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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.
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.
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.
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
Currently the number of jobs is shrinking
Bullcrap. Productivity growth is stagnant and job losses to automation are mostly not happening. The easy gains in automation of manufacturing are mostly over, and service jobs are proving much harder to automate.
It is fun to hypothesize about robots taking over, and how society is going to adapt to post-scarcity, but that is theoretical conjecture, and not based on the reality of what is actually happening today. The truth is that improvements in automation are happening far too slowly to produce the higher living standards that people have come to expect.
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 to confront the problem directly. AI and automation aren't the problem. Too many people are.
Why should we tax robots? They are doing productive work that is good for all of society as a whole. We should tax the unemployed. They are the drain on our precious bodily social services fluids. And tax children, too. Remember, "Our Children Are Our Future Unemployed!" (Well, better stated, YOUR children, not mine, of course, like every parent loves to believe).
Why should you put children in the world? Despite any dreams of social mobility, if you are struggling in a job that can easily replaced by automation, you are working there because you can't do anything else. Some folks are born with looks. Some are born with brains. Deal with it.
There is no "secret sauce". People like to scream that more education and faster Internet will magically transform a burger flipper into a brain surgeon. Forget it. Most folks in the US are already educated way beyond their intelligence. You can take a "ugly duckling", spread makeup on her all day . . . and she still won't look like a supermodel. You can try to educate someone stupid, but it will have similar results. More college education in the US has diluted the value of US college degrees. Sure, folks selling college loans will love to tell you that all you need to do is pile up a mass of debt and go to college for four years, and then you will get a great job and be rich. The sad fact, is that I meet some students looking for jobs, who probably shouldn't have even gone to college in the first place.
What can, in my opinion, best influence a child's chance of success in life are . . . it's parents. Raising children is no easy task, it's a long term project management process that is prone to unforeseen disasters. Are you willing to give up your golf or fishing weekends to spend that time with your children? Too many parents don't really think much before having children. They just do it. The rest of society will take care of their children if there are any problems. "Problem" children are not the fault of the parents, because they were "always" good parents. Obviously, it's the fault of the schools, other children, their parents, "The System", etc.
No, the sad fact is that as our society evolves and advances, there will be less and less need for folks who are not capable of doing much. People need to think before having children; think, if they are willingly to make personal sacrifices themselves for the benefit of their children's future. Will your child have a better chance in life than you did . . . ? What will you be personally doing for your children to guarantee that they will be better off . . . ?
People unemployed by automation rioting? Haw, haw. Given all the tech that we are pouring into domestic "security" systems . . . rioters will get forced RFID implants, and not be allowed to leave their designated "living" area. Whole towns and cities will transform to be like "gated" communities.
It's amazing how rain on what was supposed to be a nice summer morning puts me in a bad mood. But I can't stand hearing that AI & Automation are the problem any more. Too many people are the problem.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
economic value isn't the end-all be-all of life. Education and knowledge are intrinsically valuable and an educated society is better than an uneducated one. Unless you're some kind of philistine, in which case your opinion is invalid until you learn more.
The number of jobs isn't shrinking. There is an almost infinite amount of work out there which _could_ be done by someone.
The question is, what will people choose to do in order to maximize their effort to benefit others the most (which is what workers get paid for, benefiting others in some way). Based on this article, the answer to that will shift for some people yet again and it will be away from sewing clothes and towards something else, now that sewing clothes can be done more efficiently with more automation.
For how many centuries do Luddite theories need to continue to be disproved before people will stop believing in those fallacies?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
It is fun to hypothesize about robots taking over, and how society is going to adapt to post-scarcity, but that is theoretical conjecture, and not based on the reality of what is actually happening today.
Folks have been whining about how automation will destroy our civilization tomorrow . . . since about when it started, back in the 1700's. That tomorrow never seems to come.
Human beings, unlike some other living creatures on Earth, are not evolved and adapted to any specific environment. If the environment changes, we'll pick up our marbles and go play somewhere else. The history of humanity is a series of great disruptions and changes . . . sure, a lot of folks die prematurely along the way, but the vast majority seems to just muddle on.
Human beings are like toenail fungus . . . very difficult to get rid of completely.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Automation is gonna be kinda like global warming, short term signs are so subtle, that it's easy to miss the long term trend but bam! It will hit someday. The U3 graph going back to 1950s does show a trend where the peaks of unemployment would be the valleys now:
https://www.economicgreenfield.com/2014/07/03/u-3-and-u-6-unemployment-rate-long-term-reference-charts-as-of-july-3-2014/
Anyway, unlike what economics teaches, I think humans do have limited wants and needs and that's the problem. Our limit is connected to our (inability) to multitask and our limited attention span. For example, when I'm really into a good book, or movie, unlimited wants and needs can't kick in and say I need 10 good songs or movies right that minute. Same with food for most people.
I mention this because that's how people usually argue out of this automation problem. Something like, "oh yeah, all the carriage makers just moved onto cars!"
You see, that's true but so many of our industries are tied to solving old wants and needs (cars - age old point A to B problem), or this article about clothes, etc.
What happens when industry effectively solves the problem so that no human can compete, like sewing clothing here... will every sewing machine operator become a fashion designer? While I'm sure like printing in the past, this tech will open doors to more designers, it won't be any fraction to recover the lost jobs. Just like we can't have a poet and artist based economy (from products to services).
