28 ms·

America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

268 points by lasermatts 2y ago

tartuffe78 2y ago
Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.
- Tadpole9181 2y ago
  This is where discussions of post-scarcity and post-labor economy come in, like UBI. We keep kicking the can down the road on that front, but this is going to happen and we need to establish such a sustainable model. Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
  - sharemywin 2y ago
    1. there are limits to natural resources. 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.
    - ohplz 2y ago
      [dead]
    - RealityVoid 2y ago
      > 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work. I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities. But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.
      - kcb 2y ago
        I don't think anyone would choose to work in any way like today, especially if work is focused on generating wealth with a large portion of it being redistributed. Work would have to change to something more like volunteerism.
        RealityVoid 2y ago
        Well, many people would choose to work for the extra income that would bring them. Or some other status symbol that working could bring, welfare won't bring you that Rolex! Or some cultural shift that makes certain work "cool" (1). Or just fostering a sense of community and mission for doing certain work. People do many many many things motivated by other things than money. I agree that it's only a subset of the population, but if you decrease the work input needs to less than that percent of the population, that's doable. Still, as I said, we're not there yet and I believe we won't be there yet for a long long time. 1. Sometimes I wonder if the state shouldn't hire one of those fancy firms to push cultural outlooks about stuff to change. They have campaigns, but they mostly suck. If you put money on the table and say "hey, marketing company, by each 1% you improve this behavior you get x million dollars" I'm sure that would help motivation.
      - razakel 2y ago
        >Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives. UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.
        themaninthedark 2y ago
        I think that there are definitely people who have been on welfare and used it to better themselves and there are people who thrive in the face of adversity, overcoming the worst situations. I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose. People are weird and different.
    - Tadpole9181 2y ago
      This isn't a rebuttal, the only solution you're allowing space for is "kill everyone". The universe is finite and all things end. 1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility. 2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too. 3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      > 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. UBI is similar to confining an animal? Deciding what and when it eats, when it bathes, where it goes? Training it, whether it likes it or not? Deciding whether it gets medical care? Whether it gets to have companions of its own kind? I thought it was giving people money.
      - Loughla 2y ago
        I mean, depending on the amount, yes it could be deciding all of the things you said. You would be limited in your choices depending on how much the ubi actually is.
        alabastervlog 2y ago
        Right now I get zero ubi so I guess I am even more limited on all of those, and am even more a pet.
        c0nducktr 2y ago
        Right now you can live without it.
        alabastervlog 2y ago
        As a pet. More of a pet than someone on UBI. I'm someone already experiencing the bad thing we worry might happen to someone on UBI—withdrawal of it. Not the worst, unclear to me why this was a concern in the first place. Be cool to have UBI though.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      > 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table It's a good question. The Reagan-era response would be that having billionaires inspires people to work hard, take risks, come up with ideas and better themselves. In a post-scarcity era where the only route to wealth is capital, and machines handle the hard work and ideas, I'm not sure what benefit remains from having billionaires. What good are incentives at that point?
- Teever 2y ago
  Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up. Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity. Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do? Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes? The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
  - sharemywin 2y ago
    I don't think the costs go to zero though for that.
  - thijson 2y ago
    I've seen this plot in various movies, TV shows, and books. It definitely is a possibility. In the Dune universe the AI's are banned after a war against them.
  - allturtles 2y ago
    > The economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task. Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
    - 2y ago
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want. And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people. Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons. We will see. Edit The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
  - dttze 2y ago
    This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.
    - markus_zhang 2y ago
      If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power. They don't really need those lower end resources anyway. I think they are OK to give them away just in case.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power. Only in a democracy. China has elections, but is also a one-party state. Given the culture (thinking in terms of the group rather than the individual), I think they may actually want UBI anyway. America is a democracy right now, but such things have been known to change before. Doesn't even need to be all at once — say the US disenfranchised convicted felons, that would mean the sitting president wouldn't be allowed to vote… and because I google before posting comments, wouldn't you know it, this is already a thing the states do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t... (I don't know how accurate the book title is, does the average American really commit 3 per day? https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229 https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocen...)
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  You cannot do everything with robotics, no matter what those selling you robots will claim. There will always be demand for those supporting the machines that make things. Tech will still require humans. The goal should be to make as many things as China and EU with a USA population.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Everything, sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to have them do the things they can.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries. We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
  - netsharc 2y ago
    The Uberfication of the workforce is incredible to see: you work when the algorithms tell you there's work, you'll get paid what it wants to pay you. Cheap transport, cheap postage, cheap delivery of foods...
  - hangsi 2y ago
    Tell that to the Pierce-Arrow company: makers of the first official cars for the white house, but they didn't survive cash flow problems from the great depression. Meanwhile, Ford survives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company
  - atrus 2y ago
    But the wealthy don't spend their money. A billionaire doesn't spend more money than a million people on...anything probably.
  - hsuduebc2 2y ago
    Wealthy people would buy hundreds of millions of different phones? I strongly doubt it. Luxurious electronics for very rich people is usually something like iphone with diamonds covered back. This solves nothing and creates zero innovations.
    - 2y ago
- bufferoverflow 2y ago
  When all the labor (physical or mental) is automated, you've basically solved a huge problem for humanity. Doesn't matter who owns the robots. They either share the products of the labor for close to nothing, or they are producing for themselves only. Someone will produce for the population.
- treis 2y ago
  The West more or less doesn't pay the people who produce phones today. Partially because they don't make much and partially because of the trade imbalance.
- ChuckMcM 2y ago
