Motor winding is an amusing problem. Everybody making motors has a powered winder. It's handling the wire ends that can be either manual or automatic. If you look at videos of winders, automating the wire end handling is most of the machinery.
Here's an overview of winding automation:
Full auto, robotic transfer.[1]
Full auto, manual transfer [2].
Semi auto. [3].
Manual, powered. [4]
Manual, unpowered motor overhaul.[5] (Country girl in China who fixes motors and engines.)
Those winding machines are all from the same company, NIDE. You can buy as much automation as you want, depending on your labor costs. Option [4] is cost-effective if you can have one machine tender per machine.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FiCQX0y7-A
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wZvSem4Cd8
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4vqLxMlvk0
1. The terrible quality of the locally manufactured items. I am in Sydney and will absolutely not buy anything marked Made In Australia. I have been burnt too many times.
2. The nearly 100% mortality rate among the companies.
No, that is only one customer. There need to be lots of customers for a company to survive. So, ideally you recommend, based on good quality.
You take a bit of a gamble if you need warranty or customer service later on.
Some sort of network effect again, I suppose. There's a better term that's can't find now.
Australian made products unfortunately do not pass that initial hurdle..
Also really difficult to do, with huge tradeoffs depending on whether the construction is 2-core, 4-core, interpoled 4-core, coreless, slot-wound, salient poles, and many more configs and winding types. In particular cheap salient-pole motors can be wound directly with automated machinery while better slot-wound motors need to have the coils formed first, then inserted into the rotor slots, which is a manual process and complicated further by the fact that the coils are skewed to minimize torque ripple, no-one's really managed to automate that process yet.
So if you saw a factory making a mixture of salient-pole motors for toys and slot-wound motors for serious use you'd see exactly what TFA is describing, salient-pole automated, slot-wound with human operators.
If you want to see what real highly-automated Chinese manufacturing is like, look at one of Bunny Huang's videos on electronics assembly. Then for contrast look at the videos of how it's done in Pakistan.
Just to extend your point - chinese car manufacturers are not only producing more cars, they're innovating at a faster pace too. While I'm not an expert, there is enough and more on social media around this. Eg: https://x.com/dhh/status/2113500613082329576?a=fscIadYr4U1xm...
The key parts are R&D, design, intellectual property, engineering talent. The question is, how well are Chinese organizations doing in those capacities in regard to robotics. My impression is that the answer is, quite well.
The focus on manufacturing is (in many cases) a twisted approach of economics. In the mid-20th century the West did very well with mass production. It was an innovative technology at the top of the value chain. But in early-to-mid 21st century, it's (often) an old, ~commodity technology and the ROI is poor. It's also physically not good for workers in many cases. When looking for economic growth you want to aim for top of the value change, for the future, not what was done 70 years ago - it won't work the same way economically anymore. In economics, you can't return to what worked before.
But the economy is in equilibrium which means as this decreases, it's going to change the value of other things, and open the door for new things. Whoever can take what LLMs offer, and then most successfully build on top of that will probably be 'the winner.' I'm not sure exactly what this will translate to in practice, but it seems reasonable to predict that manufacturing is going to be a huge part of it.
"But as the cost of 'cognitive work' in general starts approach $0, the value of such, in and of itself, is also going to approach $0."
When the pirate party was big in EU, there was much talk about copying approaching the cost of 0, and therefor we would never pay for copying data, only creating new data.
I guess this all due to copyright law, and it will not disappear anytime soon, but still. I would not be too quick to draw that same conclusion.
However, we do have Wikipedia. Wikipedia was never valued at the peak sales price of Encyclopedia Britannica times the number of people online, if it was it would be worth around $16 trillion.
Imagine all the work involved in, for instance, trigonometry and its basic applications in the past. And the later on with the advent of kinematics and so forth. These things involved a lot of computation and so there were literal human calculators whose job it was to work out all of the calculations.
But with the advent of electrical calculators, we literally no longer know that these jobs even existed. It's very easy to see the same in a future where, for instance, computer programs can be efficiently written from description alone. At that point the idea of a 'programmer' would seem like quite an odd concept.
I'd also look at what it did to the value of such work. Now computations, even quite complex, are mostly worth exactly $0. But we built extensive systems on top of those computations that became worth quite a lot indeed!
But it's difficult to leap ahead from step 0 to step 3, as you need the gains from step 0 to achieve step 1, the benefits from step 1 to achieve step 2, etc. Some of those benefits are food, shelter, healthcare, education (hard to have engineers without it, for example), physical infrastructure, finance, honest and skilled government, etc.
Yes, absolutely. You can see many places have followed that path; you can skip the R&D and just use mature solutions - South Korea and Taiwan, for example.
You're attributing that to Chinese business? Isn't that what enshittification is, an American capitalist vision?
1) Unitree robots are largely made by hand.
2) Labor is approximately 8% of cost of manufacturing these robots. Because costs are not prohibitive, there is little incentive to automate.
3) Labor costs are higher in America.
4) Therefore, American companies have higher incentive to automate.
5) Therefore, the West will capture most of the robotics opportunity.
Arguments 1-4 are reasonable, but 5 is a non-sequitur. Higher incentive to automate does not mean a better ability to automate & scale manufacturing.
I believe Unitree is currently assembling robots by hand for practical reasons:
1) Labor is still relatively cheap.
2) Humanoids and robots are evolving rapidly, changing every few months.
3) Custom assembly lines are expensive, and become obsolete when the product changes. It's difficult to maintain an assembly line when the product is rapidly evolving.
4) Tooling is inadequate. American companies are not immune from this - even Tesla is assembling parts Optimus by hand, because the hand/forearms are extremely complicated and difficult to manufacture.
5) Demand is still relatively niche, these are not mass market products. There is not enough demand to justify massive automated lines.
The author also ignores the biggest counterpoint: the Chinese have already demonstrated mastery in automated manufacturing, and have proven they can run dark factories (factories without humans) at a better scale than the west.
When humanoid robots become a mass market product (they are not ready today because the software is majorly lacking), Chinese manufacturers are in an excellent position to rapidly automate.