Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has grown impatient with what he regards as a dangerously misguided national conversation about manufacturing in the United States, one that continues to fixate on bringing back the factories and jobs that disappeared four decades ago, when the far more consequential opportunity lies in dominating the complex, capital-intensive, software-defined hardware industries that will shape the rest of the century. 

“You’re just not going to get the old factories back and you’re not getting the old jobs back in the way that they were 40 years ago when they were lost,” Andreessen declared in a recent, characteristically unfiltered podcast. “The things that are getting manufactured in the future decades are much more complex and sophisticated and technologically infused and powered than the things that used to get manufactured.”

Far from conceding defeat to China, Andreessen believes the U.S. remains uniquely positioned to win what he sees as the defining economic contest of our time, provided it stops wasting political and intellectual energy trying to recreate a world of steel-framed bicycles assembled by workers turning the same bolt ten thousand times a day and instead races to build the electric, sensor-laden, self-balancing mobility devices, the autonomous delivery drones, the advanced electric vehicles, and—most important—the humanoid robots that will constitute the largest industrial markets ever created.

“You’re probably not going to get the bicycle manufacturing plant back that’s going to build bicycles the way they existed 40 years ago, where the plant’s going to work the same way it did 40 years ago, and where the jobs are going to be the same as they were 40 years ago,” Andreessen said. “What you actually want is you want to be making electric bikes, which are much more sophisticated physical artifacts that involve batteries and computers and chips.”

The factories required for these new products, as Andreessen pointed out, bear no resemblance to the labor-intensive assembly lines that still dominate much of China’s export machine, where hundreds or thousands of workers stand shoulder-to-shoulder performing the soul-crushing identical motion for ten or twelve hours in a single stretch. 

“If you go into a manufacturing plant in China assembling phones or building bicycles, you are going to see a lot of people standing at an assembly line doing the same thing over and over again for 10 hours,” the venture capitalist said. “But if you visit a Tesla factory today you see this in action, [which is] a large number of jobs that are kind of, call them blue-collar-plus jobs and then also white-collar jobs and all the associated service jobs around those higher-paying jobs, higher-skilled jobs that are frankly a lot more pleasant, that are a lot more interesting.”

If you ask Andreessen, what prevents the U.S. from scaling dozens or hundreds of furutistic facilities is not a lack of capital or talent, but a host of overbearing regulatory obstacles and chronically high energy costs that make it faster and cheaper to build in Guangdong than in Georgia.

“If you pair that futuristic outlook with the regulatory reforms and you solve all the issues around energy prices and natural resources and everything else that need to be solved,” he said, “I think that’s the formula.”

Andreessen warned that continued inaction means far more than another decade of importing consumer electronics; it means the permanent loss of the industries that will restructure global wealth and power.

“If we don’t do that, all of those things are going to get made in China. Not just phones and not just drones but also cars and also robots,” Andreessen explained.  “The great industry of the future is going to be robots, AI in mechanical form, which is going to be, I think, the biggest industry that’s ever been built. And right now, by default, China’s set up to do that.”

Yet, an American victory on a scale that would dwarf the postwar industrial boom, remains entirely within reach provided the country chooses ambition over nostalgia.

“What an amazing story it would be for America in the 21st century, that we re-industrialize not to build the products of the past, but to build the products of the future,” Andreessen concluded.