alien dreadnoughts

Elon Musk’s term for giant, state-of-the-art automated factories, invoked in Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time To Build as the manufacturing example of the essay’s central complaint. Andreessen’s point: US manufacturing output is at an all-time high, yet key production has been offshored to cheaper labor even though “we know how to build highly automated factories and the higher-paying jobs they create” — so why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts,” giant cutting-edge factories, across the country? In the essay it’s the manufacturing counterpart to the education (“match every learner with a tutor”) and housing arguments — each a case where the West knows how to build but has chosen not to.

Context: “Alien dreadnought” is the nickname Elon Musk gave to Tesla’s vision of a heavily automated, lights-out Gigafactory — a factory so densely robotic and unlike conventional human-run plants that it would look alien. The plan was later scaled back, with Musk conceding that “excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake.”

Where this appears

• It’s Time To Build — the manufacturing example: build Elon Musk’s automated “alien dreadnoughts” instead of offshoring production.