  There is an interesting twist here. "Socialist" and "Communist" economic models where those who can't work are supported by spreading a portion of the GDP produced by an economy to support those (whether it is UBI or a 'free' living space, whatever) are more able to make the transition to a robotic workforce. In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work. The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are. The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation. While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society. [1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    I still haven't seen an example of technical workers being replaced by AI
    - ChuckMcM 2y ago
      Perhaps we have differing definitions of "technical workers" ? Here in the Bay Area at least there are a number of companies which are replacing "senior staff" with an LLM and a junior engineer. The argument is that this combination is "cheaper" than the salary paid to the senior engineer. For me that is exactly analogous to replacing a factor worker with a robotic work station and a technician to maintain the robot. There is a ceiling on that junior engineer's career which occurs when they are themselves replaced by another junior engineer to reset the salary cost. We've seen some of them post "Ask HN's" about what they should do now because they aren't getting callbacks or any traction on their job search. What I haven't seen yet is this replacement penciling out to actually be less expensive when you look at time to complete tasks and support costs from faulty code/designs getting fairly far into production before being re-tooled. That may turn out to be endemic (at which point the replacement will stop and the trend will reverse) or there may be developments that mitigate these costs and get the combination to be more cost effective. It's something I watch for, evidence of it going one way or the other.
- regularization 2y ago
  Keynes wrote about how this can be done, while kicking the can down the road. Basically debt of all types, and government spending. For the US this would be military expenditures and social welfare for the elderly. Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.
  - aaronblohowiak 2y ago
    And yet the revolutions he inspired end up (in many ways) more dystopian than the capitalism they seek to replace..
    - lenerdenator 2y ago
      Since then there's been a realization that you can simply regulate the worst aspects of capitalism while still reaping most of its rewards. Now, that has been realized - but hasn't happened - in the United States, but it can certainly be done. It'll probably be too late though.
    - AngryData 2y ago
      So what? People have been misinterpreting and misusing knowledge, realizations, and stories since basically forever. That doesn't make the original works worthless or any less insightful. You would be hard pressed to link most of the policies of communist nations to things Marx said or advocated for. The vast majority of Marx's works is pointing out flaws in capitalism, not prescribing policies to use instead.
      - aaronblohowiak 2y ago
        I agree with your points but they do not lead to the conclusion that the GP was implying (that Marx contains the solution to what ails us)
- megaman821 2y ago
  Why are manufacturing jobs special? People will upgrade their tastes to consume more. Middle class houses with artistic stone work and well-manicured gardens. Skin treatments, massages, and health scans galore. More entertainment and more niche too. Banking apps that could win design awards. We are nowhere near the end of useful work.
  - guhidalg 2y ago
    I think most MAGAs have this idea that 1) manufacturing is a good paying job and 2) if the US isn't manufacturing stuff, that means China is doing it for us, which will lead to 3) when we decide to go to war with China we will not have the industrial capacity to fight the war. In their world model, the opportunity cost of manufacturing things domestically is not considered, and certainly not the benefits of manufacturing things cheaply abroad and having US workers move up the value chain.
    - from-nibly 2y ago
      Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with the us right? Specializing only works when line goes up forever. Heck sometimes line not going up as fast as yesterday is a "crisis".
      - guhidalg 2y ago
        > Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? Yes, but there are more working age people outside the US than inside the US, and they’re willing to work for less than people in the US. > At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with us right? We trade plenty of goods, and we trade more services than goods. The people that produce services tend to be college educated, which is negatively correlated with conservatism. > Specializing only works when line goes up forever. I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you want cheaper and better quality goods and services, then you need specialization. Every country had some competitive advantage, whether it’s natural resources or specific human capital. When an economic downturn happens, it’s not like that competitive advantage suddenly moves abroad. If it’s cheaper to make things in China, it’s still going to be cheaper during a recession. Raising tariffs on China _maybe_ means companies move manufacturing elsewhere, or _maybe_ means they just pass on costs to consumers. I’m willing to bet money it’s the latter.
- keybored 2y ago
  Why is this difficult to imagine? The capitalists need human labor commodity as long as, well, human labor commodity is the only labor commodity that can do the job. Once it (if ever) isn’t? And they own all the robots that can do the work? And they own all the robot soldiers that can protect their ill-gotten wealth? (Just in short total automation) Well, no need for consumer capitalism any more. Then you just have totalitarian capitalism where everyone else will have to live out their lives at the total mercy of those overlords. (It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)
- gwbas1c 2y ago
  That was a fear the first time automation came around. (I have a vague memory of machines used for weaving textiles.) Turns out people bought more cheap clothes, and thus people were needed to run the machines. I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.
- ambicapter 2y ago
  The plight of the poor is not an economic problem it is purely a political one. Progress in technology isn't really a root cause of poverty, rather a proximate cause with the root cause being "because the fruits of technology are not adequately shared by government policy", a policy issue. Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Economics is inherently political. The original (and more descriptive) term for the subject is "political economy".
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - ambicapter 2y ago
      > Economics is inherently political. Yes? The political policies will have an impact on the economy.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  In past times this question was solved by the ruling class commissioning monumental buildings and fine art, as well consuming enormous amounts of luxuries. This gave at least some form of employment back to the people. Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all. The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.
- heavyset_go 2y ago
  Read the Plutonomy paper from CitiGroup circa 2005: https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf
- danans 2y ago
  > Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes The headline last week was that the top 10% now accounts for 50% of consumer spending [1]. As that trend accelerates, the economy will reconfigure to focus ever more on selling goods and services to a smaller, wealthier group of people. This trend is already visible in many service-oriented sectors (i.e. concierge medicine, private membership based ski resorts, etc). Exacerbating wealth inequality is the objective with which these technologies are being deployed, even if it's not the objective with which they are developed by engineers and scientists. 1. https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-rich-spending-2c34a571 https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
- Galatians4_16 2y ago
  Money ≠ Wealth. Currency ≠ Money. As long as we use inflationary currency, the wealth gap will widen. If people could save money without worrying about deminishing of its' value, the gap will mend itself to natural levels, along skill/merit lines, as opposed to family inheritance/connections. Then they could also aquire wealth without needing to pawn it off to keep paying the bills.
yannis 2y ago
