I believe this conclusion is flawed. The author argues:
1) Unitree robots are largely made by hand.
2) Labor is approximately 8% of cost of manufacturing these robots. Because these costs are not prohibitive, there is little incentive to automate.
3) Labor costs are higher in America.
4) Therefore, American companies have higher incentive to automate.
5) Therefore, the West will capture most of the robotics opportunity.
Arguments 1-4 are reasonable, but 5 is a non-sequitur. Higher incentive to automate does not imply a better ability to automate & scale manufacturing.
I believe Unitree is currently assembling robots by hand for practical reasons:
1) Labor is still relatively cheap.
2) Humanoids and robots are evolving rapidly, changing every few months.
3) Custom assembly lines are expensive, and become obsolete when the product changes. It's difficult to maintain an assembly line when the product is rapidly evolving.
4) Tooling is inadequate. Some robotic parts are delicate, complicated, and difficult to automate manufacturing of. American companies have hit the exact same problem: Tesla is assembling the hand/forearm of Optimus by hand because it hasn't figured out how to automate manufacturing them. https://www.theverge.com/tech/1016492/tesla-optimus-robots-p... . Apparently, Tesla has hundreds of handless Optimus robots just standing around, waiting for hand manufacturing to catch up.
5) Demand is still relatively niche, these are not mass market products. Unitree only sold 5,500 robots last year. There is not enough demand to justify massive automated lines.
The author also ignores the biggest counterpoint: the Chinese have already demonstrated mastery in automated manufacturing, and have proven they can run dark factories (factories without humans) at a better scale than the west.
When humanoid robots become a mass market product (they are not ready today because the software side is majorly lacking), Chinese manufacturers are in an excellent position to rapidly automate.
Motor winding is an amusing problem. Everybody making motors has a powered winder. It's handling the wire ends that can be either manual or automatic. If you look at videos of winders, automating the wire end handling is most of the machinery.
Here's an overview of winding automation:
Full auto, robotic transfer.[1]
Full auto, manual transfer [2].
Semi auto. [3].
Manual, powered. [4]
Manual, unpowered motor overhaul.[5] (Country girl in China who fixes motors and engines.)
Those winding machines are all from the same company, NIDE. You can buy as much automation as you want, depending on your labor costs. Option [4] is cost-effective if you can have one machine tender per machine.
The opportunity for the west is that an engineer with todays resources can work on building [1] for $5-10k and get into the DC motor business from your shed. Im working on this myself right now, I want to try and start an autonomous manufacturing company here in Australia, maybe I'll start with motors. I predict once the war is over, Ukraine will become a robotics & manufacturing powerhouse because they've already got this model working
1. The terrible quality of the locally manufactured items. I am in Sydney and will absolutely not buy anything marked Made In Australia. I have been burnt too many times.
2. The nearly 100% mortality rate among the companies.
Rotorlab (rotorlab.com.au) are or were doing this in Australia.
They had a couple of posts about their machinery: a winding machine, CNC mill, etc.
I believe they were bought out pretty quickly by a US company. Can't recall who though.
Are you winding something in an incredibly specialized kV / wattage / torque or something? DC motors are incredibly inexpensive, how could a hobbyist sell them?
China has so many advantages it's unbeatable. For one, they didn't start a "tariff war". Then they are cheaper in every step of the way, from the labor to build the factories to the logistic involved when selling the actual products.
This was pretty much my conclusion while reading the article too.
Just to extend your point - chinese car manufacturers are not only producing more cars, they're innovating at a faster pace too. While I'm not an expert, there is enough and more on social media around this. Eg: https://x.com/dhh/status/2113500613082329576?a=fscIadYr4U1xm...
China manufactures many things but that's not the key part of the value chain. iPhones are manufactured in China (and elsewhere in Asia but Apple in Cupertino is the trillion-dollar company, not the actual manufacturers.
The key parts are R&D, design, intellectual property, engineering talent. The question is, how well are Chinese organizations doing in those capacities in regard to robotics. My impression is that the answer is, quite well.
The focus on manufacturing is (in many cases) a twisted approach of economics. In the mid-20th century the West did very well with mass production. It was an innovative technology at the top of the value chain. But in early-to-mid 21st century, it's (often) an old, ~commodity technology and the ROI is poor. It's also physically not good for workers in many cases. When looking for economic growth you want to aim for top of the value change, for the future, not what was done 70 years ago - it won't work the same way economically anymore. In economics, you can't return to what worked before.
The problem with the "West" going forward is that R&D, design, intellectual property, engineering talent are exactly the areas at most risk of AI disruption leaving the physical grunt work as the only remaining moat
Yeah this is the thing I think most are missing about LLMs. They're just seeing the current valuation of things and picturing the future as being the same, but with different efficiencies. But as the cost of 'cognitive work' in general starts approach $0, the value of such, in and of itself, is also going to approach $0.
But the economy is in equilibrium which means as this decreases, it's going to change the value of other things, and open the door for new things. Whoever can take what LLMs offer, and then most successfully build on top of that will probably be 'the winner.' I'm not sure exactly what this will translate to in practice, but it seems reasonable to predict that manufacturing is going to be a huge part of it.
"But as the cost of 'cognitive work' in general starts approach $0, the value of such, in and of itself, is also going to approach $0."
When the pirate party was big in EU, there was much talk about copying approaching the cost of 0, and therefor we would never pay for copying data, only creating new data.
I guess this all due to copyright law, and it will not disappear anytime soon, but still. I would not be too quick to draw that same conclusion.
I'd look to the past at similar 'revolutions' and what it did to existing players. For example 'computer' was the name of an occupation that existed for millennia. [1] Yet so complete was the obsolescence that I think most people (certainly including myself) never even realized these people existed, but it's quite obvious once you think about it.
Imagine all the work involved in, for instance, trigonometry and its basic applications in the past. And the later on with the advent of kinematics and so forth. These things involved a lot of computation and so there were literal human calculators whose job it was to work out all of the calculations.
But with the advent of electrical calculators, we literally no longer know that these jobs even existed. It's very easy to see the same in a future where, for instance, computer programs can be efficiently written from description alone. At that point the idea of a 'programmer' would seem like quite an odd concept.
I'd also look at what it did to the value of such work. Now computations, even quite complex, are mostly worth exactly $0. But we built extensive systems on top of those computations that became worth quite a lot indeed!
I don't think you can draw any conclusion from a party which never became a government, one way or the other.
However, we do have Wikipedia. Wikipedia was never valued at the peak sales price of Encyclopedia Britannica times the number of people online, if it was it would be worth around $16 trillion.
Manufacturing doesn't work like in Minecraft, like you put the raw material into a box, pick the blueprint, then POOF the finished product pops out. There's actually a lot of ingenuity and innovation in manufacturing. To say that the field has been static for 70 years is absolutely foolish
It is interesting that you consider R&D, design, and engineering as something fundamentally different to manufacturing, rather than its heart and soul.
I don't really follow the logic in the article at all:
The argument is that Unitree's assembly process is currently very manual because there is no incentive to automate, which is because labor cost isn't the bottleneck here, where in the US labor cost are much higher, therefore the US will have incentive to automate more. Those are reasonable so far, until you try to use that as a conclusion that this is why the West will win?
First of all, what does he think the other 92% of the cost of manufacturing is? A small portion of that is materials and electricity, but the biggest part of the remaining cost is assembly tooling/fixtures for the assembly line, and a fully automated assembly line is much, much more expensive compared to a semi-automated or manual production line.
In other words: it's not that Unitree couldn't build fully automated assembly lines if they wanted to, but spending tens of millions of dollars fully automated assembly line that takes up floor space and requires even more labor for manual maintenance for a product that is only being produced by the hundreds to thousands in quantity every month rather than millions simply does not make economic sense to begin with.
