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New T-Shirt Sewing Robot Can Make As Many Shirts Per Hour As 17 Factory Workers (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: In 2015, after years of research, SoftWear Automation introduced LOWRY, a sewing robot, or sewbot, that uses machine vision to spot and adjust to distortions in the fabric. Though initially only able to make simple products, such as bath mats, the technology is now advanced enough to make whole t-shirts and much of a pair of jeans. According to the company, it also does it far faster than a human sewing line. SoftWear Automation's big selling point is that one of its robotic sewing lines can replace a conventional line of 10 workers and produce about 1,142 t-shirts in an eight-hour period, compared to just 669 for the human sewing line. Another way to look at it is that the robot, working under the guidance of a single human handler, can make as many shirts per hour as about 17 humans. The company has emerged as a leader among those trying to automate sewing, drawing the interest of businesses that make home goods and of course clothing manufacturers, including Tianyuan Garments Company, a Chinese firm that produces for brands such as Adidas and Armani. Tianyuan Garments has invested $20 million in a 100,000-square foot factory in Little Rock, Arkansas, planned to open in 2018. The factory will be staffed with 21 robotic production lines supplied by SoftWear Automation, and will be capable of making 1.2 million t-shirts a year.
So that's like... a few dozen jobs at the most? Surely with the production costs going down the shirts will be sold at lower prices, right?
#DeleteFacebook
I guess all that Bangladeshi child labor was still too expensive huh? Had to cheapen it even more?
And is this supposed to be great news for Little Rock, Arkansas, which will see a huge growth in the 27 jobs needed to operate this new automated factory?
I honestly thought that things like tshirts were already made by robots...
Welcome to the future.
Low skilled jobs will truly be gone pretty damn quick. We really do need to take a look at how we will handle this as a society. If there are hundreds of thousands of people put out of work over the next decades it won't end well without a plan.
US production per worker is currently about $58,000, and seems to be going up by $10,000 per decade.
That's per capita, meaning "per person". If the per-capita output were distributed equally to every man, woman, and child everyone would have about $58.000 to spend. Each year. Including kids and babies. And they could do it again next year.
This will only go up as AI and automation take over. A huge number of driving jobs will be taken over by self-driving vehicles in the next decade (already happening with long-haul trucks), and AI and robotics will take over ever more of the production, working 24/7 and making more goods, more cheaply, and faster than humans.
We need to transition away from the current economic system real soon, or suffer massive riots and the downfall of our culture as unemployed people riot and take it down for us.
We need a way to spread the wealth out a little more evenly. UBI is one way, and we're getting really close to the point where UBI will be cheaper than the cost of government assistance plus the lost cost of higher crime and prison for the poor.
Perhaps taxing the robots and using the money to fund the rest of UBI would work.
We could also lower the SS retirement age, or go to a 4-day work week. Lots of options, many would work or could be made to work.
But we have to start transitioning just about now, or risk the downfall of our culture.
The real value of this tech is that it will allow for bespoke clothing to become a lot more accessible. Whether or not this iteration is capable of it, that future is inevitable.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
We need basic income or do you want smash the robots so you can get room and broad in the jail with an doctor that does not ask how are you going to pay?
Now this will stop the sweatshops from "exploiting" the workers. Worker liberation! And we can stop boycotting Nike.
That's the sound of UBI, Soylent Green, the Return of the Luddites, and widespread rioting put down by drones. Or a shirt that isn't cheaper to me, but makes some guy in a nice house slightly richer.
THE FUTURE IS HERE
Capcha is 'tricked'
I thought jails were gender-segregated. How are you going to get a broad in a jail?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Slashdot...putting the NEW in news since 1998
More well payin' jerbs coming back to 'Murica!
There are two ratios there that should match but don't 1:17 does not match 1142:669
Not a broad, but he might be someone's bitch.
Anything where you're not the one getting paid is too expensive.
Nowadays any men can just say he's a woman and magically change into one by the power of the Sea fairy
No Excuse for Nike to outsource to Bangladesh now
I would rather actually fund education so more people would be qualified for work beyond being a meat-part in a machine, doing the same thing over and over again for days, months, years.
