Wait. What if the AI gold rush contributes to better industrial robotics and ushers in an AI industrial revolution? China already has dark factories with no humans on the assembly line. Isn't that a possible outcome of the AI gold rush? (I mean omitting the fact that ChatGPT 5 Pro still says stuff like: "You’re right. I made a bad inference and defended it. That’s on me." We don't want that behavior on the assembly line.
Someone has to run the robots. And i bet it's not going to be the educated but spoiled workforce of the developed western world, but that will be outsourced to offshore destinations.
I think there's something cultural about wanting office jobs related to power over people, where you can always slack instead of waking up every day at 8 to go to the factory
This is assuming that "AI" isn't already being used extensively on manufacturing lines. Computer Vision has used "AI" neural networks for years for various tasks. The issue is that it is a lot of investment to implement automated assembly and there are still enough places in the world where labour is cheap enough to make it not worth it. As I said to one of my suppliers recently when they asked how their factory compared to others, "Automation is nice to have, but at the end of the day I'm choosing a vendor based on who can get me the product cheapest, quickest, and with high quality."
Just my 5 cents. Running factory is damn hard job. 10 products built from 50 different parts having 70 different vendors is a small nightmare. So me people can manage that, but the most can’t. Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week. I work in a factory and see this daily.
My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
The slight problem with how AI is currently being marketed is that AI is going for the fun and creative jobs that people want to do, not the dull and repetitive jobs that nobody wants to do.
If every creative job is gone to the AI beast then there will be people willing to do factory work since nothing else will be available.
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week.
In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
Western labor is never going to compete with Asian labor, so it's no use even trying. If we want to have any chance of matching what China is already doing (let alone beating it), we're going to have to invest an absolute fortune in automation and streamlining: reduce the number of unique products, reduce the part count, reduce the number of vendors, reduce the distance to vendors, and automate everything you can reasonably automate.
Make it capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive and we might be able to keep up.
> In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate.
Not really, American manufacturing is already automated. Manufacturing jobs have steadily decreased[0] while output has increased (or stayed steady) in manufacturing since the early 2000's [1]. There is only one reasonable explanation for this -> automation.
While it is true that the Chinese are indeed automated their manufacturing, it still doesn't negate the fact that companies like Foxconn still have 200k employees in China.
IMHO the real reason you'll never see manufacturing come back to the USA is because you can't convince people who are already in less manually intensive labor conditions to go back to more manually intensive labor conditions. Said differently, it's easier to get someone who's family has spent decades doing back breaking work in a rice paddy to work in a factory for slightly better pay than it is to do the reverse.
Using people for manufacturing fundamentally will never be cost competitive compared to cheaper markets. There are really only a few ways to resolve this in my view:
1. Give up and just outsource manufacturing and be ok with it
2. Invest heavily in automation, technology etc so we remove cost of labor from the equation. Or at least heavily minimize it
3. Put up trade barriers to artificially raise the cost of imported goods, which is what the current admin is trying to do, at least officially
1. leaves us dependent on other potentially adversarial countries, 3. increases the cost of goods sold so puts a burden on the population. So seems like 2. is the only way to go, if the country can get behind it. But it also inherently won't add a lot of jobs.
I used to work in such a factory in Germany and turn-over was high :) A large pool of uni students doing their summer breaks propped up the place. They could afford to work there for 1-2 months mentally because they knew they'd go back to university (me, too). The few long-timers on the factory floor were mostly functioning alcoholics.
I worked in a factory for a few months. They moved me around on the line. While each week looked the same, each day in the week was different. Though I was told by some of the other guys on the line that it was one of the nicer factories they ever worked in. I did some tech work in a few auto factories as well, and those had a very different vibe on the floor.
While it may be boring to someone who use used to doing knowledge work, there are a lot of people who need jobs who aren’t going to be doing knowledge work. They need something.
I worked fast food for a shift before I quit. I found that much more boring and hated it much more than the factory. I’d rather see people employed making stuff domestically rather than have yet another drive-thru window in town.
I grew up in a small town with two fairly decent sized factories. That was a solid job prospect for a lot of people coming out or high school that didn’t know what else they could do. It gave those kids options and kept them in town where they could buy a house, raise a family, and spend money supporting other local businesses. Now they’re both closed and the city is hunting for ways to bring businesses to town. My brother-in-law is driving 100+ miles per day to drive to an area with more jobs opportunities. I’m sure if there was a local factory gig he’d probably take it and save a ton on gas, not to mention getting back 10 hours per week of his time.