Second, why is he assuming that a fully automated assembly line will be cheaper to build in the US than in China, especially since he toured a factory with fully automated assembly lines at BYD in China immediately after? And sure, I would absolutely argue that American software engineering is more efficient than Chinese when looked at as a whole, but the cost of programming an assembly line is a minor portion of the cost compared to actually getting the assembly line fixtures and tooling built.
Third, his cost estimate is way off if he thinks you can get the same product manufactured in the US for only 50% more. From my own anecdotal experience, a more realistic cost for US manufacturing for pretty much anything is minimum 300% to 1000% more expensive if you are to make the in the US, and the lack of a mature parts supply chain in the US is honestly a bigger issue than worker wage.
I think the problem Destin (host of the channel) faced, a.k.a. high production costs in the US, and the problem Unitree faces, a.k.a. no motivation to push for further automation are all both soft problems, meaning it can be resolved eventually if someone pushes enough to solve it.
If instead just creating few of the tools, Destin pushed to create $1T worth of it, then maybe the supplychain will automatically build around it.
If China's labor cost risen to the level that makes Unitree robots more appealing, then Unitree will figure out ways to automate their production line more to keep up with the demand.
All and all, it's not a capability problem, it's a "why do it, and why now" problem. Just like, say, sending people to Mars. The tech is already here, but why send people to a planet that (currently) don't even have enough stuff needed to support living? Except of course, Mars will probably stay this way much longer than a country changing course.
Also, just a sidenote: I think Destin misread the market. He wanted to create a "high-quality", "durable" product. Sure, it make sense to do it most of the time, but a brush? You know, that thing gets dirty in an dark and oily way very quickly. With a durable brush that's expensive to replace, then you have will a problem of maintenance, clean it etc. And grill oil is not easy to clean, do you now also have to buy another product just to maintain the brush? How about now I offer you a cheap made in China brush that will disintegrate in your hands after 5 times of use, but then you just throw it away and get a new one, no maintenance required. Of course, throwing away too many trash is bad for the environment, but guess how the other trash gets handled, including, say, toothbrush?
How about, invent a grill that don't need to be brushed? Just a rinse and it's done? Just a Smarter way to think about inventing, you know.
Well, after watching the video, I think Destin designed the product in the most expensive way possible for this application, using the progressive die sheet metal handle, multiple injection molded parts, fastener, and chainmail.
If I were to design it to be manufactured in the states, I would probably go for a simple wooden handle with off the shelf wire mesh instead of chainmail, and the fastening would just be mechanical fit between wrapped wire and handle with no additional fastener, which should massively improve price and manufacturability.
Wasn't the problem that the "off the shelf" parts all came from china? Also the point was to try and manufacture something of reasonable complexity completely in the US.
“””
America has run this experiment before. In 1964 about half a million Mexican farmworkers were shut out. In 1965, 20% of California's tomatoes were picked by machine; by 1970 the figure was 99.9%.“””
I honestly had not considered closing down (legal) immigration as a forcing function for automation. Industrial policy as immigration law.
But I don’t think I get the rest …
Higher costs onshore mean machines give us an advantage - i get that.
The rest I may be missing
There is a corollary to this. When talent is blocked from immigrating, they start innovating at home.
I'm seeing this in India. Some really smart students are doing some fascinating startups at home because emigrating to the west has become really hard.
Still a very small effect, but one that gives me a lot of hope and cause for excitement.
5 years ago I was trying to get a custom aluminium enclosure for some circuit boards manufactured. We found potential suppliers in Taiwan, but they basically would have needed an expert onsite to be able to set up all the jigs. They also could have supported us through rapid scaling by switching to moulded raw stock which then was post machined, and would bring down unit prices a lot.
However, one guy knew a local SoCal machine shop that supplied parts to the auto modding scene and had a bunch of 5-axis milling machines. For 200 units they would beat Taiwan on every metric: cost, time, effort on our side, flexibility for changes.
We're engineers. From this lens, the difference between us and cavemen are the tools we have. We should lean into this.
So, you agree with the article ? If we onshore a critical mass of manufacturing, then the supply chain springs up like an eco-system, and the critical mass needed to do that is lower the better quality better engineered the machinery is
So industrial policy should be focused on high end engineering quality, more than bringing jobs back
(Might be spotting a political problem there but in general I think I agree)
How many of the most talented people will jump straight in to manufacturing because of policy/macro incentives and shifts in economic policy?
People are much more likely to try something if they see peers and role models doing it. Even better if it’s something fun and exciting that they want to be a part of.
I think to convince someone to run a factory instead of trying to become MTS @ lab, they should know 1. it’s not a binary “make it or break it” where failure means doing some boring, poorly paid job (the downside is good but not so guaranteed that it’s abused/attracts the wrong people ) 2. it’s interesting and challenging and enjoyable at times 3. it’s meaningful at a societal or personal level. That's what made tech/AI/finance work and it's the competing pitch.
Why should someone with other options want to work in or operate a factory?
And are those tomatoes picked by hand or by machine ?
(Again apropos of nothing I am assuming the rise of “on the vine tomatoes” in packets is presumably because cutting four off the branch is quicker and easier than twisting four or five.
And even possibly there is a robot doing it. Would be interested to know
It seems like much of the disparity between the West and China isn't about China having some better manufacturing technology. They do, but it's not the real issue. Really it's all about financial imbalances - people get paid less and the rent is lower. In the West we have a huge rent-extraction sector which produces nothing and makes it much harder to afford to start any activity.
It's not entirely true that the sector produces nothing, but if you think about it, the whole US economy in the last 3 decades has been nothing but rent extraction.
Defense contractors charge maintenance fees both domestic and abroad. For abroad, the maintenance contract is a requirement of getting the deal passed through congress and is frequently more expensive than the gear itself.
SaaS charge monthly instead of one upfront fee for a well tested product that used to be the norm
Video games similarly have been transitioning to day 1 paid DLCs and monthly fees
Even the movie industry is a subscription now (streaming providers aside). There's not one movie, there's the MCU pumping out 3 movies a year for the last 20. How many movies from last year have a number in their name?
Then there's of course, the actual rents. And insurance. And taxes. Something has to give, but I fear it will be the humans.
is quite reminiscent of the dismissive attitude of many tech people here towards stuff that doesn't originate in the US. It really feels strange to have lived through this change, from a place that used to be pretty cosmopolitan and focused on tech, to a place one can't browse without reading daily jingoistic comments.
It also feels like an atmosphere change rather than a deliberate one, in that people say that stuff casually, almost without thinking about it or the implications thereof. These ideas have permetated so much into the discourse that people don't really scrutinize them before repeating them.
their humanoid robots really creep me out. I've been to a few conferences for work over the past few months and they usually have a booth and then have someone walking them around by remote control.
The conference venues have concrete flooring, so I just suddenly hear loud rhythmic thumping as these things stomp around a corner.
After the initial "huh that's a cool robot thing" thought, it really started giving me the heebeejeebees.
Interesting theory. It implies existence of non-human humanoids in our distant evolutionary past where recognizing them would give us survival advantage.
There would have been plenty of those - we keep finding near ancestors, neanderthalis, the hobbit one. Some say the Monkey King from chinese legend is a folk tale of a close species
Also because they make them all faceless and sleek and alien, like a human shaped iPhone. If they instead looked like little Gundams I think they'd be cool.
> It doesn't need more. Labour was 8% of what it cost Unitree to make its robots in 2025, outsourced assemblers included, and most of the rest was parts
Ok, but what drives the cost of the parts? I am sure the parts manufacturers spend on labor, and the parts the part makers buy depend on labor. Labor drives all vast majority of the expense if you go all the way down the supply chain.
If we automate more and more of that labor with robots, then it drives down all the costs.
If we get truly autonomous robots that have the mobility and precision of humans, they could replace all of the labor. The 'switching' cost goes way down compared to the machines that do the work today.
