This is CBSI on the world.

I'm John Batchel with my colleague and co-host, Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang.

And we have Alan Tonelson, our guide on manufacturing and trade these many years.

We're turning from trade to manufacturing.

Alan, there was a lengthy feature in the Wall Street

Journal recently with video of what it's called a dark factory. Now, it sounds like the dark

web, you know, something sinister. No, no, it's a factory where the lights are not on. Why?

Because it's either heavily or dominantly robotic. And the Chinese have built some of these,

perhaps it's a Potemkin manufacturing facility, perhaps it's commonplace, and show them off to the

Wall Street Journal, meaning that the robots and AI have taken the place of manpower. For some time,

there's been a puzzle about manufacturing jobs in America, not accelerating despite the efforts of the administration to endorse the reshoring

of manufacturing facilities in the U.S. I learned from an article in the Financial Times, however, that the robots

and the engineers and the AI are commonplace now in some of the facilities in the U.S.

Where manufacturing is associated with heavy manpower. They mentioned the Finkintieri

building of U.S. Navy warships in Wisconsin, where instead of thousands

bending metal, there was a handful of engineers all wired in and supervising robots to bend metal

and build a ship not in months or years, but in days and weeks, at least the part of

the ship that requires steel.

This is all a revelation to me.

It also could explain some of the sideways move of manufacturing, not only in the U.S., but

in our little buddy to the south, that would be Mexico, and our little buddy

to the north, that would be Canada.

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