How I hate articles like this, painting everything as "existential" threat. Feeding the paranoia that has grubbed the US. Everything is viewed as a threat.
- piva00 2y ago
  Paranoia is the USA's way of life, when life always seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff: losing your job at a moment's time, losing your life savings for a healthcare emergency, losing your kid to a school shooting, losing your stuff to burglars. Any of these have a very low chance of happening but they can be so life-changing that Americans seem to always be in some state of paranoia, a low-trust society with few safety nets and a highly-competitive mindset is primed for that. American media just capitalises on the sentiment, it's a vicious cycle of abusing paranoia. The government does it too, just look at the red-scare from the Cold War that feeds into American public discourse to this day, anything remotely socially progressive is "communist". It's amusing and sad to watch from a distance.
  - RealityVoid 2y ago
    I've observed this as well, I do wonder though if that doesn't strongly encourage competitivity(is this word right? autocorrect highlights it, huh) and make people work... well, more. More effective, more time, more angry. It's certainly one possible explanation for why they dominate in many areas. But it does sound like such an exhausting thing.
    - jsnider3 2y ago
      > competitivity "competitiveness" might be the word you want.
      - gusmally 2y ago
        competition?
    - gosub100 2y ago
imtringued 2y ago
China is known to scale out in the low end market without having a strategy to go upmarket. Reading this article I honestly got the opposite impression. China is hopelessly behind Japan in both high end machine tools and robotics.
- digital_sawzall 2y ago
  China creates the most high end drones and 3d printers, and my Hisense TV is better and cheaper any of my Samsung's. This is from personal experience of things I have purchased.
- sct202 2y ago
  China is definitely growing quickly. At the trade shows I go to where some of the robots in the article are presented, Chinese companies have become quite prominent in the last few years when they were completely non-existent 10 years ago.
- pphysch 2y ago
  This "is known" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. "Is known" 15 years ago, perhaps. Things are changing rapidly.
- decimalenough 2y ago
  I take it you haven't seen any Chinese cars lately. Particularly in the EV space they're demolishing the competition in price and quality, and a huge part of that is thanks to automation with the robots described here. Check out eg the Xpeng G6, which delivers an Audi ride but undercuts the Tesla Model Y on price: https://www.xpeng.com/g6 https://www.xpeng.com/g6
  - russli1993 2y ago
    And the 2025 xpeng g6 is so much better than previous model, 5C charging battery, better ride, even better energy efficiency, better looks, better interior design, 30% of car parts are updated. And they delivered this update 2 years after the first model, when normally it takes other companies 5 years for an upgrade of this size. They have positive margins on a 17-20k RMB, 270 miles+, 350KW charging, FSD like autonomous driving EV, even though they have to price it this low due to ultra-competitive market. They can't do this without Chinese supply chain. Speed of iterations, innovations, fast time to market, efficiency is this all about.
blueyes 2y ago
Some authors of this piece are deeply involved themselves in building robots and other hardware technology. They should be taken seriously. The US is moving into a trade war, however unwise, with the country that supplies components for everything we make and need. That country has expansionist ambitions and a superior manufacturing base, which is typically what wins wars.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  Damn, thanks for plainly stating why we need manufacturing back to the states.
  - rtp4me 2y ago
    Yes, and I think this is the core motivation behind the Trump messaging - bring it back to the US if possible. In fact, he wants to bring back commercial and maritime ship building back[1]. Pretty cool! Hopefully this will employ lots of people. [1] https://news.usni.org/2025/03/05/trumps-make-shipbuilding-great-again-order-calls-for-wholesale-overhaul-of-u-s-maritime-industry https://news.usni.org/2025/03/05/trumps-make-shipbuilding-gr...
    - torginus 2y ago
      Well, no matter what he wants, there's a reason China has 5-10 year plans and not 2 week ones.
      - idiotsecant 2y ago
        This is Chinas greatest strength and their greatest weakness. They can actually commit to policy positions when they're effective, but they also commit to policy positions when they're not effective.
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      Shame it's being bungled with flip flops for nothing in return. Nor any achievable commitments which business can plan for or count on.
rickandmortyy 2y ago
[dead]
iszomer 2y ago
I would like to see a robot hand try and plug in a MCIO or OcuLink connector to its MB port because even my fat fingers have trouble seating them in correctly.
- debacle 2y ago
  Do you not have enough supports/standoffs on your mobo? Just because your case comes with 6 doesn't mean you only need 6.
- fragmede 2y ago
  you know that pick and place robots are used to put and solder the components onto the board that you're trying to plug the OcuLink connector to, right?
ilaksh 2y ago
I wish there was an app for renting humanoid (android) robots. Maybe from Unitree or TeslaBot or something, or a US-based robot if there is one that is actually being manufactured and similar.. maybe combined with a built-in AI system. America definitely seems to be a little bit behind in terms of android manufacturing. They have some pretty competitive robots but they seem more expensive and to be being built inefficiently. Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup that can build a stack and integrate it into one or more off-the-shelf robots to provide the intelligence part. Because a lot of the demos of android are teleoperated since the AI is still quite difficult. Combining the AI and a rental service would be so powerful. We might be one or two years away from that being practical.
Finnucane 2y ago
Gonna die with this hammer in my hand.
- dluan 2y ago
  Pick up a sickle while you're at it.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
>This is a Call for Action for the United States of America and the West. We are in the early precipice of a nonlinear transformation in industrial society, but the bedrock the US is standing on is shaky. Automation and robotics is currently undergoing a revolution that will enable full-scale automation of all manufacturing and mission-critical industries. These intelligent robotics systems will be the first ever additional industrial piece that is not supplemental but fully additive– 24/7 labor with higher throughput than any human—, allowing for massive expansion in production capacities past adding another human unit of work. The only country that is positioned to capture this level of automation is currently China, and should China achieve it without the US following suit, the production expansion will be granted only to China, posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities. This is not an "existential threat". It's an existential threat to the US being the top production economy. But the US can still thrive as an economy. I don't mind the US benefiting off of Chinas super productivity. Also there's really no hope, China will surpass the US in this area so it's a bit pointless to try.
keybored 2y ago
> Comparing a robotic system to a human, the current labor force is lower skilled, lower ability, and a much higher attrition rate. ... The US must take part in the robotics revolution before all labor is handed over to China to own in perpetuity. The US capitalists must monopolize all upcoming labor commodities (all-robot) before China does it. Definitely some projection here.
egypturnash 2y ago
Opens with AI art and a banner about how this is an AI site, I am just gonna assume the body of the text is AI spam as well and close it.
lenerdenator 2y ago
We didn't want a new labor economy. We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders. If that meant parting out our industrial base to our main geopolitical rival, that's what that meant. In the US, capitalism has mostly replaced nationalism and patriotism. In China, it augments those things.
- fishcrackers 2y ago
  [dead]
- chairmansteve 2y ago
  In China, Capitalism exists to benefit the state. In the USA, the state exists to benefit Capitalism.
