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Comment by rib3ye | Hacker News Reader

To all those saying “China can make stuff and the US cannot”: it seems like the “robots” are really coming to both economies in the next decade, and they’re going to put more Chinese human labor out of work than US labor due to the sheer scale of China’s labor force.

With hundreds of millions of dudes out of work, I don’t think “good” things are going to happen with regards to East-Asian political stability.

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PRC roboticizing more than RoW combined to PLUG bluecollar workforce gap, they're already short on manufacturing labour supply. Well rather kids don't want to assemble widgets. The goal is always to maintain current industrial base with fraction of headcount from demographic contraction, and by "100s millions" out of work, we're really talking about 10s of millions going to retirement and hopefully robots can keep the machine brrrting to replace productivity and drive down costs so system can caretake 10sm retirees with cheap goods - PRC manufacturing sector already down to like 120m from 250m high in 200s. Another 20m in next decade is easily absorbable. PRC just trying to keeping things steady, bad things are going to happen to every one else when they realize they don't have PRC industrial chains to replicate affordable abundance. It's going to extra screw developing economies now labour saving tech + US shifting away from global consumer via tariffs going to kill export-led model dead, and there really isn't another model on the horizon to replace it. VS west PRC going to weather fine at least longer for the simple reason they have stupid high household savings rate, this isn't leveraged US households living paycheck to paycheck that will lead to different tier of instability.

this is as impenetrable as it looks

Not impenetrable, just contrarian. China is doing the robot thing so it can cope with demographic shifts as it shifts toward an older population and deals with youth not wanting to do tedious/dangerous factory work.

Automation at huge scale while maintaining the industrial base will allow a shift toward a more consumption driven economy but still keeping things cheap. Might be the only way to keep things from toppling with their huge population.

Lots of unemployed young males is a preindicator for war. Governments sometimes fear losing control and so will start a war to kill off the young males.

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