I recently did some reading on the blight in Baltimore. Lots of vacant neighborhoods with severe impact on the economy. Seems the private sector is eager to support but staying back due to various factors like crime-rate, lack of neighborhood development, exorbitant utility charges etc.
Well... sure. Capitalists are looking for the best rate of return when they deploy their investments, they're looking at the money to be made financing datacenters vs other things, datacenters are winning.
Instead of industrial base for national security priority, Americans are served extra slop with a side of spammy content once these AI are done ingesting.
The article is implying throughout that these two things are mutually exclusive, and while that makes some intuitive sense (only so much money to invest after all), the last chart [1] doesn't give any indication that data center investment comes at the expense of industrial investment.
[1] "Private sector spending on equipment, adjusted for inflation"
The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately.
Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services. Yes, there is have a trade deficit on goods, that was a long-term strategy because services were a superior investment.
Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money unless you're planning to go to conventional war, and since the US is a nuclear superpower it's never going to get into an existential boots-on-the-ground Serious War again unless it just wants to cosplay. Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant.
So: it took decades to burn the boats with manufacturing, and trying to rebuild them in a few years is a hilarious folly. It absolutely will not go anywhere, and honestly shouldn't anyway. There is real danger, however, that the US burns the boats on the carefully crafted service sector as well.
The crazy thing is, due to coordinated propaganda campaigns, people don't realize that the Biden administration got people to invest in US factories at an unprecedented rate. Trump's already managed to scare off a lot of that investment, presumably because he wants to protect the trade deficit.
Here's a graph of actual private investment money going into factories in the US since 1950. It proves my point:
I guess the tariffs are serving some other purpose, like forcing foreign governments to bribe him under-the-counter(?) That'd explain his rapid increase in net worth since taking office.
"Services" are actually fake and it turns out you need to be able to make things to survive. Not for ROI or for trade deficits, but because the world manufacturer sets the rules.
My guess is that investors expect AI to automate manufacturing, and are waiting to see where that tech goes before spending a ton of capital on soon-to-be-obsolete machinery.
"Our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but will be able to do so indirectly, much like Apple has other companies manufacture their phones."
In other words, we are a knowledge economy and outsource like it's the 1990s with a bit of "AI" fantasies thrown in. The crash cannot come soon enough.
Just a friendly reminder: The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Of course he doesn't want people to think that tariffs can bring back middle class manufacturing jobs, and naturally he would want to publish propaganda intended to demoralize pro-labor causes like import tariffs and worker protection laws.
I'm not saying he's wrong just yet, I'm just pointing out that he owns a propaganda mouthpiece and is willing to lie on a grandiose scale to protect his business interests.
Having worked in a job shop, a factory that did gears down to quantity one, I became quite aware of the differences between IT, my previous job, and actual physical production.
The machine tools were all made 50+ years ago. Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups that are done a few times a year in quantity, to fail, erasing the profits for the job, and possibly losing customers.
The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
There's a sort of collective ADHD where we as a culture or economy collectively chase the latest shiny bauble in the hopes of getting rich without having to expend any effort. It often ends badly for the economy and then we go through a phase where we collectively are forced to slow down and reflect on our mistakes vowing not to repeat them... only to do so a decade or two later. The older you get, the more you notice this pattern. We did it in 2000 with the dotcom implosion and then again in 08 with housing and shady mortgages. This time it's overbuilding AI; putting way too much capital into infrastructure that has short useful lifetime.
> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
The only way "number goes up" capitalism continues to work is with planned obsolescence and things that need to be replaced regularly. This is a feature of the system, not a flaw. Nvidia (and all of their investors) love the fact that the stuff they make now will be outdated or broken in a few years.
If things last forever and never need to be replaced the only way to continue to increase profits is to have more people buying them. And global population appears to be peaking, at least in western countries, so that's not going to happen.
Is it sustainable? Probably not. But everyone seems to have their heads buried in the sand at the obvious dangers of what we're running into.
Nothing has changed, people behave the exact same way then or now. People value longevity and quality only when the innovation pace is slow.
Rapid innovation by definition comes with rapid changes. Rapid changes does not always mean it is planned obsolescence or just poor quality.
In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are.
The best recent example is Smartphones, early 2010s everyone updated their phones almost every year standing around the block on release. Today it is maybe once 3-4 years, there is very little reason to. The incremental changes are not meaningful and devices have become lot more reliable and rugged and of course expensive.
We do value quality if features are not going to improve much.
Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups
I am reminded of some of the very finest semiconductor plants. Where parts could in theory be swapped out and replaced, but to do so would break everything. Mirrors aligned to sub-nanometre precision. Lasers and optics where picoseconds matter. Where parts are effectively custom-tuned for this machine only, allied with all these other parts also custom-tuned for this machine only. The US has a challenge on its hands to develop within the US everything and everyone needed to simply getting these systems actually working.
