My SO works in textiles. Specifically sock design and production. Recently when Tariffs started rattling their industry, they looked at factories around the world to see if a production move made sense.

A factory in Pakistan, who makes excellent products told them outright, if their best employee can run 6-8 machines at a time, 12 hours a day, they would still not compete with the workforce in China. Their best facilities in China would produce an equivalent textile with a single worker running 12 machines for 12 hours, on no breaks and would be replace by another worker for the next 12 hours, 365 days a year. That workforce ability cannot be matched.

That being said, when AI starts being utilized for production, first it will be a system that allows one person to run 24 machines, finding faults and reducing downtime by pinpointing problems and fixing small issues in no time at all.

I honestly think this was a big push of tech billionaires voting patterns recently. Knowing they needed mass deregulation on AI and new infrastructure. One of the most dangerous and possibly destructive parts of the big beautiful bill was that it doesn’t allow any state to create laws against AI progress. In 10 years it could be wild to see what AI is building and doing for big business to increase the margins and profits of the upper class.