That was a good idea in previous decades.
Currently the number of jobs is shrinking, while the workforce is not(*). it's already causing a lot of stress in our society, and probably one reason for the recent election results.
The system was able to soak up some of the excess - the meme of children living with their parents until well into adulthood is one result - but it's starting to show signs of saturation. The burgeoning debt of education versus finding a job, currently being a topic of concern, is one bit of evidence.
Training and education are certainly important, but it doesn't address the problem. It'll only result in educated unemployed.
We need a way to support non-workers in our society, and pretty quick.
(*) Roughly speaking, population is remaining steady. Meanwhile, productivity keeps rising.
And indeed clothing/textiles was the focus of much tech before then, the spinning wheel, the loom, the cotton gin, etc. It's no surprise it's helping drive the next stage.
And it's not as if the current system didn't put a lot of people out of business, how many tailor shops you see see stateside anymore?
There are several 3rd world countries that have been hoping to pick up on China's business as it gets more expensive.
The offshoring of textile jobs is about to die.
Interesting that a Chinese company chooses the US for it's robot factory.
Talent, not labor is important.
the education resistant idiots in the US are equally screwed.
I know most people who work in technology don't really care about the "working class" who are obviously going to be affected greatly by this and other automation. It's easy to look at your DevOps-y CI/CD pipeline, see the code you write immediately go into production, and assume that it would be great to do this with factory work as well. I assure you that people will start to care when those workers start going after everyone who still has a job out of desperation, or when their jobs are eliminated through automation.
We haven't worked out a perfect solution for what happens when the vast majority of workers can't sell their labor for a reasonable price that lets them survive and consume at levels capable of sustaining businesses. Spend some time outside of the technology world, and you will see that _many_ people aren't capable of handling anything more than a job involving repetitive tasks. Lots of people need that job on an assembly line putting Part A into Slot B and adding a screw for 8 hours a day, or driving a forklift in a warehouse, or processing the same paperwork day in and day out according to rules. If you say they can't have that anymore, then you need to come up with a solution. Money's not going to disappear overnight as a store of value, and removing people's ability to earn will not end well at all. People who wouldn't dream of violence will get desperate when they lose any hope of making it.
tl;dr: Some people lost the IQ lottery, no two ways about it. You aren't going to turn a factory worker into a big data scientist. Figure out how to fix this without bloodshed, massive depopulation, gene editing/selection, Soylent Green, or similar. The things I think could work would be make-work type jobs as an employer of last resort, or just dropping the farce and giving a basic income funded by taxing means of automation. I like the idea of a basic income because along with price controls, it basically sets a floor on poverty. Let the basic income pay completely for the necessities of life, have people work part- or full-time for extra income, make it so businesses can't just raise the price of everything to compensate for the added income, and people won't have a cash-scarcity problem.
Just a few problems with your analysis..
You seem to think that 'production' and GDP are the same thing, they most certainly are not. A significant proportion of US 'GDP' is produced by foreign companies, for a start.
Then you think that number can just be made available 'to spend'? Interesting - complement false of course, but interesting. You really dont know what the term means, do you.
You also seem to think UBI, etc are ways to 'spread wealth'. Believe it or not UBI is specifically NOT designed for that, hence the 'U' part.
You also assume that giving people more for nothing lowers crime, interesting concept with a good 50 or 60 years of solid research showing the opposite is true (In general criminals are not motivated by desperation, but by a lack of feeling of personal responsibility for their actions, this is well established).
As to your SS retirement age, ROTFL, you do realise SS is going to be bankrupt already? I can only assume you want that to happen sooner?
And then, yes, the good old 'downfall of our culture' meme - you know its been used before right? It lead to a revolution, in China, The estimated death toll was in the millions.
If you want something USEFUL to point at, go for corruption - panem et circenses is the enemy right now - creating apathy of the majority to corruption by the strong. Fix that and most everything becomes much less of an issue.