I'm reminded of how the New York City subway continues to rely on parts that it essentially cannot replace... similarly how the rail system in India essentially involves maintaining what the British left behind since a lot of the pieces can't easily be upgraded or replaced.
To be clear in both cases upgrades and maintainability would be possible but requires concerted effort to modernize with a long term mindset
Manufacturing was hard to do 2 decades ago, and is harder now.
I started, grew, and exited a modern manufacturing-based business, and I can confirm that almost everything about modern capitalism in this cycle is biased -against- any business that manufactures in 1st world economies. The business, Spoonflower, was and is an innovative marketplace of textile design, mated to on-demand manufacture, and had factories in Durham NC and Berlin Germany.
Three factors made this very difficult:
-- raising funding or debt to support old-fashioned capital equipment. Building factories was once the backbone of the US economy but is now pretty close to impossible for an entrepreneur. Raising money to write software is straightforward and well understood. Raising money to purchase industrial equipment the size of a city bus is not what our startup economy is optimized for, or even understands or has models for. Confusion about this is nearly universal.
-- operating a labor-intensive (anything where the largest component of cost is the labor component) manufactory. As others have noted, making stuff is physically demanding. Some people love hard work, but culturally this is rare. If you are crazy successful, the reward is another shift of harder, potentially more efficient work.
-- exiting investors / providing ROI. Our business fit in two categories: creative digital marketplaces (Ebay, Etsy...) valued at 4-6x revenue, or makers like Cimpress or Shutterfly at .5 to 1x revenue. Who buys factories.... even really interesting ones? The short answer: only those that already own factories. When you have a very short list of potential acquisitors, its hard to create an auction market for your equity.
In general, we did okay. But every step from launch to growth to exit felt very much like swimming into a strong current. The same very hard working and resourceful group of colleagues could have done anything. I'm proud of the work, but a lot of that pride is sheer contrariness at having executed on something so unlikely and having survived.
This would be much harder now.
Sourcing is harder. Friends working in the space now rely on a global sourcing network just as we did, that is in utter disarray. Operating on thin margins with a factory that must be fed raw materials to make money is terrifying on a normal day. These days the threat to supply chains is existential.
Launching consumer brands is harder. As has been widely noted, access to the top of the funnel has now been fully monetized (or fully enshittified) by Google, Facebook etc, and because of AI, that funnel now shrinks. Something will break loose here, but nothing has yet.
A post-pandemic employment environment is even more difficult for manufacturers. I think it is safe to say that demand for jobs that require 8-12 hours of physically demanding work surrounded by colleagues and industrial machinery is at an all time low.
I spent 15 years in service to a vision of domestic making, and while we were not defeated, I understand deeply the uphill battle any manufacturing entrepreneur faces.
Quite the contrary to the points made in some of the comments mentioning that China is far ahead in applying automation tools/workflows in factories, which then shaped the competitive benifits in manufacture industries.
No, it's not.
It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to involve because of the involving needs for newer/better products.
It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources, it is the growing needs from the comsumers that require products to have newer/more functionality even if it has shorter lifetime, or event 'better', the product is looking for growth so they are designed to be short lifetime so the manufacturer and the customer both willing to upgrade in the future.
I mean it kind of makes sense if you squint. Over the past 20-40yr regulatory (often public, but also often private) developments have created an insane amount of value non-producing paper pushing busy work. A man who supplies bent steel troughs to a company that outfits food producing factories spends infinitely more time on overhead paper pushing than he did 20yr ago (pulling this example out of my own friend group). What we need isn't more stuff. What we need is cheaper clerical labor to cut through the BS mountain we've built for ourselves enabling us to spend more time doing the things that produce value.
My dad is an immigrant from China who came to America to learn process engineering. After getting his master's, his first job was at a Reynold's aluminum factory in Alabama, and his factory made aluminum stuff and sometimes bottles. 40 years later, after lots of career jumps, he is about to retire this month from Google's AI division.
I’m a software engineer now but I was a design mechanical engineer for a decade. In America, mechanical engineers always felt like the bottom of barrel. The pay, benefits, and authority was always worse, even at the big tech companies. Culturally, America wants manufacturing back but doesn’t give it the respect it deserves.
Culturally, America wants manufacturing back in order to increase the prestige of non-college men. Some amount of spillover to engineers might be tolerated, but if the pay, benefits, and authority are seen to mostly accrue to high-SAT-scoring engineers (just like in Silicon Valley) then a manufacturing renaissance will be considered an abject failure.
