I am aware that the West’s best time was essentially at the expense of the rest of the world - but where can one find opportunity and prosperity of those times today? Was this a great anomaly of history? Is it time to hedge your bets on living out the Chinese dream?
Is it time for the West to accept that what our parents experienced will never exist again?
Will the world overall need to accept that the western living standard of that time will never be reached again? (It’s too unsustainable - for the planet, and because superprofits won’t flow as they once did)
What has actually happened that’s caused it to collapse?


And my point is that they can’t actually strip out that much labor because these chatbots can’t actually replace workers. Tractors actually do the job they’re made for, chatbots can’t do even close to what they’re selling them to do. They can maybe reduce a small amount od labor on the margins, but that’s it.
It’s almost like arguing about religion at this point in that we have fundamental disconnections in worldview that cant be reconciled, but as someone in the industry I assure you they absolutely can replace workers… they already have, and will continue to do so at an accelerating pace
As someone in manufacturing I can tell you these pieces of shit need to be constantly babied even as management desperately tries to reduce labor.
They have these new automated replacements for forklifts and they keep hitting stuff and dumping parts on the ground and need to be babied all day. My own welding cell has cameras that are supposed to detect faults and only pass good parts, but they’ve basically trained them to pass all parts because they kept failing good parts. I have to double-check everything anyway, just like I as before, and it saved no labor at all.
I just don’t see it from where I work.