No. OMG, just No.
Instead of $12, can I get a decent shirt, made locally, not by children in Asia, for $3? Perhaps you can be employed in servicing the machines.
Please, go throw a brick through the window of a combine, or modern tractor, and insist we all go back to manual reaping and threshing. Or tear down miles of electrified fence, spill the livestock from the feedlots, and insist it's your God given right to be a shepherd.
When you realize the futility in that, then maybe you should learn to code. Or play a musical instrument. Or sing and dance. Or raise and love a child. Or extract a principle of nature from odd and surprising observations. Or recycle the mountains of plastic floating in the south Pacific, or your local landfill. When machines can do all those things then you can smash society without me getting in your way. Except, if a machine could raise and love a child, perhaps a special loving machine can be made just for you and your rage....
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Dude, stop "loving children", you're disgusting. When we get Soylent Green I'm eating you first to protect kids from you.
What do you propose we do with the people who can't just learn to code? Society doesn't pay people to do a lot of the things you mention unless they're truly exceptional. How do you propose we allow people to make a living while maintaining the money-based economy we have?
Think outside of the dev/IT world for a second. Not everyone is super-brilliant, or even latently super-brilliant. Most people need jobs that they can just show up at, perform a set of tasks, and go home when it's done. I'd argue that lots of corporate jobs paying decent salaries boil down to applying a fixed set of rules to an input stack of work. There are a lot more modern shepherds and manual farmers out there in the world than you think. Before all the factory work was offshored or moved to non-union states, low-skilled people could have a decent lifestyle. This is just the next step -- and it's not going to end well unless we figure out a balance between the Luddites and the ultra-wealthy robot owning class locking themselves in fortresses.
Nobody wants to sew shirts; that's shitwork for losers.
Let the shirt workers get tech jobs! As long as they're cultural fit for techbro culture, and they're under 30, there are plenty of tech jobs for all.
Extermination...
I wonder how big the step would be to get that robot to make a suture, sewing skin instead of a t-shirt.
Two years ago, I had a bite at a restaurant but the meal didn't sit so well. I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and for some reason lost consciousness. I got to my senses and discovered I was bleeding profusely from an actually very small cut in my forehead. I went to the doc next morning and he stitched the cut.
Two weeks later, he removed the stitches and told me he was quite happy with the result. He mentioned that the cut was actually not a straight cut, but a "hook" which apparently is difficult to cleanly close without later showing an obvious scar.
From the summary: "uses machine vision to spot and adjust to distortions in the fabric". It would be very interesting to know whether it could lay a stitch to prevent scar tissue.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
You presume that the worker is at fault and not the business.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Don't ask me, ask the "wealth creators" if they want to forgo the extra $6 profit per shirt?
Are you going to employ someone to do these things? After all, you've now got an extra (12-3) dollars in your wallet. Save money on 2 shirts and you can employ a Bangladesh child for an entire week, plus a pension plan!
What, unlike all those people pretending the 'gig economy' is equal to a job with a pension plan, holiday pay and health insurance?
I think this time the pressure isn't from cost, rather the pressure for ethical clothing manufacture, which admittedly, has good intentions in trying to make manufacturers pay their workers more, but while that seems like a simple solution, to pay workers more, so is not employing people... Can't be exploiting your staff if you haven't got any...
So unintended consequences screws up good intentions, again. Using "unintended consequences" loosely, its not as if this sort of thing was "unforeseen" by those who had a microeconomics class. But hey, no foul, good intentions outweigh simplistic shallow solutions to extremely complex matters.
I see a price dump for prostitutes, both of age and under, in a few less developped countries in the near future.
Shame...
Half of any population will have a below-average IQ.
That's not true: it depends on the IQ distribution. For example, if I have a population of four people, three with an IQ of 99 and one with an IQ of 103 the average IQ is 100 but 75% of the population is below average. It's simple to arrange the reverse so that 75% could be above average.
Robots cost 2000x more than a Chinese, Bangladeshi, or Vietnamese worker and only perform 20x better. They are totally not worth the risk involved in the initial capital investment.
