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He is not causally connecting "AI" with industry and manufacturing here. Building data centers isn't manufacturing. He says in this piece that energy production

by moogly 9mo ago

He is not causally connecting "AI" with industry and manufacturing here. Building data centers isn't manufacturing. He says in this piece that energy production needs to come first, and manufacturing later and not the other way around. Is he saying that AI will require building out energy production and the increased energy production will be used for... manufacturing? But it'll be used for the data centers. What, exactly, is the kind of manufacturing he's envisioning AI will bring? He's not saying. Is it perchance weapons systems? It's weapons isn't it[1]. That will only make sense if we go back in time a few decades and some assholes instigate more wars and global destabilization, because manufacturing weapons and stockpiling them is pretty pointless and resource ineffective otherwise. We know this from before. Or is he saying chips? So is he against offshoring all chip manufacturing to TSMC? That's basically been a huge part of continued security guarantees (if you can call them that when they are unproven), and also he's Taiwanese isn't he? I don't get it. Now, one of my errors here could be that I'm trying to make sense of the things Jensen Huang says, because he rambles incoherently quite a lot, after all, to such a degree I am not sure he's "entirely there". [1]: https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4370464/secretary-of-wars-arsenal-of-freedom-tour-to-rally-nation/ https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4370464/se...

freedomben 9mo ago
I don't know about Jensen specifically, and I can't remember the guy at the moment, but there have been a few tipped hands including one where the guy on national TV said something about "Americans should be gluing the iPhones together in the factory, not Chinese" and it really made a lot of this stuff click for me: they want to provide low-paying American jobs in American factories. That's probably not the whole vision, but it is a big part of it IMHO. I'll try and find the quote or video but if someone else remembers this, please share a link
- moogly 9mo ago
  That was Howard Lutnick. He's said a lot of, let's say "out-of-touch", things. He's not living in the real world, though. Motorola tried that not too long ago. Didn't go well. If you want to decimate American wages, you could do it, but if you at the same time deport people who were the most ready to work for a pittance, it's going to be hard to do this without riots. Then again, Stephen Miller wants those riots, so maybe you're right. The crux of the matter is that those workers won't be able to afford the iPhones they're assembling, however.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    The old chestnut that Henry Ford didn't actually say comes to mind though: "I wanted to pay my workers enough so they could afford the cars they were building." If they were making them in the US, Tim Cook could pay them enough to afford an iPhone on a payment plan with Verizon or AT&T. Even if he didn't want to, there's a federal minimum wage US workers employers are required to pay. What's frustrating is the investment Apple made in China is double the size of the Marshall plan the US invested in rebuilding Europe after WWII. That money could have been spent on America, but Steve Jobs spent it on China instead.
    - fooker 9mo ago
      > That money could have been spent on America This is wishful thinking, and similar to how how video game producers think if they stop N people from pirating a game, there will be N more copies of the game sold. No, instead of that the game will be played less. And analogously, less iPhones would be produced. You could argue that less iPhones would be good for the world, but that’s orthogonal to the topic.
      - pessimizer 9mo ago
        You're overestimating the proportion of the price attributed to labor that goes into an iPhone. The reason that production is offshored is to shave off a few percentage points. The price difference is almost nothing to the buyer, but a lot to the owners of Apple. iPhones have nothing to do with videogames. They are material objects, not zero marginal cost copies. edit: and the point is that, across the economy, it is very good for labor. While the iPhone's cost would rise a little bit nominally, it wouldn't rise as a portion of income, which is the only important number. The retail price would probably rise a bit more than that, but that's because it is a luxury good and its price would rise as incomes rose.
        fooker 9mo ago
        > price attributed to labor that goes into an iPhone Oh, that was not my point at all. It's that we simply do not have the scale and manpower to do it. Maybe in ten years with more automation sure, but definitely not in the Steve Jobs era.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago
  >and it really made a lot of this stuff click for me: they want to provide low-paying American jobs in American factories. This isn't a fair characterization. The people on reddit who complain that the coffee place is only scheduling them for 10 hours a week and that people are being stingy with the tips might actually prefer the factory job with a regular 40 hours, occasionally mandatory overtime, and $5/hr more than what Starbucks offers. If you disagree, then I suspect that there's no universe possible where you're satisfied without the population of the United States being cut by three quarters.
- terminalshort 9mo ago
