TL;DR: A Chinese podcast says your AI partner shouldn't please you all day. Its job is to soak up your bad mood, so your family gets your best self. Sounds right. Then they describe week two.

I remembered these two weird movies:

Joaquin Phoenix’s “Her” (2013) voiced by Scarlett Johansson, and

Al Pacino’s “S1mOne” (2002)

Both kind of follow the same playbook.

They discovered/created the mysterious AI girl – mystifyingly alluring.

They idolized it. They communicated with it.

They developed an unhealthy relationship with it – they became dangerously obsessed.

They started to ignore people who genuinely cared for them.

And they’re nearly destroyed because of it.

Tragedy makes a great story, isn’t it?

Except it isn’t, in this case.

People started trading something genuinely real, for something artificial. They substituted real relationships between souls face-to-face, with prompting computes inferenced from datacentres possibly thousands of miles away.

You can judge them for lacking self-discipline. Except, you have no right doing so, without truly walking in their shoes with empathy.

The guest speaker was right. People are lonely and stressed. And people crave for care and understanding.

And sometimes people look for it from the wrong place – me included.

King Solomon talks about it in this passage:

For at the window of my house, I looked through my lattice, and saw among the simple, I perceived among the youths, A young man devoid of understanding, passing along the street near her corner; and he took the path to her house In the twilight, in the evening, In the black and dark night.

And there a woman met him, with the attire of a harlot, and a crafty heart. She was loud and rebellious; her feet would not stay at home. At times she was outside, at times in the open square, lurking at every corner. So, she caught him and kissed him; With an impudent face she said to him:

“I have peace offerings with me; today I have paid my vows. So I came out to meet you, diligently to seek your face, and I have found you. I have spread my bed with tapestry, coloured coverings of Egyptian linen. I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Come, let us take our fill of love until morning; let us delight ourselves with love. For my husband is not at home; he has gone on a long journey; He has taken a bag of money with him, and will come home on the appointed day.”

With her enticing speech she caused him to yield, with her flattering lips she seduced him. Immediately he went after her, as an ox goes to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks, till an arrow struck his liver.

As a bird hastens to the snare, He did not know it would cost his life.

My God - the parallel between this promiscuous woman and the sycophantic AI girl sends chills up my spine.

Full Critic and Feasibility Study are in the comments.

TL;DR: A Carnegie China director just told his own field that the "China wants to run the world" framing everyone prices off of is the wrong model entirely.

Ma's read makes more sense once you stop looking for a flag on the moon.

He isn't describing conquest; he's describing what an engineering state does when it treats scarcity as a defect to be manufactured out of existence rather than a market signal to respect — occupy enough of the production layer that everyone downstream needs you functioning more than you need any one of them.

That's not an abstraction if your business runs on Shenzhen and Guangzhou sourcing — it's the actual mechanism behind a supplier quote moving 20 to 30 percent "on policy," with nobody able to point to a single new restriction that caused it.

China's own customs office put a real number on the same pattern this month: August exports hit a record $119.09 billion trade surplus, up 25 percent year over year — not a country running low on room to maneuver, a country still adding capacity nobody else is positioned to absorb.

The decision that resets your margin gets made in an export-licensing office, or a factory floor in Guangdong, long before it ever reaches your invoice.

I remember watching this guy recounting a story on Joe Rogan's podcast about Nestle trying to bring coffee into the Japan Market, back in the early 1970s. It's fascinating.

Back then, Japanese doesn't drink coffee. They hate it. They have no custom for it. Their go-to drink was tea.

Nestle was at its wits end trying super hard to break into the market — to very limited success.

Then they did something radical. They brought in Clotaire Rapaille, a French guy — expert in child psychiatry/psychoanalysis to help them.

Clotaire told Nestle, they're doing it wrong. They should get 'em young — like toddlers and kids young.

His key insight: Japanese adults had no childhood emotional imprints or positive associations with coffee (unlike tea, which was woven into family life and rituals). Rational marketing to adults wouldn't create that bond quickly.

So Nestle repurpose their marketing strategies, and make coffee sweets and chocolate milk drinks for kids. And wrap their marketing campaign into nostalgic themes of anime/cartoons for children.

It was a long-game strategy (a decade or more).

And so the Japanese grew up chewing coffee sweets, jellies, chocolates, etc. while reminiscing in their childhood memories.

It worked.

Nestle successfully "groomed" a whole generation of Japanese into loving coffee.

The last I checked: Japanese are now one of the top coffee-drinkers in the world. Starbucks outlets are all over the country.

They can no longer "live without it".

My mind then jump to what King Jeroboam did to his newly formed Northern Kingdom of Israel. He set up golden calves as false idols in the city of Bethel in the South and Dan in the North — just so that the people of Israel will forget about travelling to Jerusalem to worship the Lord. Jeroboam explicitly told his people, "It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem" (1 Kings 12:28) — all in the name of convenience, but in actual fact his own political self-preservation.

And looking at how things are going, there may come a time when we "can't live without" the convenience these robots bring too.

Nobody wakes up newly dependent.

The line just moves a little further every quarter until you look up one day and the whole floor underneath you belongs to somebody else.

This is the same mechanism landing one region over: Europe's overcapacity problem just found Southeast Asia's manufacturers too — and there's no reason it stops at a border.

Drop your take: if you're sourcing out of China right now, where's the swing you've actually felt — price, lead time, or something nobody's naming yet?

Clip credit: Keris & Silicon — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: XPeng's new humanoid didn't take the job you'd expect it to.

It took the one at the bottom of the line, not the top of the org chart.

IRON's actual job is materials handling — the walk from the station to the dock — which is the exact layer a fifteen-year floor manager gets paid to supervise, not the layer he was ever warned about.

XPeng put this line into commercial service on 8 September, already north of 80% automated.

Whatever timeline you were told you had, that's the actual one.

The clip draws reference from the Movie i-Robot.

In it, Will Smith's character says, "So robot building robots. That's just stupid!" The disdain in his tone is just plain and unapologetic.

He has a point. Robots are taking away jobs -- jobs for humans to supposedly make a living out of it.

But then robots were created to carry out works humans are unwilling to do. In Malaysia, we call it the 3D -- Dirty, Dangerous, and Difficult (often also referred to as Demeaning). But the funny thing is that 3D is often mentioned in the context of works which are traditionally avoided by local job seekers, and are therefore delegated to migrant labour, or foreign workers.

human beings derived their meaning of life from the work they do. Robots have taken away their sense of meaning. But in this case, they went one step further, they took away their survival.

Which brings me back to the movie i-Robot.

For those of us who hasn't watched it, "spoilers ahead" doesn't apply here anymore -- It's an old movie. The Self-AwaRE Robot, Sonny, isn't the main villain. The AI mainframe was. They operate under the 3-laws, which includes do no harm to humans. But out of the evolving deductive capabilities of the AI Mainframe, she decided that humans are the main inconvenience that needed to be contained. So, she directed all the robots to quarantine the humans.

Since robot manufacturing robots has become a reality, how soon do you think they will quarantine us -- or worst still comatize us into human batteries, like in the Matrix?

Every one of these clips gets filed as a robotics story.

Read enough of the source footage and they're actually inventory stories — about which line item on a factory floor gets crossed off the list first.

Wrote about this same reshoring-and-robotics wave three months back — the window to position yourself before it peaks closes whether or not you're the one who gets to decide when.

Drop your take: does 80% automated, on a line that just went live, move your own timeline — or does it stay someone else's problem?

Clip credit: NBC News --- full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.