Get rid of the cheap hands and the machines win fast…
I’ve really become fascinated by the hypothesis that outlawing slavery supercharged industrialization, and that the global crusade against slavery is why we had this whole technology explosion.
Rome knew about steam power. There’s some tantalizing evidence some ancient cultures played with electricity and maybe even simple forms of electric lights. There’s Greek stories about automatons. But why try to build machines to do real work? Just have a slave do it.
If we’d abolished slavery in ancient Roman times maybe we’d be looking at photos of habitable exoplanets from probes arriving in the Tau Ceti system by now.
> I’ve really become fascinated by the hypothesis that outlawing slavery supercharged industrialization, and that the global crusade against slavery is why we had this whole technology explosion.
Tocqueville wrote a bit about this in Democracy in America. Despite the South having an edge in terms of "free" labor the institution of slavery greatly suffocated human potential to such an extent that the non-Southern states still had higher productivity.
Should have also said controversial. I was thinking of the Baghdad battery and stories of ancient insular priesthoods and mystery cults and their “magic.” But I did remember that. It’s a lotus but Egyptians also stylized everything.
The non-woowoo proposals I’ve read call for very primitive apparati that would have been possible with metallurgy of the time. If some, I dunno, bored priests and scribes over thousands of years figured out some neat tricks. It’s before the big medieval alchemy craze but thousands of years is a long time.
I also forgot about early optics, the Antikythera mechanism which could not have been a one off, early use of fossil fuel, etc.
I don’t think the thesis I referenced argues that abolition is the only thing that made tech take off, just that it supplied an economic forcing function missing for most of the rest of history.
"Chinese markets lose trillions as race for AI supremacy with US takes its toll"
"But the demand for robotics is being driven by government agencies and research institutions, rather than everyday consumers, for whom the products are still too expensive and not yet practical for home use. Humanoid robotics and robotic dogs have been popular in the entertainment industry but are yet to be useful in home settings.
Shares in Unitree, China’s leading robot-maker, have halved since they started trading in August."*
In China, products are still made by people, because Chinese policy stipulates that robots must not take jobs away from people. If the U.S. were to switch its production to robots and thereby cause mass unemployment, a revolution would break out in the U.S.
China has no such policy. Article 41 (3) of the Labor Contract Law https://english.court.gov.cn/2015-08/17/c_761484_6.htm authorizes layoffs if "The enterprise changes its line of production, introduces a major technological updating or adjusts its business method, and, after modification of the labor contracts, still needs to reduce its personnel." There's been a prominent case recently http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/chinavoices/2026-04/30/content_... where a company tried to claim a change in the "objective conditions taken as the basis for conclusion of the contract" under Article 40 (3) instead, which the court disagreed with. This has led to a bunch of clickbait reporting in the West, claiming that workers in China are somehow protected from automation, but all it means is that they will be laid off instead of fired.
> If the U.S. were to switch its production to robots and thereby cause mass unemployment, a revolution would break out in the U.S.
You're assuming the US starts using robots to produce the things currently produced manually in the US, rather than using robots to produce the things currently produced manually in China.
Not OP, but if China takes up labor and manufacturing automation with robotics in a big way, there are a LOT of people there that will not have much to do anymore ....
This is similar to complaining that we don't all have the opportunity to spend 8 hours a day doing backbreaking farm labour after the agricultural revolution - it is only important to have people labouring if the labour is achieving something useful.
Labouring for the sake of doing labour is stupid. If robots can do it cost effectively, they should.
Industrialization did not occur to make people's lives more comfortable; it was introduced to make investors more wealthy, and it is not a given that the wealth will be distributed to society at large. Also, after each disruptive innovation people's existing skills and experience might very well be worthless in the new environment. These two factors together mean that it might take a long time to adapt to the new situation and reach a similar level of wealth again, and that is the main concern at the core of Luddism.
I mean sure. The paint isn't dry on China's economy, they built most of it in the last 20 years. They're probably not feeling overwhelmed at the thought of that sort of change - they won't have jobs they never used to have, but there will be all this stuff available assembled by machines.
For one, people need to feel like they have something meaningful to contribute. Work is an important part of that. For two, people need to be able to make a living, and work is an important part of that.
It's all well and good to say that people shouldn't have to do menial labor. But unless you have something to fill the void, it's going to be a bad time for everyone involved.
How much of the "need" is intrinsic to humanity, and how much is it a product of the culture you live in?
Western culture ties the value of people to their work. The unemployed are "lazy" (itself a pejorative). The first question you ask someone you meet is "what do you do?" A lawyer is naturally more valuable than a postal clerk. (Despite an obvious example to the contrary. )
A lot of western jobs now are menial, or worse, useless. Lots of office jobs are, frankly, meaningless. Endlessly generating reports that no-one needs, or reads, isn't a path to massive self-worth.
In the US no job means no income. No health care. Your worth as a human approaches zero. In Europe, post war, there are far more social supports for the unemployed. That's a fundamental cultural difference. Asia is also culturally different in ways which are hard for US folk to comprehend.
For example there are 3 major political viewpoints; US capitalism, European socialism, and Chinese communism. Each appears to function well, and yet the US vilifies the others, while barely being able to tell them apart.
So, to return to your hypothesis of what "humans need", it may be less of that and more of "my culture needs". Which is perhaps going to come into play when predicting a post-labor economy in other cultures.
Totally agree but it is difficult to retrain people even when it is possible. Technology can replace certain work faster than society can adjust. How to use socialist policy to help with transition is still a work in progress. What happen in France and rest of Europe will become a textbook case and we do not know how it end.
Same can be said for every country right now. And now, there's fewer and fewer reliable greener pastures that unsatisfied people can go to, which used to let off some much needed steam.
The people will always have something to do. What those somethings are is entirely up to the ruling class.
China has an aging population like most countries. So, automation will likely help fill the gap rather than make work obsolete. However, if China does get to the point where a lot of work is automated, they have a socialist system where the government can do things like step in to reduce working hours or provide universal basic services which would be impossible in the west.
Ultimately, the whole point of an economy is to direct labour and resources in a way which allows people to have a good standard of living. If most labor can really be automated, then people can just spend more of their time enjoying their lives instead of working. The technology itself is not the problem. The only reason this becomes a crisis under capitalism is because the means of production are privately owned, and the people who own them require the rest of the population to sell their labor in order to live. Automation under private ownership frees people from a paycheck, while the owners keep the gains.
People in the west often make the mistake of assuming that China is simply a mirror of their own system rather then spending the time to understand it on its own terms. CPC has around 99 million members, and it is predominantly made up of regular working class people. Also, it should be obvious that the party depends on social stability to remain in power. So, ensuring that people have their needs met is paramount for the system to continue to function. http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-07/25/content_29525199_3....
You need a lot of oversight for that 99M number to matter at all in the decision making process.
Western voting systems work more or less because the parties are in a mexican standoff when counting the ballots. This requires at least two parties and doesn't translate very well to electronic voting or vote-by-mail where a comparatively small minority (programmers or postal workers) can heavily skew the results in their favor.
They have invested a huge amount of capital in manufacturing capacity (cars in particular), so much that their total capacity is equal to about half of the entire rest of the world put together. The problem is that they do not have the domestic demand to fully consume this supply. If the rest of the world opts at any point to put up trade barriers and prevent Chinese manufactured goods from being imported, China will wind up with billions of dollars in capital stranded in these investments. That could cause a financial crisis or an economic environment similar to Japan’s lost decade.
There's a real risk of conflict happening with Taiwan. They also have decreasing birthrates, an aging population and government incentives to promote more kids is not working.
They are facing some Keynesian dilemma: because the rest of the world is importing less and they have almost no socialism, their people can't buy the stuff instead. If those corporations fail, the people will be poorer, if they distribute wealth, those corporations will be less competitive.
They have some political dilemma: people only accept the government because of economical growth, but they grew to a point where growth naturally slows down.
