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"There are no people " everything is robotic" ...
Other executives recalled touring "dark factories" that don't even need to keep the lights on, as most work is being done around the clock by robots.
They shouldn't have been surprised, if they followed what's actually been happening. Most of them probably weren't, which is one of the reasons for outsourcing.
The problem in the US is that the left and MAGA right are treating manufacturing as nothing more than "good-paying jobs" programs, which is has long stopped to be, and failed to see that real "manu-facturing" has become "auto/robo-facturing." If/when money is provided by government as grants, loans or contracts, it's always described in terms of how many "good-paying jobs" it will create in construction and manufacturing.
Add to that the red-tape of federal, state and municipal government approvals and NIMBY environmental requirements, increasing cost of labor, as well as massive energy infrastructure required (with EVs, cryptos/blockchains, "AI" and "cloud" datacenters, in addition to increased residential and commercial demands competing - and raising prices - for electricity) that investment in "renewables" couldn't deliver inexpensively on industrial/utility scale, and it's not surprising at all that we are not where we need to be to be competitive in many aspects of economy.
For example, in 2023 China installed 276,000 robots; USA installed 38,000.
And China is no longer nearly as competitive in labor cost as many East Asia or East European countries, so companies have been moving some production to Vietnam, India and other countries.
#17 | Posted by ClownShack at 2025-10-19 07:54 PM
China did something America will never do.
Take money from their billionaires and invest it into their nation.
That's just ignorant - If you'd been to China, particularly Shenzhen or Shanghai, you'd know that in many respects China is more "capitalist" that current US.
The government of China has over-invested in and overbuilt many stupid make-work projects, and real Gen-Z unemployment is very high.
Chinese billionaires are doing very well, despite Xi's crackdown on Deng Xiaoping's "exuberant" trade policies that made China a lot more competitive in the world.
America Cannot Lose the Robotics Race - AH / a16z, September 26, 2025
|------- ... The United States was able to win the key industries of the twentieth century for reasons not so dissimilar to why China is winning now: a dynamic and open market, sometimes combined with strategic government support, created epochal American companies that unleashed immense economic value - from Boeing and Lockheed to IBM and Intel. But now we are undermining our historic advantage. Not only are we failing to thoughtfully modernize regulations created to address yesterday's challenges " before we faced the prospect of a global competition with China - but some policymakers are busy adding new barriers, like administrative requirements for AI startups or restrictive copyright proposals at both the federal and state levels. China is doing everything they can to ensure that they win the industries of the future. The same cannot be said for the United States. ...
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In China these are not driven by stupid "industrial policy" like Trump's/Biden's here in the US, it's now mostly in the hands of companies that made their owners billionaires and millionaires.
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