Chapter 571 - 542 To Support the Future (Part 1)

People often say automation is the future, considering efficiency, confidentiality, and logical calculations, Lille believes there is nothing wrong with this statement.

The number of human employees at Atlas Group had actually reached saturation, and the collaboration between AI and senior researchers can easily create flexible production robots that replace human workers. There is no significant technical difficulty in gradually replacing workers on production lines, it only takes time in engineering.

But Lille has experienced many waves of unemployment, some called technical, some policy-based, and others continually invent new terms to describe it, such as "frictional adjustment," "employment transition period," "workforce mobility," "impact of industrial upgrading," and so on.

However, mass unemployment brings many problems; some people who have worked honestly for the first half of their lives suddenly lose their jobs due to financial market fluctuations, have no money for their basic needs, and are seduced by gangs into becoming gunmen. It’s not uncommon for them to even embrace crime from that point on.

Lille feels that if faced with the same situation again, he could do better—

Brain-machine interfaces are very effective learning aids, and prosthetics controlled by brain-machine interfaces are excellent advanced learning devices.

Even so, teaching a person something new is indeed much slower than simply copying and pasting onto a machine, but it also prevents many still "good" people from being overwhelmed by the radical changes in the world.

Of course, this has also led to much criticism of Lille—

He can imagine many people saying he delayed the development window and might have caused them to lose the worldwide war of "monopoly and anti-monopoly," "war and anti-war" because of this pointless "Mother Teresa" act.

But Lille’s attitude has been consistent: if you want to win the war, you need to join it, even if it means working in logistics, doing a good job on a production line far from the battlefield, studying hard, or even using what seems to be meaningless art to inspire people.

The world is never short of parasites who want to just point fingers, expecting "their own" to suddenly come up with something good for their use, to win wars for them, to propagate their ideology. These people have never been considered by Lille.

That’s why two major car companies came licking their faces to Atlas Group: Rocksen also acquired some car companies, but their strategy was to further reduce the workforce and adopt fully automated production lines to replace workers, so there was no need to deal with these two unlucky ones.

As the old powerhouses of Mei Country’s auto industry, Chrysler and General Motors, despite having gone through a financial crisis and layoffs, still collectively maintained three hundred thousand employees. Chrysler, with only fifty thousand employees, was on the brink of bankruptcy.

As traditional car manufacturers, both companies simultaneously influenced the upstream and downstream enterprises in the supply chain. Assuming each position indirectly supported 1.5 jobs, including that of suppliers and logistics companies, that means four hundred and fifty thousand jobs were linked.

Assuming each employee supported an average family of four under the current difficult circumstances, that affected a population of one point eight million people.

The living standards of these people would also indirectly affect the industry conditions of service, agriculture, and light industries. Once collapsed, the induced reactions would be cascading.

Now, the upgraded electric vehicle manufacturing industry could absorb all the production lines and also provide new job opportunities, including software engineers, battery technology specialists, and data analysts, as well as corresponding industrial workers.

With existing work experience, and the help of brain-machine interfaces, the speed of transition was much faster than educating someone straight from Africa who hadn’t even had compulsory education—an old black, for instance. It should be known that the African Union might have some promising talents, but they have also poured a lot into infrastructure due to rapid development, leading to a labor shortage.

Atlas would finance and take control of the two companies, properly dispatch these workers, and the African Union would contribute by purchasing Detroit’s municipal bonds, giving them a lease on life. This money would then be invested in International Gene Cooperation Company, arranging brain-machine interface healthcare for them.

The money would flow back into Atlas’ hands, part of it would be used for infrastructure, and the rest would be invested in the production of military equipment, including vehicles, prosthetics, and light weaponry.

Talking about saving these two companies and the auto manufacturing workers alone involved a circulation of funds exceeding twenty-one billion US Dollars, more than twice the current debts of Detroit, and, obviously, there would be subsequent economic growth.

This was the expansion of the low-end manufacturing industry, with a total increase of three hundred thousand employees, indirectly stabilizing the lives of one point eight million people.