They have some financial and monetary stuff going on, but those are mostly non-problems. They have a bubble that is bursting too, that makes the other two problems larger.
All said, I wouldn't say they are in a knife edge.
Automation is orthogonal to demand. If demand isn't there then it doesn't really matter if the factory is automated or not.
And yes, China is aware of some slowing demand (although their exports are still impressive.) You can see this playing out in a couple ways.
Firstly they dominate production in key "future" technologies. Solar and EVs spring to mind as examples, but there are others.
Secondly they are investing in infrastructure (and goodwill) outside of China. Africa has a billion consumers-in-waiting.
While the US retreats from Africa (killing USAid, indulging racist theories about South Africa, etc), promoting isolationism (America First), activly alienating people via tarrifs, what is China doing?
China is quietly filling the void. They are building roads, ports, airports and other infrastructure. They are improving supply lines (Temu is expanding in Africa at a huge rate.) They are building cultural bridges, learning and teaching two very different cultures to work more easily together. In essence developing future customers, not antagonizing them.
It will be interesting to look back in 10, 20 or 30 years to see which strategy delivers better rewards.
What will the African customers pay with? Average income in Africa is maybe $200 per month. Chinese solar and EVs already lose money when factoring in capex and subsidies across the supply chain.
You're thinking short term. The world changes a lot in 50 years.
In the 60s your argument would have applied to most of Asia. South Korea was an agrarian society. All of eastern Europe (and much of western Europe) was poor.
The question is less "where are markets now" and more "where will they be in 2050"?
"Losing money" (whatever that means at the national level) is not terribly relevant when it comes to global strategy. The US "loses money" on the military, because the US has chosen the military as a way to strategic dominance.
China instead has chosen "production" as a global strategy. One empire is voluntarily contracting. Another is expanding. The US is fighting the last war, with planes and bombs, while China builds infrastructure and makes friends.
Honestly not much more than local Chinese income. Why wife works 15 hours a day. EVERYDAY. For about 300 usd, excluding penalties for making mistakes :/
The west did need to adapt and adapted partially by importing Japanese production methods such as lean manufacturing. As Andy Grove said, “Only the paranoid survive”
US destoyed Japan & global economies to solve that problem. And the sources of those problems all moved to China, which was almost a failed state. That's how China problem today have come to be.
Russia is now probably in the state similar to circa 1980 China. In case The China Problem were to be Solved like how previous one was solved, perhaps militarily this time, that'll just launch the seeds of the same problem over the borders to there. OTOH we'll be watching Russian homage to Chinese recreations of Japanese interpretations of Disney animations by 2060s and that will be awesome.
Will the US become its own 1980 China or 1950 Japan, just to get onto the ladder back up to be 2020 China or 1990 Japan, finally building the California HSR owned by DOT? Is it playing a genius 4D Chess ... whatever ... move towards that? Maybe, I don't know. All I know is that it's not like people simply stopped being too alarmist with Japanese global takeover scare and it just went away naturally.
The only way the west wins is if it comes up with frontier physical LLMs for robots first. It seems to still have a lead in the autonomous physical LLMs at this point.
The Chinese seem to excel at copying (poorly, at first, then polishing) and scaling up. It makes sense they could leverage that approach to robots. What struck me as strange, at a strategic level, is that with a billion and a half warm bodies, and no serious military threat to their homeland, its not clear why theyd have a big incentive to automate away manual labor jobs, or need to massively upgrade military capabilities. Only if I put on a villain's hat, when doing analysis, would it make sense. Human soldiers might refuse unethical orders, or refuse to put down mass civil protest, whereas a robot would not. Then suddenly their robot strategy makes sense.
I don't see how you can say this with a straight face "[Chinese company] said they'd make a million robots per year but shipped only twelve. [American company] says they'll make a million robots per year. Therefore America will win."
anyone else notice this was written by claude (although its not 100% perfect claude language, im guessing josef tried to prompt claude ticks away and was only half successful).
Yeah, it's baffling to me that someone who did a bunch of original reporting would then be fine pushing it all through a Claude slop machine that makes everything so much harder to read and adds redundancy on redundancy into the text. The same points are made 5 or 6 times evenly spaced through the piece because the AI writing is doing local optimization at the expense of global organization.
Maybe he didn't do any original reporting, but just prompted Claude to write a science fiction story where a reporter visits some fictional factories in China and blogs about it?
Every time the article said, "I did such and such a thing," I thought, "No, Claude, you did not do that. You don't have a body. You're making this up."
Stupid thesis considering PRC already installs more industrial robots than RoW combined. There's some validity to PRC tendency to arbitrage cheap labour to defer automation when economical... i.e. why pay for expensive SaaS when you can just throw cheaper brains at problem. But the second something cheaper than bodies, PRC tend to adopt more ruthlessly than west, and with automation replacing actual projected blue collar shortage, absolutely smooth brained hot take to think west will lead in robots let alone making robots.
Unitree makes like 5 digit numbers chassis with high iteration, they use people because these are baby numbers where human iteration maximizes productivity, not lack of capability. They do it because they have this gear that west doesn't. Meanwhile PRC indigenizing all tooling to the highest end of precision. They're not going to use western robots for much longer. Indigenous replacement rate is basically J takeoff, even if we completely ignore that ABB/Kuka/fanuc all have massive assembling and R&D footprint in PRC.
Or take Tesla, one of the more competent US builders... ctrl+c, ctrl+v their model to PRC, a few rapid iteration cycles later, PRC plants > western plants (EU/US). Even SpaceX, forget payload/tempo/operational, PRC industry builds like 2-3x more first stages than US space program including SpaceX, i.e. when they figure out reusable they can put up 2-3x size reusable fleet... and that's basically them barely trying. The industrial lesson by now should be whatever West builds, PRC likely end up doing better, faster, cheaper, frequently pick all 3.
This argument generic copium by now - muh western imagination gap can somehow compete with PRC industrial gap... and robots that build robots is slightly more marketable and feasible than gray goo... until you realize one of PRC's core capability is just doing what west did better anyway.
Why is the focus on scale when no one has ever built a single humanoid robot that is useful for anything yet? One real world Rosie would be more valuable than a million "Optimus" bots.
Remember how tiny the drone market was, until DJI made them juuuuuust cheap and useful enough? Then suddenly there was a drone market, and DJI made a better one, and then the market got bigger, and then DJI made a better one, and then the market got bigger, ....
It is logistically impossible for the West to manufacture robots anywhere approaching the scale and cost of China. They control the materials, the refinement, the advanced manufacturing, the vertical integration, and a cheap labor force, to say nothing of a planned economy that can pivot on a dime to execute any demand there's available capital for. It is laughable to think the West can produce robots that compete with China.
If tomorrow morning we decided to pull a Manhattan Project just to match China's capacity for cheap effective robotics, it would take 10 years. By then China has already found their product-market fit and secured the world as a customer.
I believe this conclusion is flawed. The author argues:
1) Unitree robots are largely made by hand.
2) Labor is approximately 8% of cost of manufacturing these robots. Because these costs are not prohibitive, there is little incentive to automate.
3) Labor costs are higher in America.
4) Therefore, American companies have higher incentive to automate.
5) Therefore, the West will capture most of the robotics opportunity.
Arguments 1-4 are reasonable, but 5 is a non-sequitur. Higher incentive to automate does not imply a better ability to automate & scale manufacturing.
I believe Unitree is currently assembling robots by hand for practical reasons:
1) Labor is still relatively cheap.
2) Humanoids and robots are evolving rapidly, changing every few months.
3) Custom assembly lines are expensive, and become obsolete when the product changes. It's difficult to maintain an assembly line when the product is rapidly evolving.
4) Tooling is inadequate. Some robotic parts are delicate, complicated, and difficult to automate manufacturing of. American companies have hit the exact same problem: Tesla is assembling the hand/forearm of Optimus by hand because it hasn't figured out how to automate manufacturing them. https://www.theverge.com/tech/1016492/tesla-optimus-robots-p... . Apparently, Tesla has hundreds of handless Optimus robots just standing around, waiting for hand manufacturing to catch up.
