Turning the little screws

What Trump's trade war means for AI, automation and making iPhones in America

In the summer of 2016, just months before Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, I snuck into what was then the world’s largest iPhone factory. Officially called the Longhua Science and Technology Park, it was better known as Foxconn City, named after the massive subcontractor that handles the bulk of Apple’s product manufacturing. Longhua had become famous in the early 2010s for the suicide epidemic that swept its massive, 1.2 square mile campus, when workers protested their conditions in the gravest possible way.

As I made my way through the sprawling environs with a translator, I spotted the most notorious emblem of Foxconn’s turmoil, the so-called suicide nets, erected to catch the falling bodies of workers. Interviews with workers revealed that conditions had not improved since Apple and Foxconn promised to fix things in 2010—most felt stressed, relentlessly overworked, and underpaid. They complained of mandatory overtime, and of abusive managers who berated workers, many of whom had traveled from far away provinces to get this job, singling out underperformers to be shamed in front of their peers. They talked about having benefits withheld from them and being overcharged for housing. Someone had just jumped a few months ago, two workers told me, and all this was why.

As I walked from one end of the campus to the other, what struck me, aside from the drab, monolithic buildings and the sheer size of the operation, was the pervasive glumness that hung over the place; there were young people everywhere, talking or sitting down to eat, or heading into the 7-Eleven accessible only to Foxconn employees; but there was so little cheer or even vitality that the place indeed felt “haunted by a ghost” as one worker put it to me.

There were hundreds of thousands of people who worked here, a whole mid-sized American city, and the mood was so uniformly restrained and sullen—like I was walking all the way across St. Louis, but everyone had been told to keep quiet or else. The sheer scale made it striking. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.

I’ve been thinking about this place because for all its bleakness, it seems to be a fantasy for the Trump Administration lately—even if it’s an incoherent one.

A photo I snapped from inside Foxconn City.

This is the kind of place that secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick is talking about when he makes the rounds on TV news shows trying to sell Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and the rest of the world. In one of the clips that went viral on social media, Lutnick enthuses to a CBS anchor about an “army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones,” explaining how “that kind of thing is going to come to America.”

But, Lutnick adds, in something of a jumble, “it’s going to be automated."

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Now, with the absolute chaos of Trump’s haphazardly implemented global tariffs settling somewhat, with a 90 day pause announced on most of them, we’re left with a trade war with China—as of writing, the US has levied a wildly punitive 145% tariff rate against Chinese imports. (Two hours from now, it could be 275% or 1000% or 0, who knows.) The markets initially rejoiced at the tariff pause, but now the direness of even that is setting in; this is still very much uncharted territory. China, of course, is the largest importer of goods into the US and the largest manufacturer of American consumer electronics by a wide margin.

Trump, as in his first term, has once again returned to espousing the idea that he can return consumer electronics manufacturing to US shores—and, in particular, the manufacturing of Apple’s flagship device, the iPhone. “He believes we have the labor, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it,” Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week. Trump himself underlined the notion in a Truth Social post on Wednesday: “This is a great time to move your company into the US, like Apple, and so many others, in record numbers, are doing.”

The question is, why would anyone want what I saw in Longhua to come to the United States? Why would anyone use such mass immiseration as a talking point to sell the public on the benefits of trade policy? There are a number of answers here: The most telling, I think, is that, as with much that emerges from the White House, this isn’t as much a stated policy goal as it is a rushed effort to defend or explain whatever the boss just said or did. So it winds up being a sort of Rorschach test of what a given Trump lackey believes—and, more importantly—believes Trump wants to hear.

In this case, Lutnick is attempting to articulate Trump’s well-known affinity for the ‘Apple should build iPhones in the United States’ idea. Lutnick also has some knowledge of the actual conditions in those factories, so he’s awkwardly wrapping that up in his sales pitch. Now, Lutnick is a billionaire, and perhaps so divorced from the notion of manual labor that it doesn’t compute to him that what he’s saying scans to most people as brutal and utterly miserable. Who exactly aspires to spend all day screwing in “little, little screws” on devices, in his mind? Or it could be that he simply doesn’t care—this is, after all, an unabashedly oligarchic US government, and the purpose of these factories is not to generate good jobs for working Americans, or even to pretend as much, but to maximize profits for the owners. Hence the automation talk.

