Ask HN: What's holding back industrial robot automation in America?

It might be helpful to start at the endpoint and ask: "Okay, we have fully automated factories and power and resources for them, all under US control...how do you turn a profit? What do we even do with that much surplus capacity?"

Not that I think this is a bad thing, mind you!

(I'll also point out that the assumption is that we don't have a lot of domestic industrial capacity which is...not accurate. Wasteful, overpriced, and in that weird slump of tech where we used to have really good tech and coasted for too long, sure: but, I'd double-check that the reality on the ground matches what everybody's claiming on social media.)

This one's pretty easy, from a business logic perspective; there's no money in it. The most cost-effective corporations in America (eg. Apple) are critically reliant on not building this infrastructure. They can take advantage of global supply chains with dirt-cheap human labor and they're first in line to use state-subsidized factories wherever they're built. Who would spend a dollar on domestic manufacturing when that same money is worth 100x more in Vietnam or China?

There's no reward for reshoring like there is for building a software monopoly or disrupting a hardware business.

But here is the big issue, what are we reshoring and why? What is the incentive? Take door knobs for example. Do you care where they are made? Even if you threw a ton of robots at door knobs no one in the USA is going to care if the door knob came from Cleveland or Shanghai. And you also might find out that you cant get the material cheap enough or find sources for obtaining manufactured bits and pieces easily. We gave up so much of our manufacturing base that even obtaining raw material is expensive.

I was in a one-man machine shop last week looking at an old press flywheel with the owner who told me the bronze he needed to replace the cracked bushing was $500 alone. He then pointed to a long, narrow box of 8 foot long brass strip stock that cost the customer $1500 while the parts he made from the stock was priced at $2 each and only used a few strips. He said you cant order small quantities easily or at all in some cases of certain metals like copper, brass and bronze. I was admiring his Moore Model 2 jig boring machine (a mill-like machine used to precisely locate holes to near micrometer tolerances.) and he then showed me a closet with shelves, floor to ceiling, full of dies he used to maintain for customers that are now scrap metal. Mind you, that shop has been going 71 years and was started by his father. He still has plenty of work with no advertising but no one to take over the shop. He would sell it to the right person but he said he's not holding his breath. Robots aint saving us.