5) Demand is still relatively niche, these are not mass market products. Unitree only sold 5,500 robots last year. There is not enough demand to justify massive automated lines.
The author also ignores the biggest counterpoint: the Chinese have already demonstrated mastery in automated manufacturing, and have proven they can run dark factories (factories without humans) at a better scale than the west.
When humanoid robots become a mass market product (they are not ready today because the software side is majorly lacking), Chinese manufacturers are in an excellent position to rapidly automate.
Yes, the article doesn't really tell us much.
Motor winding is an amusing problem. Everybody making motors has a powered winder. It's handling the wire ends that can be either manual or automatic. If you look at videos of winders, automating the wire end handling is most of the machinery.
Here's an overview of winding automation:
Full auto, robotic transfer.[1]
Full auto, manual transfer [2].
Semi auto. [3].
Manual, powered. [4]
Manual, unpowered motor overhaul.[5] (Country girl in China who fixes motors and engines.)
Those winding machines are all from the same company, NIDE. You can buy as much automation as you want, depending on your labor costs. Option [4] is cost-effective if you can have one machine tender per machine.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FiCQX0y7-A
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wZvSem4Cd8
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4vqLxMlvk0
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrcnl3Zjc6Y
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0LOfUjE4SA
The opportunity for the west is that an engineer with todays resources can work on building [1] for $5-10k and get into the DC motor business from your shed. Im working on this myself right now, I want to try and start an autonomous manufacturing company here in Australia, maybe I'll start with motors. I predict once the war is over, Ukraine will become a robotics & manufacturing powerhouse because they've already got this model working
The problems with Australia are:
1. The terrible quality of the locally manufactured items. I am in Sydney and will absolutely not buy anything marked Made In Australia. I have been burnt too many times.
2. The nearly 100% mortality rate among the companies.
Rotorlab (rotorlab.com.au) are or were doing this in Australia. They had a couple of posts about their machinery: a winding machine, CNC mill, etc. I believe they were bought out pretty quickly by a US company. Can't recall who though.
Are you winding something in an incredibly specialized kV / wattage / torque or something? DC motors are incredibly inexpensive, how could a hobbyist sell them?
The only problem with PM motors is magnets. Everything else is trivial.
China has so many advantages it's unbeatable. For one, they didn't start a "tariff war". Then they are cheaper in every step of the way, from the labor to build the factories to the logistic involved when selling the actual products.
This was pretty much my conclusion while reading the article too.
Just to extend your point - chinese car manufacturers are not only producing more cars, they're innovating at a faster pace too. While I'm not an expert, there is enough and more on social media around this. Eg: https://x.com/dhh/status/2113500613082329576?a=fscIadYr4U1xm...
China manufactures many things but that's not the key part of the value chain. iPhones are manufactured in China (and elsewhere in Asia but Apple in Cupertino is the trillion-dollar company, not the actual manufacturers.
The key parts are R&D, design, intellectual property, engineering talent. The question is, how well are Chinese organizations doing in those capacities in regard to robotics. My impression is that the answer is, quite well.
The focus on manufacturing is (in many cases) a twisted approach of economics. In the mid-20th century the West did very well with mass production. It was an innovative technology at the top of the value chain. But in early-to-mid 21st century, it's (often) an old, ~commodity technology and the ROI is poor. It's also physically not good for workers in many cases. When looking for economic growth you want to aim for top of the value change, for the future, not what was done 70 years ago - it won't work the same way economically anymore. In economics, you can't return to what worked before.
The problem with the "West" going forward is that R&D, design, intellectual property, engineering talent are exactly the areas at most risk of AI disruption leaving the physical grunt work as the only remaining moat
Yeah this is the thing I think most are missing about LLMs. They're just seeing the current valuation of things and picturing the future as being the same, but with different efficiencies. But as the cost of 'cognitive work' in general starts approach $0, the value of such, in and of itself, is also going to approach $0.
But the economy is in equilibrium which means as this decreases, it's going to change the value of other things, and open the door for new things. Whoever can take what LLMs offer, and then most successfully build on top of that will probably be 'the winner.' I'm not sure exactly what this will translate to in practice, but it seems reasonable to predict that manufacturing is going to be a huge part of it.
Im not sure this is true:
"But as the cost of 'cognitive work' in general starts approach $0, the value of such, in and of itself, is also going to approach $0."
When the pirate party was big in EU, there was much talk about copying approaching the cost of 0, and therefor we would never pay for copying data, only creating new data.
I guess this all due to copyright law, and it will not disappear anytime soon, but still. I would not be too quick to draw that same conclusion.
I'd look to the past at similar 'revolutions' and what it did to existing players. For example 'computer' was the name of an occupation that existed for millennia. [1] Yet so complete was the obsolescence that I think most people (certainly including myself) never even realized these people existed, but it's quite obvious once you think about it.
Imagine all the work involved in, for instance, trigonometry and its basic applications in the past. And the later on with the advent of kinematics and so forth. These things involved a lot of computation and so there were literal human calculators whose job it was to work out all of the calculations.
But with the advent of electrical calculators, we literally no longer know that these jobs even existed. It's very easy to see the same in a future where, for instance, computer programs can be efficiently written from description alone. At that point the idea of a 'programmer' would seem like quite an odd concept.
I'd also look at what it did to the value of such work. Now computations, even quite complex, are mostly worth exactly $0. But we built extensive systems on top of those computations that became worth quite a lot indeed!
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
I don't think you can draw any conclusion from a party which never became a government, one way or the other.
However, we do have Wikipedia. Wikipedia was never valued at the peak sales price of Encyclopedia Britannica times the number of people online, if it was it would be worth around $16 trillion.
Manufacturing doesn't work like in Minecraft, like you put the raw material into a box, pick the blueprint, then POOF the finished product pops out. There's actually a lot of ingenuity and innovation in manufacturing. To say that the field has been static for 70 years is absolutely foolish
It is interesting that you consider R&D, design, and engineering as something fundamentally different to manufacturing, rather than its heart and soul.
Stupid work for you, smart work for us (and let's be real, that is the idea) doesn't work forever if the other guys are smart, too. And they are.
I don't really follow the logic in the article at all:
The argument is that Unitree's assembly process is currently very manual because there is no incentive to automate, which is because labor cost isn't the bottleneck here, where in the US labor cost are much higher, therefore the US will have incentive to automate more. Those are reasonable so far, until you try to use that as a conclusion that this is why the West will win?
First of all, what does he think the other 92% of the cost of manufacturing is? A small portion of that is materials and electricity, but the biggest part of the remaining cost is assembly tooling/fixtures for the assembly line, and a fully automated assembly line is much, much more expensive compared to a semi-automated or manual production line.
In other words: it's not that Unitree couldn't build fully automated assembly lines if they wanted to, but spending tens of millions of dollars fully automated assembly line that takes up floor space and requires even more labor for manual maintenance for a product that is only being produced by the hundreds to thousands in quantity every month rather than millions simply does not make economic sense to begin with.
Second, why is he assuming that a fully automated assembly line will be cheaper to build in the US than in China, especially since he toured a factory with fully automated assembly lines at BYD in China immediately after? And sure, I would absolutely argue that American software engineering is more efficient than Chinese when looked at as a whole, but the cost of programming an assembly line is a minor portion of the cost compared to actually getting the assembly line fixtures and tooling built.
Third, his cost estimate is way off if he thinks you can get the same product manufactured in the US for only 50% more. From my own anecdotal experience, a more realistic cost for US manufacturing for pretty much anything is minimum 300% to 1000% more expensive if you are to make the in the US, and the lack of a mature parts supply chain in the US is honestly a bigger issue than worker wage.