The “little screws” line became famous as Lutnick was trying to defend earlier comments he’d made on Fox News about how the tariffs would bring iPhone manufacturing to the US; in that earlier instance he said that most of the work would be done by robots. Perhaps realizing the case he was supposed to be trying to make was that bringing manufacturing back to America was good because it was good for jobs, he tried to thread the needle and ended up with some verbal mush about tiny screws and armies of human beings and also automation.

But it’s a telling mush. It shows us how we might begin to understand what we’re dealing with right now—and will be stuck dealing with for the coming years—with regards to Trump, labor policy, AI, and automation. First, it’s a reminder that this isn’t so much about policy at all, but about Trump’s mad king-style wielding of power, as the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie pointed out. Everything else follows from that. It’s gangster capitalism at best, an effort to force countries and companies to ingratiate themselves to him—Trump is already talking about granting exemptions to certain companies and “tailor made” deals with countries.

Given that, we can zero in on what Lutnick might be revealing with his mush. Because yes, if the tariffs with China stand—a colossal if—then there are probably a number of serious implications for industry. That’s why, I think, I received a number of calls from reporters and pundits this week, asking me how Trump’s tariffs might impact automation. After all, the Luddite uprising against bosses who were automating their work occurred after trade blockades erected over the Napoleonic Wars tanked the British textile economy. It was into that depressed economy that entrepreneurs and factory owners accelerated the adoption of automating machinery, further depressing wages and enraging the already suffering weavers and craftsman who made up the bulk of England’s industrial workforce at the time.

So it’s a good and valid question! And one that’s complicated by so, so many factors. If Trump’s intent is to bring back American manufacturing jobs by making foreign products and labor prohibitively expensive, it might, after all, blow up in his face if American companies took the opportunity to accelerate automation programs instead. On paper, it’s logical, as the automation theorist Carl Benedict Frey told the reporter Billy Perrigo in TIME this week for a good piece on tariffs and automation, to say that the rising of costs in the US “means there’s an even stronger economic incentive to find ways of automating even more tasks.” Theoretically, if the tariffs—especially those on China—hold, then there is indeed a stronger incentive for companies to invest in automation. (Of course, if they hold only in China, then companies may just find a different source of cheaper labor.)

But there are a couple things to keep in mind here:¹ First, the tariffs actually raised the costs on importing the parts and machinery you would need to build automated robotics systems. (The tariffs are also set to hit the AI industry hard; the US imported $200 billion in data center equipment and services in 2024, and much of that was from China and Taiwan.) So there’s a short-term disincentive to invest in automation tech right now. Second, of course, is that Trump’s economic policy is wildly inconsistent and unpredictable. I can’t see many companies making any sweeping investments in anything right now, until there’s at least a shred of clarity on what even the middle-term picture is going to look like. (Again, as of now, it’s a fool’s errand to guess what tariffs on any country are going to look like next week, much less a year from now.)

But third, we very, very well may see a spike in discourse around AI and automation led by the companies themselves. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and other AI firms have been pushing enterprise AI software pretty hard for the last two years, even if the results still aren’t looking all that great. If Trump’s trade shenanigans do wind up crashing the economy, or even throwing us into a minor recession—both very much within the realm of possibility!—the AI companies will have a renewed opportunity to promise cash-strapped firms labor savings if they shell out for premium tier enterprise AI software. I would not be surprised at all, in fact it would be the least surprising thing in the world, to see a renewed round of headlines worrying that, with AI approaching AGI or whatever, an economic dip could throw millions out of work sooner than we thought—logic that AI companies would wield, as they do, for commercial benefit.