paganel 2y ago
Yes, China is winning, but at what cost? Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside, the West has put itself all by itself in this position, for too long it had thought that it could still rule the world based on the services industries and on the financialization of the world economy. It seems like they bet wrong.
- jawiggins 2y ago
  > Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside What are you referring to?
  - paganel 2y ago
    Something like this [1]. I've singled out The Economist because I used to read them until not that long ago so that I can confirm first-hand that they also use that rhetoric (but can't be bothered to look for an online source right now). Later edit: A X [2] post pointing to an Economist article [3] that does just that, but, as I said, the examples are too numerous, just purchase a Economist issue and go through their China section, you'll see it right there [1] https://x.com/slipknothooh/status/1433496026795630598 https://x.com/slipknothooh/status/1433496026795630598 [2] https://x.com/Liberation_Blk/status/1690911685312126976 https://x.com/Liberation_Blk/status/1690911685312126976 [3] https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/08/08/what-does-xi-jinpings-fixation-on-food-security-mean-for-chinas-countryside https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/08/08/what-does-xi-j...
dluan 2y ago
American tech workers need to start paying attention to Chinese national policy, the National People's Congress is happening right now and it's how China sets long term goals and targets. "Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering and meeting their targets despite all the number fudging you want to point out. None of this is particularly secret or pernicious like western media tries to portray. Just follow the news. The next 5-year plan is being set now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
- thenobsta 2y ago
  Are there particularly good news sources to follow? I'm not sure what to follow to get either the source material or good commentary.
  - dluan 2y ago
    Right now, I try to consume content directly from the dragon's mouth with official news and reports, but it requires a bit of experience knowing how to read between the lines and having a strong bullshit parser. Similarly, most English language analysis from mainstream media is comically bad - CNN and American news outlets sent reporters to Beijing this week and bombarded attendees and delegates walking into the congressional hall with questions about Trump and tariffs, in English. Who does that?? Admittedly, I do like the stuff that comes out of Stanford's Digichina group, https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&sort_by=iso_date https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&..., they seem dedicated to doing an actual analysis and not just spewing brainless propaganda (HBR, looking at you). But yeah, it's hard out here to find any real meaningful information, so I've been debating starting up a substack myself, but with an additional academic research focus.
    - jorvi 2y ago
      TP Huang has a pretty good substack[0]. Its a nice insider look. And its not fake stuff, its just looked at through the most red-yellow colored glasses there are. [0] https://tphuang.substack.com/ https://tphuang.substack.com/
gertlex 2y ago
Long article. Mostly interesting! Surprising that they skip over autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in their survey of types, but perhaps that's because it's a weird interstitial with high interaction with Humans for less-general usecases (material movement, but no material handling/auto-interfacing with other automation besides e.g. an attached conveyor). Also, less clear success in the market. I think Locus robotics probably qualifies as the most widely used AMRs (vs Kiva/Amazon being posterchild for AGVs) This article, like many conversations I've had, covers "making competitive hardware", but skips a lot of the "how to do things with the robots" successfully /for multiple uses/, which is also a hard problem.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
j_timberlake 2y ago
I assume that future AGI which is smart enough to control "general purpose robotics" is probably smart enough to design robotic forms that make all the current stuff obsolete anyway. Like the article says, physical world data is too scarce to jump straight to powerful robotics first.
cytocync 2y ago
[dead]
diego_moita 2y ago
A Latin American perspective (from the B in BRICS): There are 3 economic blocks dreaming on global dominance: Europe, US and China. The difference among them is how they pursue these dreams. The Europeans talk, discuss, gather and don't do anything. The Americans shout, yell, go alone and do everything wrong. The Chinese just do it, mostly right.
scotty79 2y ago
> posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities Is US ever gonna grow out of sore loser mentality or do we really need WWIII?
jongjong 2y ago
The problem is that, at some point, the west decided to stop rewarding excellence in tech and started rewarding people for their social networking abilities. Now we have a lot of people who are good at talking and few people who are good at tech who have money to invest in robotics. Had I been even moderately rich, I'm certain I would have been investing in robotics right now. But instead, I'm working on document management software for government... While extroverts who got rich from Facebook IPO get to build Instagram for dogs... I think the decline coincided with the crackdown against cryptocurrency. Had it been allowed to develop normally instead of being suppressed and corrupted (by governments), things might have looked very different. Now I don't believe the system has any integrity so it makes no sense for me be productive. I actively look for the highest paid, most unproductive jobs I can find... Fortunately, there are MANY of those available in our system. I've made it my life's mission to exploit the system's flaws, while simultaneously complaining about them. Helping the bad guys self-destruct while earning a living is about as rewarding as it can be for me. A lot of other people my age are in the same boat, some knowingly, most unknowingly. I hope situation will change soon. There are some signs but it's going to take some big changes.
southernplaces7 2y ago
The sheer quantity of completely ridiculous, absurd economic and political beliefs, and predictions on this comment thread is amusing, all the more so when you consider that so many on HN who deride the wealthy are themselves part of the global 1% of elites in terms of income and access to resources, and have made their way to this position in the very same market economies that are supposedly bringing us all to slavery and misery of nearly feudal proportions. For a site whose readers like to tout the general trend here as being of people with above average intelligence, ignorance and blindness to the obvious is rife.
grumpy-de-sre 2y ago
I believe a lot of this is where China's current deflationary pressure is coming from. China has driven the cost to produce energy and goods right down to the floor through tremendous scale and efficiency. There doesn't seem to be any sign prices have reached the bottom yet. A lot of parallels to "The Great Deflation" [1] of the late 1800s. Quoting Wikipedia, "The prices of most basic commodities and mass-produced goods fell almost continuously; however, nominal wages remained steady, resulting in a pronounced and prolonged rise in real wages, disposable income and savings – essentially giving birth to the middle class. Goods produced by craftsmen, as opposed to in factories, did not decrease in price" China's system really prioritizes worker and middle class prosperity. Over here in the west we're too busy sliding into a rent seeking oligarchy that we haven't noticed yet. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation
Delomomonl 2y ago
Ai and robotics will push us into a golden area for x years until they become so good that we better have an answer to the implications of full automation of everything. Also the laber shortage is pushing this transition even faster in potential traditional/ slow areas.
bwfan123 2y ago
so, the narrative from semianalysis is shifting from "agi is imminent" to "robotics will take over" - what does that mean for semi sales ?
varelse 2y ago
[dead]
meetingthrower 2y ago
Where can one go and keep up with the latest in special purpose robotics? E.g., if I wanted to know about every new robot in the construction industry and similar labor intensive trades, is there a place that covers that?

