WTH . . . US factories are closing because Mexican robots work cheaper than US robots?

CNN (link below) says that America’s angst over lost assembly line jobs is misdirected. They admit that while It’s true that millions of factory jobs no longer exist, this is simply “bad timing”. The real problem is . . . robots.

According to Jason Miller, PhD, University of Michigan – as interviewed by CNN – the job losses that happened after NAFTA and other trade deals are just a coincidence. Robots would have destroyed those assembly lines anyway.

Um . . . maybe. But that doesn’t explain why so many humans are bolting together Chevy Silverados in Silao, Mexico. And the brand new Lincoln Nautilus is made in Chonqing, China. (Not Chun-King, where the supermarket chow mein brand your mother used to serve comes from).

Regular readers of this column will note that I have consistently pointed out that all jobs are going to be done by robots in the future. Not just final assembly of Silverado steering wheels and attaching the knobs on Maytag washing machines. Everything. Websites will answer our social security questions. Kiosks will order our Big Mac combo meals. Beef will be grown in labs with millions of gallons of CO2-bicarbonate and HEPES (4-(2-hydroxyethyl)-1-piperazineethanesulfonic acid, rather than cattle herded by cowboys on the open range.

And if you work with a keyboard, or a telephone, or driving a vehicle, your job will eventually be toast. AI will see to that. The good news is that we will all get a basic universal basic income, a universal basic 8 housing unit, food stamps, and free online tuition at state college. To get a degree for which there are no jobs.

Back to CNN, Professor Miller, and their theories about Mexican robots. If there ARE Mexican robots (and I concede that there probably are), those robots are likely built in China. Stop pretending your head is exploding. You knew all along that this was going to be the answer. Robots which are assembled by Uyghurs in Mongolian work camps, alongside our iPhone 16s. This will continue until the robots which make robots take over. Which is why AI stocks are going crazy. According to Wall Street, everything will be AI dependent before we know it. And if we don’t buy LOTS of shares of NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA) or Deepseek (Hangzou, China) then we and our descendants will be serfs until the end of time. This recommendation to buy AI stocks was probably issued by an AI-controlled portfolio management program.

The upside is that people everywhere will have more free time to binge-watch Netflix. But all the shows will be CGI, with almost no human actors onscreen. Think a mashup of “Avatar“ and “Thor, Love and Thunder” and “Rings of Power” – which is certainly the most boring yet CGI intensive show ever to be unleashed on the public.

Hey, Professor Jason Miller - you DO realize that AI is coming for YOUR job too, don't you? All education will happen online, and all textbooks will be written by ChatGPT.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Trump says free trade killed American auto jobs. That’s not the whole story

Avectoijesuismoi · 36-40

The US car industry issue is much the same as the what was the British Car industry, the went through a faze where they produced Uncompetitive and Unreliable junk that was also more expensive to buy, run and maintain than the other vehicles that were on the market and the misguided management believed that the public in the country would carry on buying their vehicles blindly out of loyalty.
In some cases they then tried to make them more competitive price wise by assembling etc in locations where labour costs were lower, but still made JUNK that the public didn't want to buy.

SusanInFlorida · 31-35, F

@Avectoijesuismoi to be fair to the british car industry - it HAD been bombed back to the stone age by nazi germany.

detroit has no similar excuse

Avectoijesuismoi · 36-40

@SusanInFlorida It has nothing to do with being bombed it has to do with British Leyland coming into being and taking a whole host of companies Jaguar include into the fold and promptly turning what were previously well made cars into absolute unreliable junk, that misguided management believed the public would keep on buying one of the cars that is Memorable was a Triumph Stag it had the lousiest gearbox and most unreliable and underpowered engine that they possible could have put in it. But it became a good car if you took the triumph engine and gearbox out and put the Rover V8 engine and Gearbox in from the same era, and it fitted exactly without modifications as it was all built to be standardized the problem being you had to buy two cars to get one good one
At one stage Fords were built in an area called Dagenham in the UK they became known as "Dagenham Dustbins" I will leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why they earned that title.