LLM Inevitabilism

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

Not quite in agreement about using this quotation in this context, but for those who care about attribution and credit and such, this is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

I can even hear his voice as I read the quotation.

Such a recognisable pattern to his words, somehow never turned cliché by others trying to mimic it.

> when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries;

America is a shrine to capitalism. Capitalism has driven most of the outsourcing that American companies did first to Japan (ship building, autos, then semiconductors), then to Korea (again shipbuilding, autos, semiconductors, smartphones), then to Taiwan (shipbuilding, semiconductors). Then to China- which is now a problem because the divergence between the US and CN post-Xi.

Tesla and Apple's investments in China specifically supercharged the EV and smartphone industries in China. Yes it meant that those companies benefitted from Chinese manufacturing, but it also trained Chinese industry to build those products at scale.

Also America did not reinvest enough in developing new industries or retraining in the regions which lost those industries.

America should never have moved critical manufacturing away from the US (certain shipbuilding, latest-edge semis) etc.