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Their words
That was true of industrial technology in 1870-1970; people basically got used to the idea that railroads and factories and oil and industrialized warfare and such matters were central to the way the world was run and to the collective future of humanity. AI is going to be like that going forward, and we’re just going to have to get used to that.
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18 September
12 September
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Their words
the best way to think about AI is as another social, political, cultural and economic shock in the series of shocks that have been underway over the long industrial revolution.
How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com
9 September
4 September
23 August
14 August
From one piece Travis Kalanick: How AI Will Transform the Physical World 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Everything we see, whether it's this room or any room or anywhere you go, everything you see was either grown or mined, manufactured and moved. Everything. And so we look at what we do as industrial AI.
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Their words
If you're doing highcale tasks, industrial scale tasks, you are going to make specialized machines that move and act in the physical world. The key part is move. If they're moving, they got to have wheels.
29 July
From one piece Chartbook 462: China shocked - beyond 1.0 and 2.0 to the "Big One". 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
China shock 2.0 threatens high status manufactured goods: European cars and engineering.
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korrents.com
China's industrial lead was manufactured by deliberate state industrial policy rather than by market forces alone.Their words
What China is delivering in the 2020s is an industrial policy shock of global scale.
30 June
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korrents.com
"Food from thin air" is not from thin air: it runs on water, minerals, ammonia and industrial plant.Their words
Another is that it isn’t ‘food from thin air’ as is often claimed – as well as the high energy use, it’s food from a lot of tap water, minerals, ammonia and industrial infrastructure.
17 June
1 June
7 April
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Their words
Um I think another similarity is I mean, the core notions uh behind Agile and extreme programming are solid and good, but a huge snake oil industry appeared around it, the Agile industrial complex as I like to refer to it. Um and that will happen. That is happening with AI right now, and it's often hard to see the difference between where is the snake oil and where is the real stuff.
12 February
From one piece Speed Can Reindustrialize America 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The robot arm base case saves some hourly labor at the expense of adding more skilled labor, and can easily be negative if it needs reprogramming more than a few times per year.
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Their words
The US excels at high-volume manufacturing, but not low-volume manufacturing.
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Their words
Industrial policy almost inevitably consumes more skilled labor and reduces what we can produce.
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korrents.com
An industrial robot does not replace labour, it shifts labour from hourly workers to scarce skilled ones.Their words
The key is that robot arms are not labor-replacing, but labor-shifting.
5 January
8 December 2025
From one piece Energy Predictions 2025 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
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Their words
By 2045, natural gas will be used as LNG primarily for high performance supersonic aviation, shipping, and industrial heat.
16 November 2025
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Their words
AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing.
15 November 2025
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Their words
There is a feeling that a lot of tail-chasing in industrial improvement is due to interactions not being recognized.
14 November 2025
12 November 2025
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korrents.com
What the industrial revolution took 70 to 150 years to deliver, AI may deliver in 20 to 25.Their words
whatever what took 70 years maybe 150 years for the industrial revolution may happen in 20 years 25 years
22 October 2025
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Their words
It turns out that simply getting people into temporary shelter—often derided by the homelessness-industrial complex as a band-aid—significantly reduces both social and individual harms of unsheltered homelessness.
27 September 2025
18 September 2025
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Their words
The average European and UK voter, once he or she moves on from immigration, will notice how Europe and the UK have made energy unaffordable, stopped its growth-exactly as degrowthers wish-and deindustrialized, on the altar of climate policies that do nothing to improve the climate.
12 September 2025
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Their words
but um to make robotic foundation models really work it's not just a laboratory science uh kind of experiment. It's also uh it also requires kind of industrial scale uh building effort like it's it's like it's more like the Apollo program than it is like a science experiment
2 September 2025
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Their words
But once you actually have a sophisticated industrial economy, central planning can't handle the complexity. And so you try and create incentives and structures around that while not having pricing and that just doesn't work.
15 August 2025
From one piece China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
the meta problem here is if we don't move our industrial stack off fossil fuels in 10 or 20 years, first of all, we'll get poor the same way you UK did, right? Because they ran out of coal basically. And the second thing is we'll get poor because we'll flood our coastal cities in Florida underneath climate change.
