White House Wants Tariffs to Bring Back U.S. Jobs. They Might Speed Up AI Automation Instead

From the article: Announcing his tariffs in the White House Rose Garden last week, President Trump said the move would help reopen shuttered car factories in Michigan and bring various other jobs back to the U.S.

“The president wants to increase manufacturing jobs here in the United States of America,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt added on Tuesday. “He wants them to come back home.”

But rather than enticing companies to create new jobs in the U.S., economists say, the new tariffs—bolstered by recent advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics—could instead increase incentives for companies to automate human labor entirely.

“There’s no reason whatsoever to believe that this is going to bring back a lot of jobs,” says Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist and professor of AI & work at Oxford University. “Costs are higher in the United States. That means there’s an even stronger economic incentive to find ways of automating even more tasks.”

In other words: when labor costs are low—like they are in Vietnam—it’s usually not worth it for companies to invest in the expensive up-front costs of automating human labor. But if companies are forced to move their labor to more expensive countries, like the U.S., that cost-benefit calculation changes drastically.

To be sure, experts note that tariffs may not immediately lead to more automation. Automating manufacturing jobs often requires companies to make significant investments in physical machinery, which tariffs are likely to make more expensive. In a time of economic turmoil, companies also usually hold off on making big capital expenditures.

“A-one, please.. AI is not the proper nomenclature.” -department of ending education lady

Who are they going to sell to if people don’t work?

If you are ready if this, just know this one fact.
Elon is going to download you into the matrix. You will have the capabilities of lucid dreaming in the metaverse via neuralink. You will reincarnate as an ai over and over again indefinitely (until you execute yourself from the cloud ☁️)

If that happens, the automation will be manufacturered and imported from China. The cost of manufacturing is just too high for various reasons.

First of all, never buy the cover story for a Trump initiative. See also Xi, Putin, Erdogan. This is a framing of the issues failure given the history of such types.

In this instance, as every actual expert in the field has stressed, Trump tariffs are bad faith and built to fail from the outset when combined with evil dictatorship foreign policy (including Musk funding extremists in all top European nations for the express purpose of exporting dictatorship) and attempts at the same in domestic policy. Proper tariff policy relies upon gentler and more targeted measures in response to legitimate abuses. None of that is present here except as a bullshit cover story.

I cannot stress enough how united the world will be to slow the fall into totalitarianism of the wealthiest economy and most destructive force in history. They will not be caving and simply cannot afford to as an existential matter. The bond market flex proves this with it’s brilliant if obvious ploy to attack the US in its weak-point debt situation ironically worsened immensely by Trump’s tax cut mainly to his donor class that lasted beyond his first term as well as his disastrous covid mismanagement.

Yes the automation is going to happen regardless.
It’s good then, to bring as much manufacturing locally as we can. Not all countries can automate right away so those that can will likely dominate the globe. Eventually everyone will be automated but that will take a while.

“Dark” factories are already a thing and will only improve over time. There is a benefit to reshoring; people still need to plan, design, construct, program, and manage these places — and laborers will still be needed for some time on certain tasks. So the benefit to the US is more jobs overall even if they’re not traditional sweat shop assembly line jobs (a good thing) — plus the added benefit of domestic control over supply chains in an uncertain geopolitical environment.

Well duh. This is the point. The return of jobs is just cover for the simps.

Not might lol. They will speed up automaton. There’s no way workers in the US will work for some 3-5 dollar wage especially with the cost of living and inflation. Only way the billionaires and companies will bring back factories here is if it’s automated.

They don’t give a shit about US jobs bro, they care about US manufacturing. There was a time where those things went hand in hand but now with AI And humanoid robots that time could be coming to an end. It’ll take nearly a decade for this manufacturing boom to fully roll out and by then i’d guess at least a tenth to a fifth of the US manufacturing workforce will be automated by these new machines.