Robots will never replace humans in the fashion or clothing industry. Same thing with construction.
Everyone should have a mansion, I am not kidding. Build solar powered mansions for everyone out in the desert. Build everyone a self driving vehicle.
Enlist the robots help. If we built mansions for everyone we would have no unemployment because you need at least one or two workers to supervise and direct each mansion building.
Che-matic
Table-ized A.I.
I imagine this sort of story will become a daily occurrence. Until they automate writers of course, and start writing about robot issues.
Actually we don't need it; there are almost no tee-shirt manufacturers in the US. Asian might, but not us.
Trump keeps his word. Jobs are returning to the US. well it is only for robots, but he never said it will be for people, did he?
If the cost of clothing manufacturing becomes largely independent of labour cost, it can be moved back to Europe.
This only means the profit margin on them will go from 90% to 99%.
So SoftWear Automation originally had a $1.2mil DARPA contract for automated sewing research, so this is commercialization of DARPA research.
It's interesting that a chinese company is underwriting the first big US domestic factory using these machines. Hope the tech doesn't get stolen and "100% chinese technology" ripoffs don't suddenly sprout up. Though the chinese company is very forward thinking in this regard, as rather than being squeezed out of the market, they are riding the tech wave at the expense of their comrades...
Spinning Jenny's us
How about just causing some blackouts, then you can seize the means of production and everyone wins.
For everyone saying the unemployed will rise up against the AI and automation of generic manual labor and white collar jobs just remember one thing - this advancement applies to the military as well. Once the autonomous military capabilities, including automated manufacturing, exceed the manual ones, humanity will be at the complete mercy of those few who own the armies and factories unlike any time in all human history. Good luck with that humans.
Not everyone is super-brilliant, or even latently super-brilliant. Most people need jobs that they can just show up at, perform a set of tasks, and go home when it's done. I'd argue that lots of corporate jobs paying decent salaries boil down to applying a fixed set of rules to an input stack of work. There are a lot more modern shepherds and manual farmers out there in the world than you think.
Discipline, serendipity, and teamwork have accomplished far more than brilliance. But Oh! To hold up that shining light of the brilliant hero that we should all worship! Bullshit. Western society's cult of the individual is it's own worst enemy. Remember, Achilles was no hero, he was the demon that inspired the Spartan's to grasp each other's shield.
It doesn't take brilliance to love and raise a child to become a productive member of society, but having reasonably intelligent parents who are members of a functional society definitely helps a child in every way. It doesn't take brilliance to play music composed by Beethoven, but it does take years of hard work, discipline, and passion. Is curiosity innate? Can curiosity be taught, or inadvertently destroyed? Were you raised to be curious, or do you simply push buttons and expect food? Same questions for passion.
The problem is, exactly who, or what, determines what defines "productive member of society" ? Do we use a thermodynamic model to calculate "productive"? If so, expect society and it's technology to replace you and everyone you've ever met or known with a more efficient model. In such a world, a universal basic income will simply equate to humans feeding at the trough alongside the barnyard animals. Morlocks and Eloi.
Or, do we find some way to equate "productive member of society" with skill, curiosity, teamwork and passion?
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
That sound you hear is the sound of unemployment sweeping through the third world, because $0.10/hr is too much to pay a human being for toiling in a sweatshop all day so you can get rich.
With technology like this, billions of people in the 3rd world will be tossed back into extreme poverty
Because of the global warming WE DO NOT NEED T-SHIRTS soon! In your face ROBOTS!
. SoftWear Automation's big selling point is that one of its robotic sewing lines can replace a conventional line of 10 workers and produce about 1,142 t-shirts in an eight-hour period, compared to just 669 for the human sewing line.
That depends ENTIRELY on the costs involved and you'll notice costs were not mentioned at all here. It's possible to automate all sorts of things but it doesn't matter if the costs don't work out favorably. Faster does not automatically equal economic efficiency. You have to do a minimum efficient volume of work and the cost of labor has to be sufficiently high to make the capital investment worthwhile. Most textile work is done overseas in countries with VERY low labor rates. It doesn't matter if it is 10 times faster if it is 20 times more expensive.