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Their words
And the bottleneck prior to what we call the industrial revolution was uh metabolism, right? It's just like how much like oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for you know their their um their peasant overlord or whatever.
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Their words
You can revisit a bunch of legacy industrial processes that are have been optimized for efficiency and say, well, what if we just like use twice as much power and we just want to do them faster and cheaper, right? Like less capex, less lead time, more power, right?
13 August 2025
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Their words
Industrial policy was heavily criticized and again, if I talk to my Harvard professors, they’ll be very, very, very skeptical about the role of the state, especially in such a major way. But if you look at the Chinese experience, the evidence for success is all there. The cities that have pushed the most on supporting that particular sector ultimately did the best in terms of production, but also in terms of innovation, measured by patents. It’s all in the data.
29 July 2025
From one piece Indonesia Climbs the Chain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Poverty reduction is never a purely technocratic exercise, and questions about industrial policy can never be entirely divorced from those of political economy—including those of global geopolitics.
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korrents.com
Industrial policy that grows a poor country’s economy does not automatically reduce its poverty.Their words
But, peering past the hype around Morowali reminds us that we should be careful before assuming that industrial policy must be pro-poor.
23 July 2025
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Their words
And the thing that's going to be harder to deal with this time around is that I think what we're going to see is something like probably 10 times the impact the Industrial Revolution had, but 10 times faster as well. So instead of a 100 years, it takes 10 years and so that's going to make, it's like a 100X, the impact and the speed combined.
15 May 2025
From one piece Why are solar panels and batteries from China so cheap? 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Another factor that is killing Europe’s competitiveness — not just for batteries but for many industrial products — is the high electricity costs.
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korrents.com
A country cannot fund its own industrial strategy and call the same policy cheating when China does it.Their words
But you cannot support these programs while calling out China for “cheating” for doing the same.
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Their words
But, China mainly dominates these markets because it has produced a long-term industrial strategy for these technologies and has honed an optimised, modern supply chain as a result.
12 May 2025
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korrents.com
Volatile, stop-start trade policy undermines the ability to make durable industrial investment decisions.Their words
a juddering, jarring trade motion is not the stuff of which durable industrial decision-making is made.
7 April 2025
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Their words
Persistent U.S. trade deficits are an epiphenomenal mirror to our persistent capital account surpluses, which are in turn downstream of the beggar-thy-neighbor industrial policies of countries like China and Germany.
6 April 2025
From one piece America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
China already installs several times more industrial robots a year than the United States does, and cheaper ones.Their words
First, China, on a yearly basis installs 7x as many industrial robots as we do in the United States.
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korrents.com
A humanoid robot is the wrong tool on a factory floor, because a machine specialised in the task beats it.Their words
They are not useful in industrial environments where, if a humanoid robot can do it, an industrial machine which is specialized in the task can do it even better.
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Their words
That’s because America has an amazing consumer supply chain, one of the best, if not the best in the world, but this is totally different from having an industrial supply chain.
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Their words
Automation will not save us.
3 February 2025
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Their words
China, if they wanted to build the largest data center in the world, if they had access to the chips, could. So it's just a question of when, not if.
21 January 2025
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Their words
The fact remains that without a stock of capable administrators, industrial policy and export targeting and infrastructure-building—or even Adam Smith’s minimum of “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice”—are a nonstarter.
10 January 2025
16 December 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The GoalTheir words
Written in the '80s, yet a timeless novel on what management is about, may that be a manager of a team, an organization or an industrial plant.
6 November 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Designing for PeopleTheir words
Memoirs of one of the founders of industrial design.
23 January 2024
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korrents.com
China's industrial lead was manufactured by deliberate state industrial policy rather than by market forces alone.Their words
The foundations of China’s success in EVs were built a decade ago, when the state decided to bet on batteries, and then bought up a lot of the mines for these metals.
19 January 2024
3 January 2024
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korrents.com
A modern shipyard can match a whole wartime industrial mobilisation with a fraction of the workers.Their words
South Korea's yearly production often matches the total tonnage the US produced in WWII - with one-fifth of the workers!
10 October 2023
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