Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

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China manufactures many things but that's not the key part of the value chain. iPhones are manufactured in China (and elsewhere in Asia but Apple in Cupertino is the trillion-dollar company, not the actual manufacturers.

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.

The problem with the "West" going forward is that R&D, design, intellectual property, engineering talent are exactly the areas at most risk of AI disruption leaving the physical grunt work as the only remaining moat

Yeah this is the thing I think most are missing about LLMs. They're just seeing the current valuation of things and picturing the future as being the same, but with different efficiencies. 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.

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.

Im not sure this is true:

"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.

I'd look to the past at similar 'revolutions' and what it did to existing players. For example 'computer' was the name of an occupation that existed for millennia. [1] Yet so complete was the obsolescence that I think most people (certainly including myself) never even realized these people existed, but it's quite obvious once you think about it.

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!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

I don't think you can draw any conclusion from a party which never became a government, one way or the other.

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.

Manufacturing doesn't work like in Minecraft, like you put the raw material into a box, pick the blueprint, then POOF the finished product pops out. There's actually a lot of ingenuity and innovation in manufacturing. To say that the field has been static for 70 years is absolutely foolish

It is interesting that you consider R&D, design, and engineering as something fundamentally different to manufacturing, rather than its heart and soul.

Stupid work for you, smart work for us (and let's be real, that is the idea) doesn't work forever if the other guys are smart, too. And they are.

I did say China seems to do well in those respects.

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.

On the other hand, catching up is usually much faster than doing something for the first time. China is catching up fast. I think the cheating / dishonesty gives Westerners the wrong idea - Chinese cheating is like doping at the Olympics: if you want to win, you have to be among the best and cheat.

> catching up is usually much faster than doing something for the first time

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.

I also mean stuff like stealthily reducing quality until the customer notices and such things. It seems to be more common in B2B than in B2C.

That's what Americans want to buy: barely functional cruft to sell at Walmart. China also makes plenty of innovative quality products. The US bans those. Cars are one example.

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