A Chinese clothing manufacturer now gets to put "Made in the USA" labels on the clothes they make.
good whitepaper here
http://atom.singularity2050.com/
A UBI , but driven by the exponential upwards gains in efficiency in the economy.
More automation ->> more UBI
I get what you are saying. When I was a kid, my job didn't EXIST, so I still find it fascinating that I am doing it. I tell my kids that too, that the job they do for a living might not exist yet. (although, they are convinced that "being a youtuber" is the best job ever)
I would kind of like to see the future with robot workers be a place where people don't HAVE to work so damn hard. Hey, I am American and grew up on a farm - I have been working most of my life. I don't mind having a strong work ethic. I like to work on the things I like to work on. But I don't think hard work is ideal. It's kind of difficult to relax sometimes, and when I do I feel guilty about it. I think it would be really interesting to see how things would go if people didn't have to work so much to survive.
Maybe somehow robots will help with that. In this story, a robot replaces workers who were using machines to do what people used to do by hand. That seems like evolution to me. Maybe those people toiling in the shirt factories can find something better to do with their time. Some days I really wish I could.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Get one factory under your control to learn the technology, then bring it home.
The folks from SoftWear may think they have a customer, but they may find that the customer turns into a competitor with their technology.
SortWear had better keep their SoftWare safe if they want to stay around.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!
Yes, we need a UBI. We need to tell people "You are worthless and obsolete, here's some money, now go away and live in your ghetto."
We must continue to devalue workers and dehumanize them. We must have racism against the human race.
(did ANYONE see if the sarcasm meter melted yet?)
These robots.
You also need to ask yourself why they chose Little Rock. hmmm. The answer is 200 miles away.
This would put the Three Amigos out of business!
The fashion industry has a throughput like no other. This was only a matter of time.
The robot is amazing, btw. I like how they use the tightly spaced omni-directional conveyers to move the fabric around and stich and cut it with stationary machines, just like a human would.
Next up:
A full set of top quality, taylor made garments, 5 hours after you've stepped into a 3D scanning booth. With your custom brand of choice and cheaper than any ready-made equivalent than you can get.
I feel sorry for the teenagers in bangladesh. They were sewing 12 hours a day, but at least they had a job. It's going to be toughest for them.
We need to start spreading the wealth more thouroughly. Like, now.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's shameful
Won't anyone think of the children?
What do you propose we do with the people who can't just learn to code?
I *can* code and even I'm this short of moving out of it as a main occupation alltogether. Just went into a Docker introduction last evening at one of our numeros local evening dev meetups. Entire Infrastructure setup templates with 2 hours of initial scripting. Need a new instance of an entire ERP Appserver? A few clicks, go get some coffee, come back, finished.
Add in AI/Machine Learning and regular coding jobs are *over*. ... That's why I'm about to move coding as a job into a new perspective for myself. That might include getting back into dancing. That may actually have more future than my current job. And eventhough coding pays twice as much today it might be just about free in a few years.
Just sayin'.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Only we need them made by the right parents and properly educated. Global population is going to peak at 9 billion in two decades or so, with most people being oldtimers and then rapidly decline. Underpopulation is going to be a problem.
Besides, the planet could easyly handle 30 billion people without losing a single other species of life and zero to negilible impact on the global environment. Twice the earths population would easyly fit into Europe, including food production, heavy industry and all and we could leave the rest of the planet as nature reserve. Only we'd need to get smart about it. The smart part is where the problem is. To many dumb people around. Powerful tools in dumb hands. See Nuclear Fission, ICEs and modern mono aggriculture for some examples.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
To echo this sentiment; I tutor kids in comp-sci and programming.