The guy from the Smarter Every Day channel ran into your final point when he was trying to create a grill scrubber. It's a fascinating series.
I think the problem Destin (host of the channel) faced, a.k.a. high production costs in the US, and the problem Unitree faces, a.k.a. no motivation to push for further automation are all both soft problems, meaning it can be resolved eventually if someone pushes enough to solve it.
If instead just creating few of the tools, Destin pushed to create $1T worth of it, then maybe the supplychain will automatically build around it.
If China's labor cost risen to the level that makes Unitree robots more appealing, then Unitree will figure out ways to automate their production line more to keep up with the demand.
All and all, it's not a capability problem, it's a "why do it, and why now" problem. Just like, say, sending people to Mars. The tech is already here, but why send people to a planet that (currently) don't even have enough stuff needed to support living? Except of course, Mars will probably stay this way much longer than a country changing course.
Also, just a sidenote: I think Destin misread the market. He wanted to create a "high-quality", "durable" product. Sure, it make sense to do it most of the time, but a brush? You know, that thing gets dirty in an dark and oily way very quickly. With a durable brush that's expensive to replace, then you have will a problem of maintenance, clean it etc. And grill oil is not easy to clean, do you now also have to buy another product just to maintain the brush? How about now I offer you a cheap made in China brush that will disintegrate in your hands after 5 times of use, but then you just throw it away and get a new one, no maintenance required. Of course, throwing away too many trash is bad for the environment, but guess how the other trash gets handled, including, say, toothbrush?
How about, invent a grill that don't need to be brushed? Just a rinse and it's done? Just a Smarter way to think about inventing, you know.
Well, after watching the video, I think Destin designed the product in the most expensive way possible for this application, using the progressive die sheet metal handle, multiple injection molded parts, fastener, and chainmail.
If I were to design it to be manufactured in the states, I would probably go for a simple wooden handle with off the shelf wire mesh instead of chainmail, and the fastening would just be mechanical fit between wrapped wire and handle with no additional fastener, which should massively improve price and manufacturability.
Wasn't the problem that the "off the shelf" parts all came from china? Also the point was to try and manufacture something of reasonable complexity completely in the US.
Some thoughts:
“”” America has run this experiment before. In 1964 about half a million Mexican farmworkers were shut out. In 1965, 20% of California's tomatoes were picked by machine; by 1970 the figure was 99.9%.“””
I honestly had not considered closing down (legal) immigration as a forcing function for automation. Industrial policy as immigration law.
But I don’t think I get the rest …
Higher costs onshore mean machines give us an advantage - i get that. The rest I may be missing
There is a corollary to this. When talent is blocked from immigrating, they start innovating at home.
I'm seeing this in India. Some really smart students are doing some fascinating startups at home because emigrating to the west has become really hard.
Still a very small effect, but one that gives me a lot of hope and cause for excitement.
It's about finding the right supply chain.
5 years ago I was trying to get a custom aluminium enclosure for some circuit boards manufactured. We found potential suppliers in Taiwan, but they basically would have needed an expert onsite to be able to set up all the jigs. They also could have supported us through rapid scaling by switching to moulded raw stock which then was post machined, and would bring down unit prices a lot.
However, one guy knew a local SoCal machine shop that supplied parts to the auto modding scene and had a bunch of 5-axis milling machines. For 200 units they would beat Taiwan on every metric: cost, time, effort on our side, flexibility for changes.
We're engineers. From this lens, the difference between us and cavemen are the tools we have. We should lean into this.
So, you agree with the article ? If we onshore a critical mass of manufacturing, then the supply chain springs up like an eco-system, and the critical mass needed to do that is lower the better quality better engineered the machinery is
So industrial policy should be focused on high end engineering quality, more than bringing jobs back
(Might be spotting a political problem there but in general I think I agree)
How many of the most talented people will jump straight in to manufacturing because of policy/macro incentives and shifts in economic policy?
People are much more likely to try something if they see peers and role models doing it. Even better if it’s something fun and exciting that they want to be a part of.
I think to convince someone to run a factory instead of trying to become MTS @ lab, they should know 1. it’s not a binary “make it or break it” where failure means doing some boring, poorly paid job (the downside is good but not so guaranteed that it’s abused/attracts the wrong people ) 2. it’s interesting and challenging and enjoyable at times 3. it’s meaningful at a societal or personal level. That's what made tech/AI/finance work and it's the competing pitch.
Why should someone with other options want to work in or operate a factory?
Apropos of nothing, it seems like roughly 2/3 of tomatoes consumed in the US come from Mexico, and trending higher.
And are those tomatoes picked by hand or by machine ?
(Again apropos of nothing I am assuming the rise of “on the vine tomatoes” in packets is presumably because cutting four off the branch is quicker and easier than twisting four or five.
And even possibly there is a robot doing it. Would be interested to know
It seems like much of the disparity between the West and China isn't about China having some better manufacturing technology. They do, but it's not the real issue. Really it's all about financial imbalances - people get paid less and the rent is lower. In the West we have a huge rent-extraction sector which produces nothing and makes it much harder to afford to start any activity.
It's not entirely true that the sector produces nothing, but if you think about it, the whole US economy in the last 3 decades has been nothing but rent extraction.
Defense contractors charge maintenance fees both domestic and abroad. For abroad, the maintenance contract is a requirement of getting the deal passed through congress and is frequently more expensive than the gear itself.
SaaS charge monthly instead of one upfront fee for a well tested product that used to be the norm
Video games similarly have been transitioning to day 1 paid DLCs and monthly fees
Even the movie industry is a subscription now (streaming providers aside). There's not one movie, there's the MCU pumping out 3 movies a year for the last 20. How many movies from last year have a number in their name?
Then there's of course, the actual rents. And insurance. And taxes. Something has to give, but I fear it will be the humans.
Unitree G1 Supply Chain Visualization: https://robodienst.com/supply-chain/unitree-g1
(I'm not affiliated with the site in any way; I just found it useful and thought I'd share it here.)
Honestly, this kind of take:
> the robots that make robots will be Western.
is quite reminiscent of the dismissive attitude of many tech people here towards stuff that doesn't originate in the US. It really feels strange to have lived through this change, from a place that used to be pretty cosmopolitan and focused on tech, to a place one can't browse without reading daily jingoistic comments.
It also feels like an atmosphere change rather than a deliberate one, in that people say that stuff casually, almost without thinking about it or the implications thereof. These ideas have permetated so much into the discourse that people don't really scrutinize them before repeating them.
their humanoid robots really creep me out. I've been to a few conferences for work over the past few months and they usually have a booth and then have someone walking them around by remote control.
The conference venues have concrete flooring, so I just suddenly hear loud rhythmic thumping as these things stomp around a corner.
After the initial "huh that's a cool robot thing" thought, it really started giving me the heebeejeebees.
I’ve felt the same way about mannequins for years
Uncanny Valley is an evolutionary advantage, I’ve surmised
Awkward to think about why tho
Interesting theory. It implies existence of non-human humanoids in our distant evolutionary past where recognizing them would give us survival advantage.
There would have been plenty of those - we keep finding near ancestors, neanderthalis, the hobbit one. Some say the Monkey King from chinese legend is a folk tale of a close species
Also because they make them all faceless and sleek and alien, like a human shaped iPhone. If they instead looked like little Gundams I think they'd be cool.
Probably too many pinch points though.
> It doesn't need more. Labour was 8% of what it cost Unitree to make its robots in 2025, outsourced assemblers included, and most of the rest was parts
Ok, but what drives the cost of the parts? I am sure the parts manufacturers spend on labor, and the parts the part makers buy depend on labor. Labor drives all vast majority of the expense if you go all the way down the supply chain.
If we automate more and more of that labor with robots, then it drives down all the costs.
If we get truly autonomous robots that have the mobility and precision of humans, they could replace all of the labor. The 'switching' cost goes way down compared to the machines that do the work today.