Because ever since the Industrial Revolution, it certainly has been a recurring theme: When there’s an economic depression, or a barrier erected to a trade, you do often see owners and tech entrepreneurs announcing that they are investing in—or threatening to invest in—automation, usually as a way to slash their labor costs or to try to weaken worker power. The cloth factory owners and industrialists did so in the 1800s, using the workers’ relative weakness to buy more machinery and to run them with precarious and child labor.

There was a big push by industry to automate in the late 1950s, during an economic slouch—the carmaker Ford had coined the term “automation” and established a department dedicated to the practice the decade before. Most recently, we witnessed this during the response to the Covid pandemic; there were a lot of headlines about how the virus was going to accelerate automation, and many jobs were at stake.

Screenshot of the management consultancy OliverWyman during the peak Covid pandemic years.

While some real efforts at automation were undertaken—a National Institutes of Health study found that 5.7% of middle to low income workers self-reported having lost their jobs to automation during the pandemic—it a) did not end up denting the economy or the broader jobs picture, and b) nonetheless no doubt proved useful to employers as pervasive leverage over their workers, who were increasingly inclined to agitate for better conditions amid a plague. The threat of automation is simple, and constant, even if its premise is often untrue: Step out of line, we can replace you with technology.

So that’s what I’ll be watching most of all as the trade war saga unfolds: corporations using the specter of automation or AI adoption as leverage over workers. I gave a similar quote to TIME’s Perrigo, and he was kind enough to give me the final word in his piece, which also included Frey’s thoughts, as well as others.

Right now, there is not a chance in hell that Apple will be meaningfully moving its iPhone manufacturing operations to the United States anytime soon. The company itself has repeatedly said it will not; the last big Trump-led effort to do so failed spectacularly; and 404 Media has a whole litany of other reasons. But on top of that, there’s even less of a chance that if it were to do so that those operations would be heavily automated. As things stand, it’s highly unlikely other firms will invest in robotic automation about now either.

And bear in mind that even if Trump and Apple did ever convince Foxconn to set up a working iPhone factory on American shores, it would in all likelihood look a lot more like the Longhua facility I described above—barring the huge numbers. Foxconn has been rolling out automation, too, but only in specific use cases, and the process has been slow. It would probably be filled indeed with armies of human beings working numbing and thankless jobs—the sort imagined by speculative fiction writer Tim Maughan in the story I republished earlier this week—in miserable conditions, because that’s the requirement of the job.

And that’s the rub. Trump, Lutnick; they don’t care. They don’t care even to try to imagine the lifeworld of an actual worker, or think more than 30 seconds about automation, because to them, it doesn’t matter—automation, human laborer, American worker, Chinese worker, these are abstract producers of value to them, the big bosses, the ones at the top of the food chain. All else exists for their benefit. Trump has decided that it would somehow serve is own interests, his own ego, to see Apple build iPhones in the United States. He would like that, on some fleeting level; to be able to say, “I did that.” It would be a testament to his power. That is the extent of his interest in the idea.

Figuring out the rest is a rearguard action against his whims. So when we’re thinking about what the Trump administration’s trade policy might mean for automation, let’s keep that in mind—automation and AI, like servile labor, are tools that exist to serve its power. It’s why JD Vance wants American AI to “dominate” and called for an end to industry regulation. It’s also why Musk and DOGE and their supporters have talked so much about AI, and why Trump uses AI as a way to justify his executive order expanding the coal industry. To the Trump administration, it’s the technology’s ultimate value proposition—one of concentrating power, turning the screws on workers, and ultimately, of dominion. It’s why AGI is so alluring to the industry: the promise of infinite labor replacement, and infinite investment, even if all you get so far is sometimes-functional software automation. A shiny automated future or millions of immiserated workers—like Lutnick’s jumble, the distinction ultimately doesn’t matter, as long as it serves their power.

1. Some of which are raised by Perrigo’s other interview subjects, like Daron Acemoglu, in the same piece!