One thing is absolutely clear...some people just have a knack for some things
One kid I tutored couldn't get enough. He saw a little bit of code and just wouldn't stop! He grok'd quite a bit of the higher level concepts (like OOP versus functional), he understood assembly and byte code, how they're different, and much more. I started working with him when he was 12, after about a year and a half, he was writing code that most college graduates couldn't read! He wasn't some kid genius (he actually could only read and write at a 3rd grade level), but he had a mind for logic, analyzing and the various other "gifts" that make one more adept at programming.
Enter kid 2. Has the same tech-lust, same general interest, flare and panache as kid 1 and is actually a little more artistic than kid 1. Kid 2 just turned 12 and I've only been working with him for about 2 months. I started down the same course, same curriculum, explained that if you "want to make a game", you need to "learn a little code". I show kid 2 a little bit of code and his general reaction was "meh, that's cool I guess." However, I just started a small "game" project where I'm writing the "code" (small Lua scripts) and he's coming up with "game" design. And you know what I found out. Kid 2 is taking this way of learning to "code" and running with it.
I honestly don't think kid 2 will ever "want" to learn the code over designing/directing, but that's exactly the point.
Some people are just naturally more gifted than others; we don't force everyone who's unemployed to become sports stars or movie celebs, realistically that's well more attainable for just about any unemployed person than throwing them at some "code boot camp" and thinking they'll produce more value than if they were just to be beat up on national television because they have a ball in their hand and a helmet on their head (maybe).
I don't mind if my ability to code and automate will generate billions in revenue that can then fund people like kid 2 to sit and play XBox all day, because if they sit and play video games and watch TV, then those other unemployed people can supplement the lack of GOOD content by becoming c-list actors and 3rd string football players.
Everybody wins!
Humans keep putting humans out of work through automation, and there will never be a replacement job for all those displaced. We all really need to give a damn and consider the long term impact of this on society, not just those we care about. The wealthy will be the only ones earning money in the end will not spend enough to support employing everyone in other roles. As long as they prevent sufficient taxation of the Haves, the lives of the Have-Nots will not be supported by the economies of the world. Remember, the wealthy make their money with money and can do so anywhere in the world all while living where it remains most safe and comfortable.
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
So now it's all automated, will I be able so send in my dimensions and have it create a Tee shirt that fits every time.
Nullius in verba
In other words, you have no ACTUAL PRACTICAL ADVICE.
Go bore someone else with your bullshit philosophy.
Because the only thing better than making 2/hour is being deprecated and making 0/hour
Just another second banana
Wow, even those 50 cent a day workers prove to be too expensive for clothing manufacturers.
What do you propose we do with the people who can't just learn to code?
Welcome to the Soylent Corporation; bringing new meaning to the term 'human resources' since 1973.
To own and operate the machine Is likely less than 17x so-called 'living wages', so those 17 factory workers are going to be freed-up to find better opportunities, like...
Ken
its not gonna happen, as an owner who now does not need to pay USD250 x 17 staff (USD4250), its gonna go into my machine capital, (minimal)maintenance and the rest into my pocket.
I assure you, your $3 shirts wont be happening anytime soon.
I keep wondering why they don't create a robot that replaces coal miners... those people DIE doing their job, it seems like that would be the first industry to automate! Shouldn't be sending human beings below ground at all when the job can be done by remote-controlled drones.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Just heard this arrant nonsense on NPR last night, and seeing it now in this thread.
"Workers aren't losing jobs to automation because productivity numbers aren't up"
This is the opposite of science. Faith-based reasoning without true analysis. No attempt to false the premises at all!
In reality, I personally have automated away thousands of jobs. The majority of the people who were automated out of their jobs have never worked again, in any field. In my long IT career I've automated away fiber production line jobs (2 men do the job of 30), coal mining jobs (eight men can now do the work of one hundred) and even clerical jobs (web self-service displacing 18 phone attendants).
However, ongoing productivity losses are more than offsetting the productivity gains I have created through screwing over loyal laborers. The losses are caused partly by people working stupidly long hours, but mostly by access to the Internet (through smart phones and workplace computers) progressively reaching more and more workers. Right now I'm on slashdot and my boss is shopping for shoes. Twenty years ago, we'd both be hard at work...