Now, it may not happen this decade, or century even, but if progress continues, I'm sure enough there will be a point when mundane human wants are effectively satisfied and the people left unemployed will not be remotely equipped to handle any other type of need or want no matter their education.
The real question is how to handle that transition period where employment needs to keep going... but not everyone (or even half) can be employed.
And even if our want was unlimited, our funds are not. And no matter how much someone wants (or even needs) something, if he cannot afford it, no sale will happen.
If we want to fix our economy, we need more money on the demand side. The supply side is adequately funded. Actually, overfunded. Interest is bordering on becoming negative and STILL nobody can invest in something worthwhile.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Erh... you know that the poor are more and that guns are cheap enough for them to afford them, right?
You might want to rethink that idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I believe it was Henry Ford who once said that it made no sense to pay his workers so little they could never afford to buy one of his cars.
Good luck running a successful business in a world where only business OWNERS make money with which to buy stuff.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
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.
More goods, and faster than humans? Gee, that's nice. Too bad the unemployable masses won't have any disposable income to buy any of that massively efficient inventory of goods and services. And the wealthy elite left with money won't be buying 10 million units of each.
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.
First of all, taxing the wealthy elite to fund UBI appears to be just about the only way to fund it, and we all know how easy it is to extract taxes from them today. This is is the first challenge of UBI, and it's a considerable one.
The little taxes you do succeed to extract will be so obscenely small that UBI will be Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses and not a penny more, confirming my initial statement regarding disposable income and goods and services. Those currently on welfare are not exactly living a glamorous lifestyle. As an example of the impact, Apple is one of largest corporations on the planet, and sells tens of millions of units, but essentially makes nothing that would be considered an affordable necessity for those barely able to fund their sustenance.
Perhaps taxing the robots and using the money to fund the rest of UBI would work.
Taxing the robots is taxing the wealthy elite. I've already described how that will work out. They'll lobby to maintain tax havens and loopholes, and lobby to pay the bare minimum. And they will succeed, much like they do today.
We could also lower the SS retirement age, or go to a 4-day work week.
To do what, drain it even faster, and accelerate it's already predicted death? Automation seeks to remove the human worker altogether, so there won't be a 4-day work week. It will be a 0-day work week for the unemployable masses.
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.
Many won't work. Greed N. Corruption is the CEO of capitalism now. Solve for that issue first, and then you might have a chance. Probably not though. Eat the Rich might be one option after the downfall.
The number of jobs isn't shrinking. There is an almost infinite amount of work out there which _could_ be done by someone.
No, that's bullshit on literally every level. First, nothing human is almost infinite. We're tiny little squishy things. Second, we are using up natural capital faster than it can be replenished already. We need to engage in less economic activity, not more. We use up our year's allotment of resources by mid-August. We need to do less work as a species, or we will surely perish. Third, in order for someone to be paid for work, someone has to be willing to pay for it. It's not enough for it to theoretically be work, it has to actually be work. And the ultra-wealthy are accumulating cash that they literally cannot physically spend before they die, and then refusing to invest it, which is how jobs are created. They're not the "job creators", they are the job preventers.
The question is, what will people choose to do in order to maximize their effort to benefit others the most
The question is, will the already-rich fucks who have all the money take their finger off the wheel, and start placing bets themselves so that someone else can have some money?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Contrary to what you've been brainwashed to believe, there is no economical value in education beyond the point where someone can use it. There's already legions of people walking around with worthless college diplomas, and yet you're suggesting to take money out of people's pockets to create more of those.
No, the problem is that people seem to think education should give people the exact skills and knowledge they need to do a specific job. That's stupid because the nature of work changes over time, even over the three or four years someone studies for.
University level education is more about giving people a mixture of skills for further learning and general knowledge of common techniques. That's why most courses include general classes on things like economics, basic law, mathematics, English, research techniques, the scientific method etc.
It's then supposed to be up to employees to specialize new employees, with training and accumulated experience.
Instead companies want to treat workers as commodities, and if they can't get those skills locally they just import them. The idea of finding someone who has proven they can learn and has the skills necessary to do so to a high standard and training them doesn't seem to fit the model of "next quarter's bonus" very well.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
. 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.
You might not be familiar with Roman (who wrote the comment you replied to), but he is a hard core religious fascist who believes he is not obligated to pay employees, ever. His next comment will likely source his favorite scripture or his personal lord and savior; he uses their statements to justify treating people like disposable commodities. He believes that business owners are evolutionarily superior to all workers and should always be treated and regarded as such.
How amusing that the captcha is "multiple", as roman also has a sock puppet account that he uses to help further the spread of his favorite parts of the gospel.
This. Whenever I hear an economist arguing about the "wonders of the free market", I notice that he always assumes that the market would be some abstract entity with unlimited funds and unlimited consumption capacity , completely ignoring that for you have a market you need to have consumers and that to have consumers it is necessary to have people with jobs (for wages).
No people with jobs => no consumers => no market.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
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
This is ridiculous....I have never seen any bills that vote against birth control.
What people are against, is some people having to PAY for OTHER people's birth control, or forcing private entities to pay for others birth control.
I have never in my life, seen even a thought to vote a moratorium or ban on the manufacture or sales of birth control.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........