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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?
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 honestly thought a robotic sewing machine would be called SEWER instead of LOWRY.
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.
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.
I honestly thought a robotic sewing machine would be called SEWER instead of LOWRY.
That name stinks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Slashdot...putting the NEW in news since 1998
Your name stinks.
There are two ratios there that should match but don't 1:17 does not match 1142:669
Anything where you're not the one getting paid is too expensive.
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.
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.
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...
Che-matic
Table-ized A.I.
This only means the profit margin on them will go from 90% to 99%.
But since IQ is distributed, at least roughly, on a gauss bell curve, your example simply suffers from a small sample size.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The uncomfortable thing is that they refuse to cooperate for some odd reason.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
What it really suffers from (modulo total lack of originality) is imprecision. Average is just a measure of central tendency. It can refer to the mode, median or mean (and there are several types of those, too).
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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?
Yea, he has said people, at least with respect to coal jobs.
Coal jobs? You mean the jobs that probably should be replaced by robots, and sooner rather than later? Those jobs?
Automation and robotics are inevitably going to keep taking over more and more low skilled jobs. That can't, and arguably shouldn't be stopped. The problem is a lot of people don't have the ambition to transition to more higher skilled jobs, whether that is because of nature or nurture, it doesn't matter, but it seems nevertheless true.
The true problem is automation will destroy the low-end jobs. And "good enough" AI will work to destroy the high-end jobs. The problem for the masses is not ambition; most are simply incapable. This is the reason brain surgeons and rocket scientists are a rare breed; not everyone holds the intelligence or skill to become one.
Is it possible that we won't see massive unemployment anytime soon? Sure. People adapt. I'm not too worried about that, at least in my lifetime. Of a greater concern is this leads to more wealth pooling at the top few percent and money idle isn't all that useful to the economy. We need to, at minimum, tax investment income and capital gains the same as ordinary income, and ideally use the revenue delta to reduce taxes on ordinary income.
You will be as successful at taxing the wealthy elite tomorrow as you are today. In other words, you won't succeed. Taxation is always touted as the obvious answer to fund UBI, but it's damn near impossible to get the wealthy elite to actually pay taxes. They're rather good at lobbying to maintain tax havens and loopholes to avoid taxes.
Life goes on even if we have more time to live it...
As the unemployable masses grow, so will boredom. All it takes is a 2-day blackout in a major city to cause a spike in births 9 months later, so we know what people will be doing once they're bored. Our fragile planet can't even sustain the population now. Life expectancy will be shortened by design to minimize the impact of population growth and hopefully avoid a cull.
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
. 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.
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.
You also need to ask yourself why they chose Little Rock. hmmm. The answer is 200 miles away.
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
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.
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Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
But they work 24x7, and never complain to HR.
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
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.
Good move with the last line. It was essential to void being "Poe'd".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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
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.
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.
Of course, this has been developed over the previous 6 years. IOW, like the current economy, this is not because of an idiot. It was Os and Atlanta's policies that produced this.
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.
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.