  You have one of 3 choices here: 1. Low paid American workers glue iphones together in sweatshops 2. Low paid Chinese workers glue iphones together in sweatshops 3. Well paid American workers glue iphones together in sweatshops, and to make this possible we have a massive tariffs regime that makes consumer goods massively more expensive and massively increases the price of all manufactured goods. Pick your poison. They call economics the "dismal science" for a reason.
  - YY4398742398 9mo ago
    Chinese workers are not "low paid" relative to prices of goods in China though. A Chinese worker gluing an iPhone together can afford a decent middle class lifestyle, the Chinese version of the "American dream". What America really needs is massive deflation in the cost of everything, curbing income inequality (which is driving inflation) and moving to renewables (cost of oil/gas also drives inflation).
    - intalentive 9mo ago
      Yes, and a big part of the reason labor costs are so high is that living costs are high. The US worker is saturated with debt, fees, payments, rents of every stripe.
    - groos 9mo ago
      Deflation is never going to be allowed to happen even if economic conditions allow it. The reason that the Federal Reserve wants inflation at ~2% is so that nobody hoards cash in their home and instead spends it before it loses value or puts it in a bank to lend to the economy or invests it. Deflation would mean that you could hoard cash and it would grow in value, leading to less money available for economic growth.
    - ponector 9mo ago
      >> Chinese workers are not "low paid" relative to prices of goods in China though. A Chinese worker gluing an iPhone together can afford a decent middle class lifestyle, the Chinese version of the "American dream I'm pretty sure this is what Apple wants you to believe, while Chinese company offers minimal wage for workers who assemble phones. One could never afford a decent lifestyle on a minimal wage.
ineedaj0b 9mo ago
the price of metal, raw metal, coming out of factories like aluminum, steel, titanium is high because the cost of energy is high. I think it’s 30%-40% the cost of smelting it. Unless you can drop the price of energy and cheapen the raw material cost, the entire manufacturing industry will be uncompetitive. Primary smelters currently run pretty efficiently but are bottlenecked by two main factors in the USA: raw energy prices and regulations. (there’s likely some modern process improvements they could add too but those won’t increase productively as greatly). To reduce energy costs… you’ll need about double the current energy production we have today. That sounds like a lot but it’s very doable (the US has been neglecting itself for 50 years). It could with a little push from the Government catch up in 10-15 years, think lots of nuclear and solar.
- moogly 9mo ago
  Bringing energy costs down. I see. While I'm not super well-versed in the US energy market, and I understand it's a bit complex, I do believe it's a mix of regulated and deregulated private monopolies under a bunch of regional ISOs, but there's an energy trading market down there somewhere setting spot prices, correct? So are you saying the US energy market should be, if not fully re-regulated, regulated harder, or perhaps abolished and everything should be brought back to being state or federally run (I'm not sure the US ever had that)? It is not always in energy producers' interest to have really low energy prices, after all.
  - rickydroll 9mo ago
    I believe you have it right. In theory, power generation should have been a well-regulated monopoly. Unfortunately, as soon as you add investors, aka rent seekers, the system is pushed to increase profits at the expense of the customer. We should reset the monopoly by publishing and documenting tariffs for power and carriage. Third-party power suppliers should still have access to the power grid, with complete, transparent, and understandable costs for consumers. There needs to be a plan for continual upgrades and maintenance, rather than starving the grid and then requiring big bursts of funding that go in part to the rent seekers.
K0balt 9mo ago
Manufacturing means, realistically, bootstrapping the general purpose robots that will foment the “third Industrial Revolution”, which will revolutionize capital and make money largely irrelevant. Energy, materials, and automation are the only relevant factors for capital in the post-employment era.
- moogly 9mo ago
  Oh yeah, I also like post-scarcity SF like Iain M. Banks. Funny names for those ships, right? So we're betting everything on infusing humanoid robots with "AI" and abundance will automatically follow? I'm missing a lot of steps here inbetween. Will we live in harmony or will it be a massive scramble by the various nations to extract every single piece of natural resource by way of PvP? Oh right, the robots will fight. It'll be like that ancient robot-fighting show. We'll have that show too, but it'll be AI slop now, and it'll be entertainment for the robot warfighters while they charge their batteries. Can't we just make the billionaires buy everyone a robot from China instead? Oh wait, their money will be useless in a post-scarcity society and they will just be like any regular Joe. Wait a minute. That seems like a massive conflict of interest. Hmmm.
  - pepperball 9mo ago
    > Can't we just make the billionaires buy everyone a robot from China instead? Oh wait, their money will be useless in a post-scarcity society and they will just be like any regular Joe. Wait a minute. That seems like a massive conflict of interest. Hmmm. Dude it’s all good. Just snort another line and fall in the techno-delusion.
    - K0balt 9mo ago
      Unfortunately, that’s not the result of money being useless. Money being useless means the end of scarcity for a very few, and life outside the gilded walls for everyone else, trying to maintain an agrarian society so they can eat , and trying to stay out of the way of the ecophagic juggernaut.
  - K0balt 9mo ago

