What AI Means for American Manufacturing
A 19th-century blacksmith, a 21st-century governor, and the lesson we keep forgetting: America wins when we pivot, not panic.
My great-grandfather Fred Stoelting ran a soot-black forge in southern Indiana when the 1800s were gasping their last.
One day the world swapped iron for rubber—wagon wheels went from clanging metal to cushiony pneumatic tires—and the local paper showed up asking if the old smithy was finished.
Fred wiped the coal dust off his hands and laughed.
“The good Lord took iron away and put rubber in its place.”
Then he hung up his hammer, installed a vulcanizing rack, and spent the next twenty years retreading wagons instead of shoeing horses.
His grandson—my dad—played with balsa-wood airplanes on that same dirt floor.
Those toy planes turned into a career designing real ones; dad became an aeronautical engineer in the same county that once smelled only of coal and quenched steel.
Same dirt, different sky.
I think about Fred every time someone tells me AI is about to close the last American factory.
As governor of Indiana—the most manufacturing-intensive state per capita—I heard the panic daily.
But panic is a choice, and history says it’s the wrong one.
Here’s the shorter, faster version of the future Fred already wrote for us.
1. AI doesn’t delete manufacturing; it re-writes the recipe
• Deloitte predicts a net +3.8 million U.S. manufacturing jobs by 2033 once smart factories are counted.
• Robots + humans = smaller, safer, more specialized plants that don’t need to chase cheap labor offshore.
• Data centers—the “forges” of the AI era—already pumped 92 % of U.S. growth in the first half of 2025. Without them, GDP would have flat-lined at 0.1 % instead of the 4.3 % we posted in Q3.
2. The skills gap is real, but it’s solvable if we start early
• Bring back “shop class” for the 2020s: every high-schooler should open a neural-net model the way Fred opened a molten pour.
• Make community colleges and vo-techs the new backbone—stackable certificates, paid apprenticeships, mentorships that don’t expire at 22.
• Protect liberal arts. Critical thinking is the antivirus for deep-fake reality.
3. Energy is the new anvil
• Small-town America has land and talent; it just needs electrons and water.
• Indiana learned the hard way: announce a factory without announcing the power line, and you get pitchforks, not paychecks.
• Portfolio approach: advanced small-modular nukes, upgraded transmission, solar, wind, and—yes—fusion bets.
4. Politicians have to earn the future, not just tweet about it
• Experiment in public: let states be labs, waive rules fast, measure faster.
• Defer to people closest to the machines, not the microphones.
• Trade blame for patient optimism; voters can handle the truth if you give them a plan.
Fred didn’t ask Washington for permission to stop shoeing horses.
He sized up rubber, learned the vulcanizing torch, and kept the till ringing.
We can do the same with algorithms, robots, and quantum bits.
The alternative isn’t standing still—it’s playing by someone else’s rulebook in a language we didn’t write.
So here’s the blog-sized takeaway:
American manufacturing dies only if American imagination does.
Keep the imagination, retool the rest.
The forge is gone; the data center is humming.
Same dirt, different sky.
Let’s get building.