they grew to a point where growth naturally slows down.
They have some financial and monetary stuff going on, but those are mostly non-problems. They have a bubble that is bursting too, that makes the other two problems larger.
All said, I wouldn't say they are in a knife edge.
And yes, China is aware of some slowing demand (although their exports are still impressive.) You can see this playing out in a couple ways.
Firstly they dominate production in key "future" technologies. Solar and EVs spring to mind as examples, but there are others.
Secondly they are investing in infrastructure (and goodwill) outside of China. Africa has a billion consumers-in-waiting.
While the US retreats from Africa (killing USAid, indulging racist theories about South Africa, etc), promoting isolationism (America First), activly alienating people via tarrifs, what is China doing?
China is quietly filling the void. They are building roads, ports, airports and other infrastructure. They are improving supply lines (Temu is expanding in Africa at a huge rate.) They are building cultural bridges, learning and teaching two very different cultures to work more easily together. In essence developing future customers, not antagonizing them.
It will be interesting to look back in 10, 20 or 30 years to see which strategy delivers better rewards.
In the 60s your argument would have applied to most of Asia. South Korea was an agrarian society. All of eastern Europe (and much of western Europe) was poor.
The question is less "where are markets now" and more "where will they be in 2050"?
"Losing money" (whatever that means at the national level) is not terribly relevant when it comes to global strategy. The US "loses money" on the military, because the US has chosen the military as a way to strategic dominance.
China instead has chosen "production" as a global strategy. One empire is voluntarily contracting. Another is expanding. The US is fighting the last war, with planes and bombs, while China builds infrastructure and makes friends.
That's a sure way to extend an unsustainable situation, while making it bigger. It doesn't usually lead to anything good on the long term, but I don't think they have been doing so much of it to break the world.
... and who knows? maybe this time it leads to democratization and growth all over the world, and they get somebody to export to. I don't think that's likely, but I can be wrong.
Who here remembers when Japan was gonna take over and the West needed to adapt
Russia is now probably in the state similar to circa 1980 China. In case The China Problem were to be Solved like how previous one was solved, perhaps militarily this time, that'll just launch the seeds of the same problem over the borders to there. OTOH we'll be watching Russian homage to Chinese recreations of Japanese interpretations of Disney animations by 2060s and that will be awesome.
Will the US become its own 1980 China or 1950 Japan, just to get onto the ladder back up to be 2020 China or 1990 Japan, finally building the California HSR owned by DOT? Is it playing a genius 4D Chess ... whatever ... move towards that? Maybe, I don't know. All I know is that it's not like people simply stopped being too alarmist with Japanese global takeover scare and it just went away naturally.
Huh?
You're assuming the US starts using robots to produce the things currently produced manually in the US, rather than using robots to produce the things currently produced manually in China.
Especially when that American company is… Tesla!
Everyone knows that’s a combination that builds the best companies…the very reason why the whole world drives American cars.
Every time the article said, "I did such and such a thing," I thought, "No, Claude, you did not do that. You don't have a body. You're making this up."
West will outbuild china....
also author
> The next day, at BYD, I saw the other end of this: a car plant where everything I saw was automated.
Note there are no fully automated US car plants.
Unitree makes like 5 digit numbers chassis with high iteration, they use people because these are baby numbers where human iteration maximizes productivity, not lack of capability. They do it because they have this gear that west doesn't. Meanwhile PRC indigenizing all tooling to the highest end of precision. They're not going to use western robots for much longer. Indigenous replacement rate is basically J takeoff, even if we completely ignore that ABB/Kuka/fanuc all have massive assembling and R&D footprint in PRC.
Or take Tesla, one of the more competent US builders... ctrl+c, ctrl+v their model to PRC, a few rapid iteration cycles later, PRC plants > western plants (EU/US). Even SpaceX, forget payload/tempo/operational, PRC industry builds like 2-3x more first stages than US space program including SpaceX, i.e. when they figure out reusable they can put up 2-3x size reusable fleet... and that's basically them barely trying. The industrial lesson by now should be whatever West builds, PRC likely end up doing better, faster, cheaper, frequently pick all 3.
This argument generic copium by now - muh western imagination gap can somehow compete with PRC industrial gap... and robots that build robots is slightly more marketable and feasible than gray goo... until you realize one of PRC's core capability is just doing what west did better anyway.
If tomorrow morning we decided to pull a Manhattan Project just to match China's capacity for cheap effective robotics, it would take 10 years. By then China has already found their product-market fit and secured the world as a customer.