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.<p>"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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025</a>
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.
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.
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.
>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.<p>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.
Yes, China is winning, but at what cost?<p>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.
Long article. Mostly interesting!<p>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)<p>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.
> posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities<p>Is US ever gonna grow out of sore loser mentality or do we really need WWIII?
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.<p>Like the article says, physical world data is too scarce to jump straight to powerful robotics first.
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.
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...<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
We didn't want a new labor economy.<p>We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders. If that meant parting out our industrial base to our main geopolitical rival, <i>that's what that meant</i>.<p>In the US, capitalism has mostly replaced nationalism and patriotism. In China, it augments those things.
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.<p>Also the laber shortage is pushing this transition even faster in potential traditional/ slow areas.
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?
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.<p>Quoting Wikipedia,<p>"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"<p>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.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation</a>
A Latin American perspective (from the B in BRICS):<p>There are 3 economic blocks dreaming on global dominance: Europe, US and China. The difference among them is how they pursue these dreams.<p>The Europeans talk, discuss, gather and don't do anything.<p>The Americans shout, yell, go alone and do everything wrong.<p>The Chinese just do it, mostly right.
> 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.<p>The US capitalists must monopolize all upcoming labor commodities (all-robot) before China does it. Definitely some projection here.
so, the narrative from semianalysis is shifting from "agi is imminent" to "robotics will take over" - what does that mean for semi sales ?
China is known to scale out in the low end market without having a strategy to go upmarket.<p>Reading this article I honestly got the opposite impression. China is hopelessly behind Japan in both high end machine tools and robotics.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Combining the AI and a rental service would be so powerful.<p>We might be one or two years away from that being practical.