65 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 79.3 ms ] threadI think there's something cultural about wanting office jobs related to power over people, where you can always slack instead of waking up every day at 8 to go to the factory
My family owns a small plastic manufacturing plant in the US. This is the biggest problem they face. The western worker's appetite for a low skill monotonous manufacturing job is very small. The business loses employees to Walmart etc. despite the factory having higher pay and significantly better benefits.
If every creative job is gone to the AI beast then there will be people willing to do factory work since nothing else will be available.
In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!
Western labor is never going to compete with Asian labor, so it's no use even trying. If we want to have any chance of matching what China is already doing (let alone beating it), we're going to have to invest an absolute fortune in automation and streamlining: reduce the number of unique products, reduce the part count, reduce the number of vendors, reduce the distance to vendors, and automate everything you can reasonably automate.
Make it capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive and we might be able to keep up.
Not really, American manufacturing is already automated. Manufacturing jobs have steadily decreased[0] while output has increased (or stayed steady) in manufacturing since the early 2000's [1]. There is only one reasonable explanation for this -> automation.
While it is true that the Chinese are indeed automated their manufacturing, it still doesn't negate the fact that companies like Foxconn still have 200k employees in China.
IMHO the real reason you'll never see manufacturing come back to the USA is because you can't convince people who are already in less manually intensive labor conditions to go back to more manually intensive labor conditions. Said differently, it's easier to get someone who's family has spent decades doing back breaking work in a rice paddy to work in a factory for slightly better pay than it is to do the reverse.
[0] - https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling...
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GOMA
1. Give up and just outsource manufacturing and be ok with it
2. Invest heavily in automation, technology etc so we remove cost of labor from the equation. Or at least heavily minimize it
3. Put up trade barriers to artificially raise the cost of imported goods, which is what the current admin is trying to do, at least officially
1. leaves us dependent on other potentially adversarial countries, 3. increases the cost of goods sold so puts a burden on the population. So seems like 2. is the only way to go, if the country can get behind it. But it also inherently won't add a lot of jobs.
While it may be boring to someone who use used to doing knowledge work, there are a lot of people who need jobs who aren’t going to be doing knowledge work. They need something.
I worked fast food for a shift before I quit. I found that much more boring and hated it much more than the factory. I’d rather see people employed making stuff domestically rather than have yet another drive-thru window in town.
I grew up in a small town with two fairly decent sized factories. That was a solid job prospect for a lot of people coming out or high school that didn’t know what else they could do. It gave those kids options and kept them in town where they could buy a house, raise a family, and spend money supporting other local businesses. Now they’re both closed and the city is hunting for ways to bring businesses to town. My brother-in-law is driving 100+ miles per day to drive to an area with more jobs opportunities. I’m sure if there was a local factory gig he’d probably take it and save a ton on gas, not to mention getting back 10 hours per week of his time.
[1] "Private sector spending on equipment, adjusted for inflation"
That's 0.3%.
Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services. Yes, there is have a trade deficit on goods, that was a long-term strategy because services were a superior investment.
Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money unless you're planning to go to conventional war, and since the US is a nuclear superpower it's never going to get into an existential boots-on-the-ground Serious War again unless it just wants to cosplay. Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant.
So: it took decades to burn the boats with manufacturing, and trying to rebuild them in a few years is a hilarious folly. It absolutely will not go anywhere, and honestly shouldn't anyway. There is real danger, however, that the US burns the boats on the carefully crafted service sector as well.
Here's a graph of actual private investment money going into factories in the US since 1950. It proves my point:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RC1Q027SBEA
I guess the tariffs are serving some other purpose, like forcing foreign governments to bribe him under-the-counter(?) That'd explain his rapid increase in net worth since taking office.
"Our goal is to create a company that can do anything short of manufacturing physical objects directly, but will be able to do so indirectly, much like Apple has other companies manufacture their phones."
In other words, we are a knowledge economy and outsource like it's the 1990s with a bit of "AI" fantasies thrown in. The crash cannot come soon enough.
I'm not saying he's wrong just yet, I'm just pointing out that he owns a propaganda mouthpiece and is willing to lie on a grandiose scale to protect his business interests.
The machine tools were all made 50+ years ago. Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups that are done a few times a year in quantity, to fail, erasing the profits for the job, and possibly losing customers.
The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
There's a sort of collective ADHD where we as a culture or economy collectively chase the latest shiny bauble in the hopes of getting rich without having to expend any effort. It often ends badly for the economy and then we go through a phase where we collectively are forced to slow down and reflect on our mistakes vowing not to repeat them... only to do so a decade or two later. The older you get, the more you notice this pattern. We did it in 2000 with the dotcom implosion and then again in 08 with housing and shady mortgages. This time it's overbuilding AI; putting way too much capital into infrastructure that has short useful lifetime.