268 points by lasermatts 2y ago

Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.

Tadpole9181 2y ago
This is where discussions of post-scarcity and post-labor economy come in, like UBI. We keep kicking the can down the road on that front, but this is going to happen and we need to establish such a sustainable model. Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
- sharemywin 2y ago
  1. there are limits to natural resources. 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.
  - ohplz 2y ago
    [dead]
  - RealityVoid 2y ago
    > 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work. I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities. But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.
    - kcb 2y ago
      I don't think anyone would choose to work in any way like today, especially if work is focused on generating wealth with a large portion of it being redistributed. Work would have to change to something more like volunteerism.
      - RealityVoid 2y ago
        Well, many people would choose to work for the extra income that would bring them. Or some other status symbol that working could bring, welfare won't bring you that Rolex! Or some cultural shift that makes certain work "cool" (1). Or just fostering a sense of community and mission for doing certain work. People do many many many things motivated by other things than money. I agree that it's only a subset of the population, but if you decrease the work input needs to less than that percent of the population, that's doable. Still, as I said, we're not there yet and I believe we won't be there yet for a long long time. 1. Sometimes I wonder if the state shouldn't hire one of those fancy firms to push cultural outlooks about stuff to change. They have campaigns, but they mostly suck. If you put money on the table and say "hey, marketing company, by each 1% you improve this behavior you get x million dollars" I'm sure that would help motivation.
    - razakel 2y ago
      >Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives. UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.
      - themaninthedark 2y ago
        I think that there are definitely people who have been on welfare and used it to better themselves and there are people who thrive in the face of adversity, overcoming the worst situations. I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose. People are weird and different.
  - Tadpole9181 2y ago
    This isn't a rebuttal, the only solution you're allowing space for is "kill everyone". The universe is finite and all things end. 1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility. 2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too. 3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    > 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. UBI is similar to confining an animal? Deciding what and when it eats, when it bathes, where it goes? Training it, whether it likes it or not? Deciding whether it gets medical care? Whether it gets to have companions of its own kind? I thought it was giving people money.
    - Loughla 2y ago
      I mean, depending on the amount, yes it could be deciding all of the things you said. You would be limited in your choices depending on how much the ubi actually is.
      - alabastervlog 2y ago
        Right now I get zero ubi so I guess I am even more limited on all of those, and am even more a pet.
        c0nducktr 2y ago
        Right now you can live without it.
        alabastervlog 2y ago
        As a pet. More of a pet than someone on UBI. I'm someone already experiencing the bad thing we worry might happen to someone on UBI—withdrawal of it. Not the worst, unclear to me why this was a concern in the first place. Be cool to have UBI though.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    > 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table It's a good question. The Reagan-era response would be that having billionaires inspires people to work hard, take risks, come up with ideas and better themselves. In a post-scarcity era where the only route to wealth is capital, and machines handle the hard work and ideas, I'm not sure what benefit remains from having billionaires. What good are incentives at that point?
Teever 2y ago
Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up. Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity. Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do? Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes? The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
- sharemywin 2y ago
  I don't think the costs go to zero though for that.
- thijson 2y ago
  I've seen this plot in various movies, TV shows, and books. It definitely is a possibility. In the Dune universe the AI's are banned after a war against them.
- allturtles 2y ago
  > The economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task. Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
  - 2y ago
markus_zhang 2y ago
UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want. And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people. Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons. We will see. Edit The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
- dttze 2y ago
  This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.
  - markus_zhang 2y ago
    If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power. They don't really need those lower end resources anyway. I think they are OK to give them away just in case.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power. Only in a democracy. China has elections, but is also a one-party state. Given the culture (thinking in terms of the group rather than the individual), I think they may actually want UBI anyway. America is a democracy right now, but such things have been known to change before. Doesn't even need to be all at once — say the US disenfranchised convicted felons, that would mean the sitting president wouldn't be allowed to vote… and because I google before posting comments, wouldn't you know it, this is already a thing the states do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t... (I don't know how accurate the book title is, does the average American really commit 3 per day? https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229 https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocen...)
jvanderbot 2y ago
You cannot do everything with robotics, no matter what those selling you robots will claim. There will always be demand for those supporting the machines that make things. Tech will still require humans. The goal should be to make as many things as China and EU with a USA population.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Everything, sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to have them do the things they can.
ryandrake 2y ago
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries. We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
- netsharc 2y ago
  The Uberfication of the workforce is incredible to see: you work when the algorithms tell you there's work, you'll get paid what it wants to pay you. Cheap transport, cheap postage, cheap delivery of foods...
- hangsi 2y ago
  Tell that to the Pierce-Arrow company: makers of the first official cars for the white house, but they didn't survive cash flow problems from the great depression. Meanwhile, Ford survives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company
- atrus 2y ago
  But the wealthy don't spend their money. A billionaire doesn't spend more money than a million people on...anything probably.
- hsuduebc2 2y ago
  Wealthy people would buy hundreds of millions of different phones? I strongly doubt it. Luxurious electronics for very rich people is usually something like iphone with diamonds covered back. This solves nothing and creates zero innovations.
  - 2y ago
bufferoverflow 2y ago
When all the labor (physical or mental) is automated, you've basically solved a huge problem for humanity. Doesn't matter who owns the robots. They either share the products of the labor for close to nothing, or they are producing for themselves only. Someone will produce for the population.
treis 2y ago
The West more or less doesn't pay the people who produce phones today. Partially because they don't make much and partially because of the trade imbalance.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
There is an interesting twist here. "Socialist" and "Communist" economic models where those who can't work are supported by spreading a portion of the GDP produced by an economy to support those (whether it is UBI or a 'free' living space, whatever) are more able to make the transition to a robotic workforce. In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work. The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are. The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation. While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society. [1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  I still haven't seen an example of technical workers being replaced by AI
  - ChuckMcM 2y ago
    Perhaps we have differing definitions of "technical workers" ? Here in the Bay Area at least there are a number of companies which are replacing "senior staff" with an LLM and a junior engineer. The argument is that this combination is "cheaper" than the salary paid to the senior engineer. For me that is exactly analogous to replacing a factor worker with a robotic work station and a technician to maintain the robot. There is a ceiling on that junior engineer's career which occurs when they are themselves replaced by another junior engineer to reset the salary cost. We've seen some of them post "Ask HN's" about what they should do now because they aren't getting callbacks or any traction on their job search. What I haven't seen yet is this replacement penciling out to actually be less expensive when you look at time to complete tasks and support costs from faulty code/designs getting fairly far into production before being re-tooled. That may turn out to be endemic (at which point the replacement will stop and the trend will reverse) or there may be developments that mitigate these costs and get the combination to be more cost effective. It's something I watch for, evidence of it going one way or the other.
regularization 2y ago
Keynes wrote about how this can be done, while kicking the can down the road. Basically debt of all types, and government spending. For the US this would be military expenditures and social welfare for the elderly. Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.
- aaronblohowiak 2y ago
  And yet the revolutions he inspired end up (in many ways) more dystopian than the capitalism they seek to replace..
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    Since then there's been a realization that you can simply regulate the worst aspects of capitalism while still reaping most of its rewards. Now, that has been realized - but hasn't happened - in the United States, but it can certainly be done. It'll probably be too late though.
  - AngryData 2y ago
    So what? People have been misinterpreting and misusing knowledge, realizations, and stories since basically forever. That doesn't make the original works worthless or any less insightful. You would be hard pressed to link most of the policies of communist nations to things Marx said or advocated for. The vast majority of Marx's works is pointing out flaws in capitalism, not prescribing policies to use instead.
    - aaronblohowiak 2y ago
      I agree with your points but they do not lead to the conclusion that the GP was implying (that Marx contains the solution to what ails us)
megaman821 2y ago
Why are manufacturing jobs special? People will upgrade their tastes to consume more. Middle class houses with artistic stone work and well-manicured gardens. Skin treatments, massages, and health scans galore. More entertainment and more niche too. Banking apps that could win design awards. We are nowhere near the end of useful work.
- guhidalg 2y ago
  I think most MAGAs have this idea that 1) manufacturing is a good paying job and 2) if the US isn't manufacturing stuff, that means China is doing it for us, which will lead to 3) when we decide to go to war with China we will not have the industrial capacity to fight the war. In their world model, the opportunity cost of manufacturing things domestically is not considered, and certainly not the benefits of manufacturing things cheaply abroad and having US workers move up the value chain.
  - from-nibly 2y ago
    Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with the us right? Specializing only works when line goes up forever. Heck sometimes line not going up as fast as yesterday is a "crisis".
    - guhidalg 2y ago
      > Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? Yes, but there are more working age people outside the US than inside the US, and they’re willing to work for less than people in the US. > At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with us right? We trade plenty of goods, and we trade more services than goods. The people that produce services tend to be college educated, which is negatively correlated with conservatism. > Specializing only works when line goes up forever. I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you want cheaper and better quality goods and services, then you need specialization. Every country had some competitive advantage, whether it’s natural resources or specific human capital. When an economic downturn happens, it’s not like that competitive advantage suddenly moves abroad. If it’s cheaper to make things in China, it’s still going to be cheaper during a recession. Raising tariffs on China _maybe_ means companies move manufacturing elsewhere, or _maybe_ means they just pass on costs to consumers. I’m willing to bet money it’s the latter.
keybored 2y ago
Why is this difficult to imagine? The capitalists need human labor commodity as long as, well, human labor commodity is the only labor commodity that can do the job. Once it (if ever) isn’t? And they own all the robots that can do the work? And they own all the robot soldiers that can protect their ill-gotten wealth? (Just in short total automation) Well, no need for consumer capitalism any more. Then you just have totalitarian capitalism where everyone else will have to live out their lives at the total mercy of those overlords. (It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)
gwbas1c 2y ago
That was a fear the first time automation came around. (I have a vague memory of machines used for weaving textiles.) Turns out people bought more cheap clothes, and thus people were needed to run the machines. I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.
ambicapter 2y ago
The plight of the poor is not an economic problem it is purely a political one. Progress in technology isn't really a root cause of poverty, rather a proximate cause with the root cause being "because the fruits of technology are not adequately shared by government policy", a policy issue. Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Economics is inherently political. The original (and more descriptive) term for the subject is "political economy".
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ambicapter 2y ago
    > Economics is inherently political. Yes? The political policies will have an impact on the economy.
carlosjobim 2y ago
In past times this question was solved by the ruling class commissioning monumental buildings and fine art, as well consuming enormous amounts of luxuries. This gave at least some form of employment back to the people. Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all. The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.
heavyset_go 2y ago
Read the Plutonomy paper from CitiGroup circa 2005: https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf
danans 2y ago
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes The headline last week was that the top 10% now accounts for 50% of consumer spending [1]. As that trend accelerates, the economy will reconfigure to focus ever more on selling goods and services to a smaller, wealthier group of people. This trend is already visible in many service-oriented sectors (i.e. concierge medicine, private membership based ski resorts, etc). Exacerbating wealth inequality is the objective with which these technologies are being deployed, even if it's not the objective with which they are developed by engineers and scientists. 1. https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-rich-spending-2c34a571 https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
Galatians4_16 2y ago
Money ≠ Wealth. Currency ≠ Money. As long as we use inflationary currency, the wealth gap will widen. If people could save money without worrying about deminishing of its' value, the gap will mend itself to natural levels, along skill/merit lines, as opposed to family inheritance/connections. Then they could also aquire wealth without needing to pawn it off to keep paying the bills.