Get rid of the cheap hands and the machines win fast…
I’ve really become fascinated by the hypothesis that outlawing slavery supercharged industrialization, and that the global crusade against slavery is why we had this whole technology explosion.
Rome knew about steam power. There’s some tantalizing evidence some ancient cultures played with electricity and maybe even simple forms of electric lights. There’s Greek stories about automatons. But why try to build machines to do real work? Just have a slave do it.
If we’d abolished slavery in ancient Roman times maybe we’d be looking at photos of habitable exoplanets from probes arriving in the Tau Ceti system by now.
> I’ve really become fascinated by the hypothesis that outlawing slavery supercharged industrialization, and that the global crusade against slavery is why we had this whole technology explosion.
Tocqueville wrote a bit about this in Democracy in America. Despite the South having an edge in terms of "free" labor the institution of slavery greatly suffocated human potential to such an extent that the non-Southern states still had higher productivity.
> simple forms of electric lights
What do you have in mind here? The Dendera light is a carving of a lotus.
Should have also said controversial. I was thinking of the Baghdad battery and stories of ancient insular priesthoods and mystery cults and their “magic.” But I did remember that. It’s a lotus but Egyptians also stylized everything.
The non-woowoo proposals I’ve read call for very primitive apparati that would have been possible with metallurgy of the time. If some, I dunno, bored priests and scribes over thousands of years figured out some neat tricks. It’s before the big medieval alchemy craze but thousands of years is a long time.
I also forgot about early optics, the Antikythera mechanism which could not have been a one off, early use of fossil fuel, etc.
I don’t think the thesis I referenced argues that abolition is the only thing that made tech take off, just that it supplied an economic forcing function missing for most of the rest of history.
This is at the core of the argument for UBI. Technological advances will explode.
"Chinese markets lose trillions as race for AI supremacy with US takes its toll"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/27/chinese-market...In China, products are still made by people, because Chinese policy stipulates that robots must not take jobs away from people. If the U.S. were to switch its production to robots and thereby cause mass unemployment, a revolution would break out in the U.S.
China has no such policy. Article 41 (3) of the Labor Contract Law https://english.court.gov.cn/2015-08/17/c_761484_6.htm authorizes layoffs if "The enterprise changes its line of production, introduces a major technological updating or adjusts its business method, and, after modification of the labor contracts, still needs to reduce its personnel." There's been a prominent case recently http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/chinavoices/2026-04/30/content_... where a company tried to claim a change in the "objective conditions taken as the basis for conclusion of the contract" under Article 40 (3) instead, which the court disagreed with. This has led to a bunch of clickbait reporting in the West, claiming that workers in China are somehow protected from automation, but all it means is that they will be laid off instead of fired.
> If the U.S. were to switch its production to robots and thereby cause mass unemployment, a revolution would break out in the U.S.
You're assuming the US starts using robots to produce the things currently produced manually in the US, rather than using robots to produce the things currently produced manually in China.
That’s a brilliant insight.
We can't switch our production to robots, we already switched it to China.
I think people underestimate the knife edge China is on, but still, I want these in the West.
> I think people underestimate the knife edge China is on
What do you mean by this?
Not OP, but if China takes up labor and manufacturing automation with robotics in a big way, there are a LOT of people there that will not have much to do anymore ....
This is similar to complaining that we don't all have the opportunity to spend 8 hours a day doing backbreaking farm labour after the agricultural revolution - it is only important to have people labouring if the labour is achieving something useful.
Labouring for the sake of doing labour is stupid. If robots can do it cost effectively, they should.
Industrialization did not occur to make people's lives more comfortable; it was introduced to make investors more wealthy, and it is not a given that the wealth will be distributed to society at large. Also, after each disruptive innovation people's existing skills and experience might very well be worthless in the new environment. These two factors together mean that it might take a long time to adapt to the new situation and reach a similar level of wealth again, and that is the main concern at the core of Luddism.
I mean sure. The paint isn't dry on China's economy, they built most of it in the last 20 years. They're probably not feeling overwhelmed at the thought of that sort of change - they won't have jobs they never used to have, but there will be all this stuff available assembled by machines.
For one, people need to feel like they have something meaningful to contribute. Work is an important part of that. For two, people need to be able to make a living, and work is an important part of that.
It's all well and good to say that people shouldn't have to do menial labor. But unless you have something to fill the void, it's going to be a bad time for everyone involved.
How much of the "need" is intrinsic to humanity, and how much is it a product of the culture you live in?
Western culture ties the value of people to their work. The unemployed are "lazy" (itself a pejorative). The first question you ask someone you meet is "what do you do?" A lawyer is naturally more valuable than a postal clerk. (Despite an obvious example to the contrary. )
A lot of western jobs now are menial, or worse, useless. Lots of office jobs are, frankly, meaningless. Endlessly generating reports that no-one needs, or reads, isn't a path to massive self-worth.
In the US no job means no income. No health care. Your worth as a human approaches zero. In Europe, post war, there are far more social supports for the unemployed. That's a fundamental cultural difference. Asia is also culturally different in ways which are hard for US folk to comprehend.
For example there are 3 major political viewpoints; US capitalism, European socialism, and Chinese communism. Each appears to function well, and yet the US vilifies the others, while barely being able to tell them apart.
So, to return to your hypothesis of what "humans need", it may be less of that and more of "my culture needs". Which is perhaps going to come into play when predicting a post-labor economy in other cultures.
Totally agree but it is difficult to retrain people even when it is possible. Technology can replace certain work faster than society can adjust. How to use socialist policy to help with transition is still a work in progress. What happen in France and rest of Europe will become a textbook case and we do not know how it end.
Same can be said for every country right now. And now, there's fewer and fewer reliable greener pastures that unsatisfied people can go to, which used to let off some much needed steam.
The people will always have something to do. What those somethings are is entirely up to the ruling class.
China has an aging population like most countries. So, automation will likely help fill the gap rather than make work obsolete. However, if China does get to the point where a lot of work is automated, they have a socialist system where the government can do things like step in to reduce working hours or provide universal basic services which would be impossible in the west.
Ultimately, the whole point of an economy is to direct labour and resources in a way which allows people to have a good standard of living. If most labor can really be automated, then people can just spend more of their time enjoying their lives instead of working. The technology itself is not the problem. The only reason this becomes a crisis under capitalism is because the means of production are privately owned, and the people who own them require the rest of the population to sell their labor in order to live. Automation under private ownership frees people from a paycheck, while the owners keep the gains.
Why would wealthy party members put up with that kind of redistribution? If most things are automated, why do they need those people?
People in the west often make the mistake of assuming that China is simply a mirror of their own system rather then spending the time to understand it on its own terms. CPC has around 99 million members, and it is predominantly made up of regular working class people. Also, it should be obvious that the party depends on social stability to remain in power. So, ensuring that people have their needs met is paramount for the system to continue to function. http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-07/25/content_29525199_3....
You need a lot of oversight for that 99M number to matter at all in the decision making process.
Western voting systems work more or less because the parties are in a mexican standoff when counting the ballots. This requires at least two parties and doesn't translate very well to electronic voting or vote-by-mail where a comparatively small minority (programmers or postal workers) can heavily skew the results in their favor.
Institutional memories of civil wars and uprisings?
They have invested a huge amount of capital in manufacturing capacity (cars in particular), so much that their total capacity is equal to about half of the entire rest of the world put together. The problem is that they do not have the domestic demand to fully consume this supply. If the rest of the world opts at any point to put up trade barriers and prevent Chinese manufactured goods from being imported, China will wind up with billions of dollars in capital stranded in these investments. That could cause a financial crisis or an economic environment similar to Japan’s lost decade.
There's a real risk of conflict happening with Taiwan. They also have decreasing birthrates, an aging population and government incentives to promote more kids is not working.