"Half of Detroit will come back to life because of this!" exclaimed a politician from Detroit’s political scene, almost crying, at times feeling like a beggar.

Such is the consequence of an ecological imbalance in society: if there were no more conflicts in society, advancing under a unified will...

How could entities that relied on conflict for their existence possibly fare well?

Detroit put all its bets on automobiles, lost diversity, enjoyed it once, but indeed became a beggar now. Others might still have a chance to save themselves, but they couldn’t even pay their city employees’ salaries.

The politician clutched Lille’s hand, looking like he was about to kiss it.

"This..." Lille skillfully withdrew his hand and opened a projection, "is the future production line I hope to build."

Holographic projections were transformed through the glasses worn by the visitors, displaying the look of future manufacturing lines from all directions within the exhibition area.

Workers using brain-computer interfaces, remotely controlled production equipment, real-time AI assistance, and... some mysterious auxiliary robots.

Politicians and management personnel from both car companies stopped in their tracks, shifting their gaze away from Lille and towards the holographic projections.

The projection helpfully included a feature where you could point at anything you didn’t understand for further explanation, serving both as a display and an instructional tool.

After finalizing this area, Lille moved on to the next exhibit.

Manufacturing often shares commonalities, especially in the automotive industry, so the production line included not just car assembly but also emerging manufacturing sectors like prosthetics and graphene batteries.

That would lead to a heavy demand for another high-end manufacturing product—

Chips.

The chips used in the brain-computer interfaces were designed by Lille based on the standard chips he encountered in the Cyberpunk World, a three-dimensional stacked chip that’s a basic technology over there, with surplus production capacity and ubiquitous in the market.

But on this side, in 2009, the chip industry was primarily referred to traditional CPU manufacturers like Samsung Electronics and Intel, big and essentially monopolistic, and more importantly, most had already joined Rocksen’s military industrial group, providing large capacities to military enterprises like Stark.

But that wasn’t a problem.

In terms of architecture, traditional CPU designs are more suitable for sequential processing and are more in line with humans’ single-threaded mode of tool use.

Brain-computer interfaces need to process a vast amount of bioelectrical signals, information unrelated to human thinking and far more complex than imaginable, which gave birth to the three-dimensional stacked design and a special ternary coding scheme, requiring multi-threaded compute chips with a vast array of stream processors.

The AI also had similar characteristics and wasn’t well-suited to traditional CPUs, conveniently bypassing the traditional CPU manufacturing domain and providing a new track.

It just so happened that the companies on this track were still small at this time and could easily undergo mergers and reorganizations that were just beginning.

The newly started companies didn’t have much choice. With Rocksen and traditional CPU companies aligned against them, they would naturally transfer the orders for brain-computer interface chips in the Cyber Technology Company’s version to these businesses, shrinking their room to operate. If they couldn’t join forces with Lille, they’d soon have to start rewriting their resumes.

The mergers and acquisitions involved a direct increase of 17,000 employees, changes to the production lines, and the need for brain-computer interface implants, requiring an investment of 1.6 billion US dollars; the direct acquisition costs were 8 billion US dollars, with a near-total investment of 10 billion.

Among the acquired companies was XMSC, the enterprise tasked with Lille’s first commissioned chip production, but the representative was no longer the Mr. Wang from before.

This time, a young man arrived, also surnamed Wang, but there were no officially registered legal ties between them, seemingly an unregistered foster father and son relationship.

Watching Lille’s perfected second version of the brain-computer interface chip in the holographic projection, he seemed somewhat downcast.

Noticing this, Lille asked, "Where is Mr. Wang?"

The young man, snapping out of his reverie, seemed somewhat surprised; after all, this was the first time Lille had initiated a conversation that evening, and it wasn’t purely business-related.

"Plane crash, my uncle and his family were all unfortunately killed."

Lille nodded slightly; crashes seemed to occur more commonly among Rocksen’s competition.

He checked; the crashed flight also included a legislator from Mei Country...

He patted the young man’s shoulder: "Do well."

"Understood."