yannis 2y ago

How I hate articles like this, painting everything as "existential" threat. Feeding the paranoia that has grubbed the US. Everything is viewed as a threat.

piva00 2y ago
Paranoia is the USA's way of life, when life always seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff: losing your job at a moment's time, losing your life savings for a healthcare emergency, losing your kid to a school shooting, losing your stuff to burglars. Any of these have a very low chance of happening but they can be so life-changing that Americans seem to always be in some state of paranoia, a low-trust society with few safety nets and a highly-competitive mindset is primed for that. American media just capitalises on the sentiment, it's a vicious cycle of abusing paranoia. The government does it too, just look at the red-scare from the Cold War that feeds into American public discourse to this day, anything remotely socially progressive is "communist". It's amusing and sad to watch from a distance.
- RealityVoid 2y ago
  I've observed this as well, I do wonder though if that doesn't strongly encourage competitivity(is this word right? autocorrect highlights it, huh) and make people work... well, more. More effective, more time, more angry. It's certainly one possible explanation for why they dominate in many areas. But it does sound like such an exhausting thing.
  - jsnider3 2y ago
    > competitivity "competitiveness" might be the word you want.
    - gusmally 2y ago
      competition?
  - gosub100 2y ago

imtringued 2y ago

China is known to scale out in the low end market without having a strategy to go upmarket. Reading this article I honestly got the opposite impression. China is hopelessly behind Japan in both high end machine tools and robotics.