They are facing some Keynesian dilemma: because the rest of the world is importing less and they have almost no socialism, their people can't buy the stuff instead. If those corporations fail, the people will be poorer, if they distribute wealth, those corporations will be less competitive.
They have some political dilemma: people only accept the government because of economical growth, but they grew to a point where growth naturally slows down.
They have some financial and monetary stuff going on, but those are mostly non-problems. They have a bubble that is bursting too, that makes the other two problems larger.
All said, I wouldn't say they are in a knife edge.
Automation is orthogonal to demand. If demand isn't there then it doesn't really matter if the factory is automated or not.
And yes, China is aware of some slowing demand (although their exports are still impressive.) You can see this playing out in a couple ways.
Firstly they dominate production in key "future" technologies. Solar and EVs spring to mind as examples, but there are others.
Secondly they are investing in infrastructure (and goodwill) outside of China. Africa has a billion consumers-in-waiting.
While the US retreats from Africa (killing USAid, indulging racist theories about South Africa, etc), promoting isolationism (America First), activly alienating people via tarrifs, what is China doing?
China is quietly filling the void. They are building roads, ports, airports and other infrastructure. They are improving supply lines (Temu is expanding in Africa at a huge rate.) They are building cultural bridges, learning and teaching two very different cultures to work more easily together. In essence developing future customers, not antagonizing them.
It will be interesting to look back in 10, 20 or 30 years to see which strategy delivers better rewards.
What will the African customers pay with? Average income in Africa is maybe $200 per month. Chinese solar and EVs already lose money when factoring in capex and subsidies across the supply chain.
You're thinking short term. The world changes a lot in 50 years.
In the 60s your argument would have applied to most of Asia. South Korea was an agrarian society. All of eastern Europe (and much of western Europe) was poor.
The question is less "where are markets now" and more "where will they be in 2050"?
"Losing money" (whatever that means at the national level) is not terribly relevant when it comes to global strategy. The US "loses money" on the military, because the US has chosen the military as a way to strategic dominance.
China instead has chosen "production" as a global strategy. One empire is voluntarily contracting. Another is expanding. The US is fighting the last war, with planes and bombs, while China builds infrastructure and makes friends.
Honestly not much more than local Chinese income. Why wife works 15 hours a day. EVERYDAY. For about 300 usd, excluding penalties for making mistakes :/
The term is 内卷, or involution.
Honestly to think America’s constant paranoia is a positive
Who here remembers when Japan was gonna take over and the West needed to adapt
The west did need to adapt and adapted partially by importing Japanese production methods such as lean manufacturing. As Andy Grove said, “Only the paranoid survive”
US destoyed Japan & global economies to solve that problem. And the sources of those problems all moved to China, which was almost a failed state. That's how China problem today have come to be.
Russia is now probably in the state similar to circa 1980 China. In case The China Problem were to be Solved like how previous one was solved, perhaps militarily this time, that'll just launch the seeds of the same problem over the borders to there. OTOH we'll be watching Russian homage to Chinese recreations of Japanese interpretations of Disney animations by 2060s and that will be awesome.
Will the US become its own 1980 China or 1950 Japan, just to get onto the ladder back up to be 2020 China or 1990 Japan, finally building the California HSR owned by DOT? Is it playing a genius 4D Chess ... whatever ... move towards that? Maybe, I don't know. All I know is that it's not like people simply stopped being too alarmist with Japanese global takeover scare and it just went away naturally.
The only way the west wins is if it comes up with frontier physical LLMs for robots first. It seems to still have a lead in the autonomous physical LLMs at this point.
The Chinese seem to excel at copying (poorly, at first, then polishing) and scaling up. It makes sense they could leverage that approach to robots. What struck me as strange, at a strategic level, is that with a billion and a half warm bodies, and no serious military threat to their homeland, its not clear why theyd have a big incentive to automate away manual labor jobs, or need to massively upgrade military capabilities. Only if I put on a villain's hat, when doing analysis, would it make sense. Human soldiers might refuse unethical orders, or refuse to put down mass civil protest, whereas a robot would not. Then suddenly their robot strategy makes sense.
So the West will win because it has higher labor costs and protectionist measures.
Everyone knows that’s a combination that builds the best companies…the very reason why the whole world drives American cars.
I don't see how you can say this with a straight face "[Chinese company] said they'd make a million robots per year but shipped only twelve. [American company] says they'll make a million robots per year. Therefore America will win."
Especially when that American company is… Tesla!
anyone else notice this was written by claude (although its not 100% perfect claude language, im guessing josef tried to prompt claude ticks away and was only half successful).
Yeah, it's baffling to me that someone who did a bunch of original reporting would then be fine pushing it all through a Claude slop machine that makes everything so much harder to read and adds redundancy on redundancy into the text. The same points are made 5 or 6 times evenly spaced through the piece because the AI writing is doing local optimization at the expense of global organization.
Maybe he didn't do any original reporting, but just prompted Claude to write a science fiction story where a reporter visits some fictional factories in China and blogs about it?
Every time the article said, "I did such and such a thing," I thought, "No, Claude, you did not do that. You don't have a body. You're making this up."
He has photos of him inside of different factories inside of China, including a Unitree one.
author
West will outbuild china....
also author
> The next day, at BYD, I saw the other end of this: a car plant where everything I saw was automated.
Note there are no fully automated US car plants.
You're seeing this article because it was upvoted. Why it was upvoted? Because you want it to be true, but that doesn't mean it is true.
Bullish or bullshitting?
Stupid thesis considering PRC already installs more industrial robots than RoW combined. There's some validity to PRC tendency to arbitrage cheap labour to defer automation when economical... i.e. why pay for expensive SaaS when you can just throw cheaper brains at problem. But the second something cheaper than bodies, PRC tend to adopt more ruthlessly than west, and with automation replacing actual projected blue collar shortage, absolutely smooth brained hot take to think west will lead in robots let alone making robots.
Unitree makes like 5 digit numbers chassis with high iteration, they use people because these are baby numbers where human iteration maximizes productivity, not lack of capability. They do it because they have this gear that west doesn't. Meanwhile PRC indigenizing all tooling to the highest end of precision. They're not going to use western robots for much longer. Indigenous replacement rate is basically J takeoff, even if we completely ignore that ABB/Kuka/fanuc all have massive assembling and R&D footprint in PRC.
Or take Tesla, one of the more competent US builders... ctrl+c, ctrl+v their model to PRC, a few rapid iteration cycles later, PRC plants > western plants (EU/US). Even SpaceX, forget payload/tempo/operational, PRC industry builds like 2-3x more first stages than US space program including SpaceX, i.e. when they figure out reusable they can put up 2-3x size reusable fleet... and that's basically them barely trying. The industrial lesson by now should be whatever West builds, PRC likely end up doing better, faster, cheaper, frequently pick all 3.
This argument generic copium by now - muh western imagination gap can somehow compete with PRC industrial gap... and robots that build robots is slightly more marketable and feasible than gray goo... until you realize one of PRC's core capability is just doing what west did better anyway.
Why is the focus on scale when no one has ever built a single humanoid robot that is useful for anything yet? One real world Rosie would be more valuable than a million "Optimus" bots.
Remember how tiny the drone market was, until DJI made them juuuuuust cheap and useful enough? Then suddenly there was a drone market, and DJI made a better one, and then the market got bigger, and then DJI made a better one, and then the market got bigger, ....
stop trying to bully anyone
It is logistically impossible for the West to manufacture robots anywhere approaching the scale and cost of China. They control the materials, the refinement, the advanced manufacturing, the vertical integration, and a cheap labor force, to say nothing of a planned economy that can pivot on a dime to execute any demand there's available capital for. It is laughable to think the West can produce robots that compete with China.
If tomorrow morning we decided to pull a Manhattan Project just to match China's capacity for cheap effective robotics, it would take 10 years. By then China has already found their product-market fit and secured the world as a customer.