> When you realize the futility in that, then maybe you should learn to code. Or play a musical instrument. Or sing and dance. Or raise and love a child. Or extract a principle of nature from odd and surprising observations. Or recycle the mountains of plastic floating in the south Pacific, or your local landfill. When machines can do all those things then you can smash society without me getting in your way. Except, if a machine could raise and love a child, perhaps a special loving machine can be made just for you and your rage....
* play a musical instrument? whats the point? its all synthetic.
* sing and dance? whats the point? its all autotuned
* raise and love a child, for what? there ain't no point with all the pollution from industrial society
* clean up the plastic? you'll just make more...
* extract principles form nature? when was the last time I SAW nature.
no. I'ld much rather, as an entertainment, **smash you**.
get it yet? it ain't rage dick. its choice. which your mechanotopia, doesn't allow. else you're branded a luddite and anti-technology.
I have no idea, how you got modded up +5 insightful. You're not anywhere near that. -5 dummy more like it.
supply of immigrants because of all these jobs that need to be filled!!
How do we avoid the return of Luddites?
You don't. I agree that there are plenty of people that are not suited for current-day work.
BI
Instead of straight basic income, you might want to consider something along the lines of a career buyout based on heavily optimistic projections.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
True, but note that this factory might very well be able to run 24/7. Factories with large numbers of human workers tend to lie idle 10-12 hours a day, and I imagine that is even true in Bangladesh.
Not sure where you got this idea but you are misinformed. My day job is to run a (small) manufacturing plant. Three shift factories using human labor are incredibly common everywhere in the world. Factories that don't run multiple shifts only do so because they don't have enough work to justify multiple shifts. You do not need high levels of automation to run multiple shifts effectively and never have. If anything automated factories are LESS able to run three shifts because of the need for maintenance (scheduled and unscheduled) on the additional production equipment. Robots and automated equipment break and need servicing routinely. Anyone who thinks they run with perfect reliability has never worked in a manufacturing plant.
But there are other costs as well, like shipping.
True but this is well understood among those of us who work in manufacturing.
A lot of people would be willing to pay somewhat more for quick delivery of custom-made clothing.
While there is a market for quickly made custom clothing, it's unclear exactly how big it is and it is clear that the technology to make it happen on a large scale is not yet economically viable. I design assembly lines and production systems for a living. The economics of automating what you describe require rather substantial scale to become viable. It's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Nobody is willing to invest in the expensive automation because it isn't clear that the market exists and the market doesn't exist because nobody is willing to take the risk on building the automation for an unproven market.
I expect it will get sorted out in due time but it seems certain that either someone is going to have to take a VERY big risk or we will have to wait for the automation to become more economically viable. And it won't displace traditional mass production unless it can get very close to it on price which is a much harder thing to do than many people appreciate. It's kind of like 3D printing. It's very useful and a great technology but the unit cost of producing a single unit that way generally is higher than other mass production techniques aside from a few corner cases.
...it's not going to end well unless we figure out a balance between the Luddites and the ultra-wealthy robot owning class locking themselves in fortresses.
The chasm between the ultra-wealthy and the other 99.999% of the human race isn't shrinking. Greed doesn't give a shit about balance or the masses. Greed cares about Greed, and will happily build a bigger fortress, both today and tomorrow.
If you think the market potential for custom-fit clothing is unknown and risky, talk to just about any female about what it's like to shop for jeans.
It IS unknown and risky. Any time you are investing millions of dollars into automation that is inherently risky, especially when people's buying habits are accustomed to a different process. Customer education is expensive. Nobody has done custom clothing on a large scale because the technology to do so at a low cost does not exist and isn't likely to exist any time soon. In fact it is easy to show that it is nearly impossible to make a one off custom product at a price point competitive with mass produced goods even if the quality is better no matter what technology you use. The reason for this is simple. There are fixed costs to ANY manufacturing process that have to be amortized across the number of units produced. These costs are the same whether you produce one unit or a million. It is virtually impossible to amortize the fixed costs of a custom product over a large enough number of units sold to make them at a cost similar to mass produced products. It is almost always cheaper to make a standard product (or a range of standard products) than it is to make custom products even with flexible automation.
