Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.'"
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
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?
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.
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.
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.'"
Perhaps the stock market it at record highs _because_ interest is approaching negative rates? If you can't put your savings in the bank that money has to be invested somewhere. More investors chasing the same shares = higher share prices.
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