The only way "number goes up" capitalism continues to work is with planned obsolescence and things that need to be replaced regularly. This is a feature of the system, not a flaw. Nvidia (and all of their investors) love the fact that the stuff they make now will be outdated or broken in a few years.
If things last forever and never need to be replaced the only way to continue to increase profits is to have more people buying them. And global population appears to be peaking, at least in western countries, so that's not going to happen.
Is it sustainable? Probably not. But everyone seems to have their heads buried in the sand at the obvious dangers of what we're running into.
Rapid innovation by definition comes with rapid changes. Rapid changes does not always mean it is planned obsolescence or just poor quality.
In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are.
The best recent example is Smartphones, early 2010s everyone updated their phones almost every year standing around the block on release. Today it is maybe once 3-4 years, there is very little reason to. The incremental changes are not meaningful and devices have become lot more reliable and rugged and of course expensive.
We do value quality if features are not going to improve much.
I am reminded of some of the very finest semiconductor plants. Where parts could in theory be swapped out and replaced, but to do so would break everything. Mirrors aligned to sub-nanometre precision. Lasers and optics where picoseconds matter. Where parts are effectively custom-tuned for this machine only, allied with all these other parts also custom-tuned for this machine only. The US has a challenge on its hands to develop within the US everything and everyone needed to simply getting these systems actually working.
To be clear in both cases upgrades and maintainability would be possible but requires concerted effort to modernize with a long term mindset
The new superpowers will be the EU, which was smart enough not to make the same gamble, and China, which will structurally survive it.
I started, grew, and exited a modern manufacturing-based business, and I can confirm that almost everything about modern capitalism in this cycle is biased -against- any business that manufactures in 1st world economies. The business, Spoonflower, was and is an innovative marketplace of textile design, mated to on-demand manufacture, and had factories in Durham NC and Berlin Germany.
Three factors made this very difficult:
-- raising funding or debt to support old-fashioned capital equipment. Building factories was once the backbone of the US economy but is now pretty close to impossible for an entrepreneur. Raising money to write software is straightforward and well understood. Raising money to purchase industrial equipment the size of a city bus is not what our startup economy is optimized for, or even understands or has models for. Confusion about this is nearly universal.
-- operating a labor-intensive (anything where the largest component of cost is the labor component) manufactory. As others have noted, making stuff is physically demanding. Some people love hard work, but culturally this is rare. If you are crazy successful, the reward is another shift of harder, potentially more efficient work.
-- exiting investors / providing ROI. Our business fit in two categories: creative digital marketplaces (Ebay, Etsy...) valued at 4-6x revenue, or makers like Cimpress or Shutterfly at .5 to 1x revenue. Who buys factories.... even really interesting ones? The short answer: only those that already own factories. When you have a very short list of potential acquisitors, its hard to create an auction market for your equity.
In general, we did okay. But every step from launch to growth to exit felt very much like swimming into a strong current. The same very hard working and resourceful group of colleagues could have done anything. I'm proud of the work, but a lot of that pride is sheer contrariness at having executed on something so unlikely and having survived.
This would be much harder now.
Sourcing is harder. Friends working in the space now rely on a global sourcing network just as we did, that is in utter disarray. Operating on thin margins with a factory that must be fed raw materials to make money is terrifying on a normal day. These days the threat to supply chains is existential.
Launching consumer brands is harder. As has been widely noted, access to the top of the funnel has now been fully monetized (or fully enshittified) by Google, Facebook etc, and because of AI, that funnel now shrinks. Something will break loose here, but nothing has yet.
A post-pandemic employment environment is even more difficult for manufacturers. I think it is safe to say that demand for jobs that require 8-12 hours of physically demanding work surrounded by colleagues and industrial machinery is at an all time low.
I spent 15 years in service to a vision of domestic making, and while we were not defeated, I understand deeply the uphill battle any manufacturing entrepreneur faces.
No, it's not.
It's actually because China is lowring the requirement/quality for delivery and makes everthing for the comsumer market to degrade rapidly so that the manufacturers has the chance to involve because of the involving needs for newer/better products.
It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources, it is the growing needs from the comsumers that require products to have newer/more functionality even if it has shorter lifetime, or event 'better', the product is looking for growth so they are designed to be short lifetime so the manufacturer and the customer both willing to upgrade in the future.
Excuse my language/grammer.
The AI crash will be a catalyst for general instability and chaos with a fascist at the helm.
I don't really know what the lesson here is.