People who think custom products can be made cost competitive with mass produced products simply don't understand the costs involved once you are talking about large unit volumes. There are some corner cases and I'm certainly not arguing that there isn't a market for custom apparel. That such a market exists is obvious. What I'm saying is that it's unclear how bit that market can ever become or how close the delta between mass produced and custom apparel can become. I work with this sort of calculations all the time and my opinion is that the delta is going to remain large for the foreseeable future.
Sure, it can sew - but can it love?
Just think how dull Mysteries of Lowell would be with all the characters replaced by robots. (No doubt the well-educated /. readership is intimately acquainted with Mysteries of Lowell.)
Seriously, it is weird that none of the major clothing companies in America are buying these and setting up. They are NOT going to get any cheaper.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We have had several decades of noise over the pay of American workers vs. the pay rates of foreign workers ruining the US ability to export goods. Poof ! There goes that issue right down the toilet. Now the issue becomes whether my robot can work faster, cheaper or better than their robot. The price of labor now is out of the equation. But will the product be less expensive for the public? Hell no! Compare it to the coal industry. One machine can easily replace one hundred coal miners. Now look at the price of coal decade by decade and it has dome nothing but rise sharply. Or how about baseball bats. When i was a kid a bat was a trivial expense. Now highly automated machines make those bats far, far faster than human labor ever could. Now go price the bats. Does $150.00 for a bat surprise you? In 1952 I got a brand new, good quality trombone for about $100.. Today a similar trombone would go for $2,000. Part of the reason for the inflation that is behind this all is the ongoing cost of wars. The many billions we burned up fighting wars are still being paid off and inflation is one trick the government can use to dump national debt. If a dollar becomes worth one penny then we are only paying back 1% of our war debts and other national debts as well.
Cost of goods and services will always be greater than zero
Minimize thecost of production, based on cost of machinery, cost of raw materials, cost of patents and licensing, cost of taxes, cost of real estate, and cost of reduced personnel (engineers and top management brass). The resulting cost of production always shall remain greater than zero. This assumes a just economic system where there is an absence of monoplies, lobbies, corruption, and nepotism.
The retail side of the economy may also be automated by having vending machines deliver simple products like t-shirts, or having the warehouse-to-customer process automated. The cost of retail always remains greater than zero.
Net result: costs of mature products remain relatively stable. Without UBI, demand goes down, because out of work consumers are reduced to subsisting in a barter economy. The rust belt shall become continental in size.
The rest of this conclusion is tongue in cheek. Our mode of transportation reverts to four legged animals.
Our bankrupt government in such an economy will not be able to support modern, weaponized, armed forces to protect our citizens. Knights with sharp swords will reign in the end, and our nation will revert to a feudal society controlled by a disarray of powerful knights and oligarchs.
Automated weaponry.
Couldn't resist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Looking at the video of the Softwere robotic system in operation, I don't see how sewing custom clothes that way would be significantly any harder than standard ones for that particular system.
It's not like we are printing clothes now with web presses -- clothes production has been a labor intensive custom operation producing varying quality. See: "Robots threatens Bangladeshi garment workers"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But even if the delta was, say, 10X (or more) between custom clothes and mass-produced clothes, if the cost after full automation was so low (including automating material production), then many people might choose the $1.00 custom shirt over the $0.10 mass produced shirt in the same way so many people buy custom coffee at Starbucks when it could be so much cheaper to get standard coffee from one big pot.
Also, when the cost (to all parties, including the customer's own time) of choosing, ordering, boxing, and delivering (and maybe returning) an item begins to significantly outweigh the cost of the item, then consumers may tend to purchase more expensive higher quality items given the incremental difference is not that big a percentage of the total delivered cost.
I agree with you though it is a bit of a chicken and egg thing where the market still needs to get proven along with the reliability of the technology.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.