digital_sawzall 2y ago
China creates the most high end drones and 3d printers, and my Hisense TV is better and cheaper any of my Samsung's. This is from personal experience of things I have purchased.
sct202 2y ago
China is definitely growing quickly. At the trade shows I go to where some of the robots in the article are presented, Chinese companies have become quite prominent in the last few years when they were completely non-existent 10 years ago.
pphysch 2y ago
This "is known" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. "Is known" 15 years ago, perhaps. Things are changing rapidly.
decimalenough 2y ago
I take it you haven't seen any Chinese cars lately. Particularly in the EV space they're demolishing the competition in price and quality, and a huge part of that is thanks to automation with the robots described here. Check out eg the Xpeng G6, which delivers an Audi ride but undercuts the Tesla Model Y on price: https://www.xpeng.com/g6 https://www.xpeng.com/g6
- russli1993 2y ago
  And the 2025 xpeng g6 is so much better than previous model, 5C charging battery, better ride, even better energy efficiency, better looks, better interior design, 30% of car parts are updated. And they delivered this update 2 years after the first model, when normally it takes other companies 5 years for an upgrade of this size. They have positive margins on a 17-20k RMB, 270 miles+, 350KW charging, FSD like autonomous driving EV, even though they have to price it this low due to ultra-competitive market. They can't do this without Chinese supply chain. Speed of iterations, innovations, fast time to market, efficiency is this all about.

blueyes 2y ago

Some authors of this piece are deeply involved themselves in building robots and other hardware technology. They should be taken seriously. The US is moving into a trade war, however unwise, with the country that supplies components for everything we make and need. That country has expansionist ambitions and a superior manufacturing base, which is typically what wins wars.

sieabahlpark 2y ago
Damn, thanks for plainly stating why we need manufacturing back to the states.
- rtp4me 2y ago
  Yes, and I think this is the core motivation behind the Trump messaging - bring it back to the US if possible. In fact, he wants to bring back commercial and maritime ship building back[1]. Pretty cool! Hopefully this will employ lots of people. [1] https://news.usni.org/2025/03/05/trumps-make-shipbuilding-great-again-order-calls-for-wholesale-overhaul-of-u-s-maritime-industry https://news.usni.org/2025/03/05/trumps-make-shipbuilding-gr...
  - torginus 2y ago
    Well, no matter what he wants, there's a reason China has 5-10 year plans and not 2 week ones.
    - idiotsecant 2y ago
      This is Chinas greatest strength and their greatest weakness. They can actually commit to policy positions when they're effective, but they also commit to policy positions when they're not effective.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    Shame it's being bungled with flip flops for nothing in return. Nor any achievable commitments which business can plan for or count on.

rickandmortyy 2y ago

[dead]

iszomer 2y ago

I would like to see a robot hand try and plug in a MCIO or OcuLink connector to its MB port because even my fat fingers have trouble seating them in correctly.

debacle 2y ago
Do you not have enough supports/standoffs on your mobo? Just because your case comes with 6 doesn't mean you only need 6.
fragmede 2y ago
you know that pick and place robots are used to put and solder the components onto the board that you're trying to plug the OcuLink connector to, right?

ilaksh 2y ago

I wish there was an app for renting humanoid (android) robots. Maybe from Unitree or TeslaBot or something, or a US-based robot if there is one that is actually being manufactured and similar.. maybe combined with a built-in AI system. America definitely seems to be a little bit behind in terms of android manufacturing. They have some pretty competitive robots but they seem more expensive and to be being built inefficiently. Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup that can build a stack and integrate it into one or more off-the-shelf robots to provide the intelligence part. Because a lot of the demos of android are teleoperated since the AI is still quite difficult. Combining the AI and a rental service would be so powerful. We might be one or two years away from that being practical.

Finnucane 2y ago

Gonna die with this hammer in my hand.

dluan 2y ago
Pick up a sickle while you're at it.

ninetyninenine 2y ago

>This is a Call for Action for the United States of America and the West. We are in the early precipice of a nonlinear transformation in industrial society, but the bedrock the US is standing on is shaky. Automation and robotics is currently undergoing a revolution that will enable full-scale automation of all manufacturing and mission-critical industries. These intelligent robotics systems will be the first ever additional industrial piece that is not supplemental but fully additive– 24/7 labor with higher throughput than any human—, allowing for massive expansion in production capacities past adding another human unit of work. The only country that is positioned to capture this level of automation is currently China, and should China achieve it without the US following suit, the production expansion will be granted only to China, posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities. This is not an "existential threat". It's an existential threat to the US being the top production economy. But the US can still thrive as an economy. I don't mind the US benefiting off of Chinas super productivity. Also there's really no hope, China will surpass the US in this area so it's a bit pointless to try.

keybored 2y ago

> Comparing a robotic system to a human, the current labor force is lower skilled, lower ability, and a much higher attrition rate. ... The US must take part in the robotics revolution before all labor is handed over to China to own in perpetuity. The US capitalists must monopolize all upcoming labor commodities (all-robot) before China does it. Definitely some projection here.

egypturnash 2y ago

Opens with AI art and a banner about how this is an AI site, I am just gonna assume the body of the text is AI spam as well and close it.

lenerdenator 2y ago

We didn't want a new labor economy. We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders. If that meant parting out our industrial base to our main geopolitical rival, that's what that meant. In the US, capitalism has mostly replaced nationalism and patriotism. In China, it augments those things.

fishcrackers 2y ago
[dead]
chairmansteve 2y ago
In China, Capitalism exists to benefit the state. In the USA, the state exists to benefit Capitalism.

paganel 2y ago

Yes, China is winning, but at what cost? Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside, the West has put itself all by itself in this position, for too long it had thought that it could still rule the world based on the services industries and on the financialization of the world economy. It seems like they bet wrong.