by moogly 9mo ago

freedomben 9mo ago

I don't know about Jensen specifically, and I can't remember the guy at the moment, but there have been a few tipped hands including one where the guy on national TV said something about "Americans should be gluing the iPhones together in the factory, not Chinese" and it really made a lot of this stuff click for me: they want to provide low-paying American jobs in American factories. That's probably not the whole vision, but it is a big part of it IMHO. I'll try and find the quote or video but if someone else remembers this, please share a link

moogly 9mo ago
That was Howard Lutnick. He's said a lot of, let's say "out-of-touch", things. He's not living in the real world, though. Motorola tried that not too long ago. Didn't go well. If you want to decimate American wages, you could do it, but if you at the same time deport people who were the most ready to work for a pittance, it's going to be hard to do this without riots. Then again, Stephen Miller wants those riots, so maybe you're right. The crux of the matter is that those workers won't be able to afford the iPhones they're assembling, however.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  The old chestnut that Henry Ford didn't actually say comes to mind though: "I wanted to pay my workers enough so they could afford the cars they were building." If they were making them in the US, Tim Cook could pay them enough to afford an iPhone on a payment plan with Verizon or AT&T. Even if he didn't want to, there's a federal minimum wage US workers employers are required to pay. What's frustrating is the investment Apple made in China is double the size of the Marshall plan the US invested in rebuilding Europe after WWII. That money could have been spent on America, but Steve Jobs spent it on China instead.
  - fooker 9mo ago
    > That money could have been spent on America This is wishful thinking, and similar to how how video game producers think if they stop N people from pirating a game, there will be N more copies of the game sold. No, instead of that the game will be played less. And analogously, less iPhones would be produced. You could argue that less iPhones would be good for the world, but that’s orthogonal to the topic.
    - pessimizer 9mo ago
      You're overestimating the proportion of the price attributed to labor that goes into an iPhone. The reason that production is offshored is to shave off a few percentage points. The price difference is almost nothing to the buyer, but a lot to the owners of Apple. iPhones have nothing to do with videogames. They are material objects, not zero marginal cost copies. edit: and the point is that, across the economy, it is very good for labor. While the iPhone's cost would rise a little bit nominally, it wouldn't rise as a portion of income, which is the only important number. The retail price would probably rise a bit more than that, but that's because it is a luxury good and its price would rise as incomes rose.
      - fooker 9mo ago
        > price attributed to labor that goes into an iPhone Oh, that was not my point at all. It's that we simply do not have the scale and manpower to do it. Maybe in ten years with more automation sure, but definitely not in the Steve Jobs era.
NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago
>and it really made a lot of this stuff click for me: they want to provide low-paying American jobs in American factories. This isn't a fair characterization. The people on reddit who complain that the coffee place is only scheduling them for 10 hours a week and that people are being stingy with the tips might actually prefer the factory job with a regular 40 hours, occasionally mandatory overtime, and $5/hr more than what Starbucks offers. If you disagree, then I suspect that there's no universe possible where you're satisfied without the population of the United States being cut by three quarters.
terminalshort 9mo ago
You have one of 3 choices here: 1. Low paid American workers glue iphones together in sweatshops 2. Low paid Chinese workers glue iphones together in sweatshops 3. Well paid American workers glue iphones together in sweatshops, and to make this possible we have a massive tariffs regime that makes consumer goods massively more expensive and massively increases the price of all manufactured goods. Pick your poison. They call economics the "dismal science" for a reason.
- YY4398742398 9mo ago
  Chinese workers are not "low paid" relative to prices of goods in China though. A Chinese worker gluing an iPhone together can afford a decent middle class lifestyle, the Chinese version of the "American dream". What America really needs is massive deflation in the cost of everything, curbing income inequality (which is driving inflation) and moving to renewables (cost of oil/gas also drives inflation).
  - intalentive 9mo ago
    Yes, and a big part of the reason labor costs are so high is that living costs are high. The US worker is saturated with debt, fees, payments, rents of every stripe.
  - groos 9mo ago
    Deflation is never going to be allowed to happen even if economic conditions allow it. The reason that the Federal Reserve wants inflation at ~2% is so that nobody hoards cash in their home and instead spends it before it loses value or puts it in a bank to lend to the economy or invests it. Deflation would mean that you could hoard cash and it would grow in value, leading to less money available for economic growth.
  - ponector 9mo ago
    >> Chinese workers are not "low paid" relative to prices of goods in China though. A Chinese worker gluing an iPhone together can afford a decent middle class lifestyle, the Chinese version of the "American dream I'm pretty sure this is what Apple wants you to believe, while Chinese company offers minimal wage for workers who assemble phones. One could never afford a decent lifestyle on a minimal wage.

