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Am I the only one to find this level of competition scary for western countries? I always thought that robots and automation would be our hope to compete with

Am I the only one to find this level of competition scary for western countries? I always thought that robots and automation would be our hope to compete with the ultra-cheap labor in China. Like Apple moving production back to the US and making it profitable with a lot of automation. But if China now becomes a leader at robotics in addition to remaining competitive at manufacturing, then how are we going to compete?

catalogia 6y ago
> if China now becomes a leader at robotics How was this ever not going to be the case? Robotics will go wherever the manufacturing is. Where else would roboticists get practical real world experience, other than in factories? Obviously there's plenty of robotic manufacturing in America still, but there's clearly no shortage of opportunity in it for China either. The assumption that America would have the best robotics which would force manufacturing to come back to America seems rooted in little more than wishful thinking.
- keenmaster 6y ago
  I don’t think people would have expected Boston Dynamics to emerge out of the U.S. as opposed to Japan, but they did, and it’s telling that they emerged out of a subregion with top rate American educational institutions. Ignore that they were bought out by SoftBank because I think America will consistently churn out top robotics and automation companies in the coming years. All it takes is for there to be a profit signal. Until a field has that profit signal, Americans outside of academia pretty much ignore it.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    Boston Dynamics doesn't seem like the sort of robotics that's particularly relevant to manufacturing. They've got impressive showy robots but don't know who to sell them to; the military seems ambivalent and now Boston Dynamics is trying to sell them as toys to rich people instead. It remains to be seen if they'll find a viable market like that. Industrial robotics on the other hand is a mature field, and much (most?) of it has been outside the US from the beginning. Yaskawa and FANUC in Japan. ABB in Switzerland. Siemens in Germany. How many factories have been automated by these companies? How many have been automated by Boston Dynamics?
    - keenmaster 6y ago
      I think the more important AI becomes in guiding robotic hardware, the more America will gain a competitive advantage in manufacturing. At the very least America would be able to eat Germany’s lunch. I also believe that America will ultimately “win” the AI race against Asian countries, but many here may disagree with that.
      - catalogia 6y ago
        It's not clear to me that "AI guided robotics" have much industrial utility. Where those sort of systems might excel is in finding solutions to novel problems. But mass production is all about avoiding the introduction of novel problems in the first place; that's been the premise of mass manufacturing since the 19th century. Parts are made to a spec and interchange with each other, allowing machines without intelligence to make and assemble them. Which is not to say advanced tech like computer vision or whatnot don't have industrial applications; it definitely does. Industrial robots using computer vision are already common today, used for things like quality control (e.g. inspecting each individual potato chip on a conveyor belt.) I suspect that to the extent other AI systems might plausibly be relevant to industrial-scale production, industrial robotics companies have been investing. I sincerely doubt Boston Dynamics is going to leapfrog Siemens in any foreseeable future.
troughway 6y ago
You remember that whole story about the cannon launcher competition where one team tries to take the meticulous approach of calculating the trajectory arc needed to hit the target, while the other team starts shooting and readjusts as they go? Or the one about the art class where one team meticulously plans things out and produces some unfinished shoddy work, while the other team keeps churning out bad pieces but eventually starts churning out good pieces in volume? Well, at 1.4 billion people, China can most certainly keep churning out bad pieces and readjusting, and they will get much better, much faster than a lot of other countries would. That it's 2020 and they still aren't seen as the leader of the world in everything has historic roots that have bred a lot of resentment in China towards the West. In particular, the meddling of US in China's affairs. But the pendulum is swinging. Let's see what happens next.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  I had never thought about it like that before :) Yes, China definitely has the volume of people necessary to just try out everything and see what sticks. In that case, the solution might be for governments to massively invest into making the tools available for free to pretty much every citizen, so that in the west, one person can run the same number of experiments as 100 people in China.

catalogia 6y ago

> if China now becomes a leader at robotics How was this ever not going to be the case? Robotics will go wherever the manufacturing is. Where else would roboticists get practical real world experience, other than in factories? Obviously there's plenty of robotic manufacturing in America still, but there's clearly no shortage of opportunity in it for China either. The assumption that America would have the best robotics which would force manufacturing to come back to America seems rooted in little more than wishful thinking.

keenmaster 6y ago
I don’t think people would have expected Boston Dynamics to emerge out of the U.S. as opposed to Japan, but they did, and it’s telling that they emerged out of a subregion with top rate American educational institutions. Ignore that they were bought out by SoftBank because I think America will consistently churn out top robotics and automation companies in the coming years. All it takes is for there to be a profit signal. Until a field has that profit signal, Americans outside of academia pretty much ignore it.
- catalogia 6y ago
  Boston Dynamics doesn't seem like the sort of robotics that's particularly relevant to manufacturing. They've got impressive showy robots but don't know who to sell them to; the military seems ambivalent and now Boston Dynamics is trying to sell them as toys to rich people instead. It remains to be seen if they'll find a viable market like that. Industrial robotics on the other hand is a mature field, and much (most?) of it has been outside the US from the beginning. Yaskawa and FANUC in Japan. ABB in Switzerland. Siemens in Germany. How many factories have been automated by these companies? How many have been automated by Boston Dynamics?
  - keenmaster 6y ago
    I think the more important AI becomes in guiding robotic hardware, the more America will gain a competitive advantage in manufacturing. At the very least America would be able to eat Germany’s lunch. I also believe that America will ultimately “win” the AI race against Asian countries, but many here may disagree with that.
    - catalogia 6y ago
      It's not clear to me that "AI guided robotics" have much industrial utility. Where those sort of systems might excel is in finding solutions to novel problems. But mass production is all about avoiding the introduction of novel problems in the first place; that's been the premise of mass manufacturing since the 19th century. Parts are made to a spec and interchange with each other, allowing machines without intelligence to make and assemble them. Which is not to say advanced tech like computer vision or whatnot don't have industrial applications; it definitely does. Industrial robots using computer vision are already common today, used for things like quality control (e.g. inspecting each individual potato chip on a conveyor belt.) I suspect that to the extent other AI systems might plausibly be relevant to industrial-scale production, industrial robotics companies have been investing. I sincerely doubt Boston Dynamics is going to leapfrog Siemens in any foreseeable future.

troughway 6y ago

You remember that whole story about the cannon launcher competition where one team tries to take the meticulous approach of calculating the trajectory arc needed to hit the target, while the other team starts shooting and readjusts as they go? Or the one about the art class where one team meticulously plans things out and produces some unfinished shoddy work, while the other team keeps churning out bad pieces but eventually starts churning out good pieces in volume? Well, at 1.4 billion people, China can most certainly keep churning out bad pieces and readjusting, and they will get much better, much faster than a lot of other countries would. That it's 2020 and they still aren't seen as the leader of the world in everything has historic roots that have bred a lot of resentment in China towards the West. In particular, the meddling of US in China's affairs. But the pendulum is swinging. Let's see what happens next.

fxtentacle 6y ago
I had never thought about it like that before :) Yes, China definitely has the volume of people necessary to just try out everything and see what sticks. In that case, the solution might be for governments to massively invest into making the tools available for free to pretty much every citizen, so that in the west, one person can run the same number of experiments as 100 people in China.