jawiggins 2y ago
> Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside What are you referring to?
- paganel 2y ago
  Something like this [1]. I've singled out The Economist because I used to read them until not that long ago so that I can confirm first-hand that they also use that rhetoric (but can't be bothered to look for an online source right now). Later edit: A X [2] post pointing to an Economist article [3] that does just that, but, as I said, the examples are too numerous, just purchase a Economist issue and go through their China section, you'll see it right there [1] https://x.com/slipknothooh/status/1433496026795630598 https://x.com/slipknothooh/status/1433496026795630598 [2] https://x.com/Liberation_Blk/status/1690911685312126976 https://x.com/Liberation_Blk/status/1690911685312126976 [3] https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/08/08/what-does-xi-jinpings-fixation-on-food-security-mean-for-chinas-countryside https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/08/08/what-does-xi-j...

dluan 2y ago

American tech workers need to start paying attention to Chinese national policy, the National People's Congress is happening right now and it's how China sets long term goals and targets. "Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering and meeting their targets despite all the number fudging you want to point out. None of this is particularly secret or pernicious like western media tries to portray. Just follow the news. The next 5-year plan is being set now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025

thenobsta 2y ago
Are there particularly good news sources to follow? I'm not sure what to follow to get either the source material or good commentary.
- dluan 2y ago
  Right now, I try to consume content directly from the dragon's mouth with official news and reports, but it requires a bit of experience knowing how to read between the lines and having a strong bullshit parser. Similarly, most English language analysis from mainstream media is comically bad - CNN and American news outlets sent reporters to Beijing this week and bombarded attendees and delegates walking into the congressional hall with questions about Trump and tariffs, in English. Who does that?? Admittedly, I do like the stuff that comes out of Stanford's Digichina group, https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&sort_by=iso_date https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&..., they seem dedicated to doing an actual analysis and not just spewing brainless propaganda (HBR, looking at you). But yeah, it's hard out here to find any real meaningful information, so I've been debating starting up a substack myself, but with an additional academic research focus.
  - jorvi 2y ago
    TP Huang has a pretty good substack[0]. Its a nice insider look. And its not fake stuff, its just looked at through the most red-yellow colored glasses there are. [0] https://tphuang.substack.com/ https://tphuang.substack.com/

gertlex 2y ago

Long article. Mostly interesting! Surprising that they skip over autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in their survey of types, but perhaps that's because it's a weird interstitial with high interaction with Humans for less-general usecases (material movement, but no material handling/auto-interfacing with other automation besides e.g. an attached conveyor). Also, less clear success in the market. I think Locus robotics probably qualifies as the most widely used AMRs (vs Kiva/Amazon being posterchild for AGVs) This article, like many conversations I've had, covers "making competitive hardware", but skips a lot of the "how to do things with the robots" successfully /for multiple uses/, which is also a hard problem.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

j_timberlake 2y ago

I assume that future AGI which is smart enough to control "general purpose robotics" is probably smart enough to design robotic forms that make all the current stuff obsolete anyway. Like the article says, physical world data is too scarce to jump straight to powerful robotics first.

cytocync 2y ago

[dead]

diego_moita 2y ago

A Latin American perspective (from the B in BRICS): There are 3 economic blocks dreaming on global dominance: Europe, US and China. The difference among them is how they pursue these dreams. The Europeans talk, discuss, gather and don't do anything. The Americans shout, yell, go alone and do everything wrong. The Chinese just do it, mostly right.

scotty79 2y ago

> posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities Is US ever gonna grow out of sore loser mentality or do we really need WWIII?

jongjong 2y ago

The problem is that, at some point, the west decided to stop rewarding excellence in tech and started rewarding people for their social networking abilities. Now we have a lot of people who are good at talking and few people who are good at tech who have money to invest in robotics. Had I been even moderately rich, I'm certain I would have been investing in robotics right now. But instead, I'm working on document management software for government... While extroverts who got rich from Facebook IPO get to build Instagram for dogs... I think the decline coincided with the crackdown against cryptocurrency. Had it been allowed to develop normally instead of being suppressed and corrupted (by governments), things might have looked very different. Now I don't believe the system has any integrity so it makes no sense for me be productive. I actively look for the highest paid, most unproductive jobs I can find... Fortunately, there are MANY of those available in our system. I've made it my life's mission to exploit the system's flaws, while simultaneously complaining about them. Helping the bad guys self-destruct while earning a living is about as rewarding as it can be for me. A lot of other people my age are in the same boat, some knowingly, most unknowingly. I hope situation will change soon. There are some signs but it's going to take some big changes.

southernplaces7 2y ago

The sheer quantity of completely ridiculous, absurd economic and political beliefs, and predictions on this comment thread is amusing, all the more so when you consider that so many on HN who deride the wealthy are themselves part of the global 1% of elites in terms of income and access to resources, and have made their way to this position in the very same market economies that are supposedly bringing us all to slavery and misery of nearly feudal proportions. For a site whose readers like to tout the general trend here as being of people with above average intelligence, ignorance and blindness to the obvious is rife.

grumpy-de-sre 2y ago

I believe a lot of this is where China's current deflationary pressure is coming from. China has driven the cost to produce energy and goods right down to the floor through tremendous scale and efficiency. There doesn't seem to be any sign prices have reached the bottom yet. A lot of parallels to "The Great Deflation" [1] of the late 1800s. Quoting Wikipedia, "The prices of most basic commodities and mass-produced goods fell almost continuously; however, nominal wages remained steady, resulting in a pronounced and prolonged rise in real wages, disposable income and savings – essentially giving birth to the middle class. Goods produced by craftsmen, as opposed to in factories, did not decrease in price" China's system really prioritizes worker and middle class prosperity. Over here in the west we're too busy sliding into a rent seeking oligarchy that we haven't noticed yet. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation

Delomomonl 2y ago

Ai and robotics will push us into a golden area for x years until they become so good that we better have an answer to the implications of full automation of everything. Also the laber shortage is pushing this transition even faster in potential traditional/ slow areas.

bwfan123 2y ago

so, the narrative from semianalysis is shifting from "agi is imminent" to "robotics will take over" - what does that mean for semi sales ?

varelse 2y ago

[dead]

meetingthrower 2y ago

Where can one go and keep up with the latest in special purpose robotics? E.g., if I wanted to know about every new robot in the construction industry and similar labor intensive trades, is there a place that covers that?