ineedaj0b 9mo ago

the price of metal, raw metal, coming out of factories like aluminum, steel, titanium is high because the cost of energy is high. I think it’s 30%-40% the cost of smelting it. Unless you can drop the price of energy and cheapen the raw material cost, the entire manufacturing industry will be uncompetitive. Primary smelters currently run pretty efficiently but are bottlenecked by two main factors in the USA: raw energy prices and regulations. (there’s likely some modern process improvements they could add too but those won’t increase productively as greatly). To reduce energy costs… you’ll need about double the current energy production we have today. That sounds like a lot but it’s very doable (the US has been neglecting itself for 50 years). It could with a little push from the Government catch up in 10-15 years, think lots of nuclear and solar.

moogly 9mo ago
Bringing energy costs down. I see. While I'm not super well-versed in the US energy market, and I understand it's a bit complex, I do believe it's a mix of regulated and deregulated private monopolies under a bunch of regional ISOs, but there's an energy trading market down there somewhere setting spot prices, correct? So are you saying the US energy market should be, if not fully re-regulated, regulated harder, or perhaps abolished and everything should be brought back to being state or federally run (I'm not sure the US ever had that)? It is not always in energy producers' interest to have really low energy prices, after all.
- rickydroll 9mo ago
  I believe you have it right. In theory, power generation should have been a well-regulated monopoly. Unfortunately, as soon as you add investors, aka rent seekers, the system is pushed to increase profits at the expense of the customer. We should reset the monopoly by publishing and documenting tariffs for power and carriage. Third-party power suppliers should still have access to the power grid, with complete, transparent, and understandable costs for consumers. There needs to be a plan for continual upgrades and maintenance, rather than starving the grid and then requiring big bursts of funding that go in part to the rent seekers.

K0balt 9mo ago

Manufacturing means, realistically, bootstrapping the general purpose robots that will foment the “third Industrial Revolution”, which will revolutionize capital and make money largely irrelevant. Energy, materials, and automation are the only relevant factors for capital in the post-employment era.

moogly 9mo ago
Oh yeah, I also like post-scarcity SF like Iain M. Banks. Funny names for those ships, right? So we're betting everything on infusing humanoid robots with "AI" and abundance will automatically follow? I'm missing a lot of steps here inbetween. Will we live in harmony or will it be a massive scramble by the various nations to extract every single piece of natural resource by way of PvP? Oh right, the robots will fight. It'll be like that ancient robot-fighting show. We'll have that show too, but it'll be AI slop now, and it'll be entertainment for the robot warfighters while they charge their batteries. Can't we just make the billionaires buy everyone a robot from China instead? Oh wait, their money will be useless in a post-scarcity society and they will just be like any regular Joe. Wait a minute. That seems like a massive conflict of interest. Hmmm.
- pepperball 9mo ago
  > Can't we just make the billionaires buy everyone a robot from China instead? Oh wait, their money will be useless in a post-scarcity society and they will just be like any regular Joe. Wait a minute. That seems like a massive conflict of interest. Hmmm. Dude it’s all good. Just snort another line and fall in the techno-delusion.
  - K0balt 9mo ago
    Unfortunately, that’s not the result of money being useless. Money being useless means the end of scarcity for a very few, and life outside the gilded walls for everyone else, trying to maintain an agrarian society so they can eat , and trying to stay out of the way of the ecophagic juggernaut.
- K0balt 9mo ago