Levi Strauss Replaces Human Sanding With Automated Lasers (bloomberg.com)

_Sharp'r_ writes: Stressing jeans used to require 300 to 400 workers with sandpaper all day. Now Levi Strauss does a better job by shooting their new jeans with computer-guided lasers in intricate patterns generated in CAD systems. Along the way, they save water and "will cut the number of chemicals it uses to produce jeans from 1,000 to a few dozen," reports Bloomberg.

Comments

The video is cool

[_Sharp'r_]

If you want to see the process on video.

One of the cooler parts is that using software, they can now make reproducible artistic designs, designs to emphasize different body parts, text/image messages, whatever someone can dream up.

Worn or Indigo removed?

[Errol backfiring]

Imagine managing 300 to 400 people who do nothing for eight to 10 hours but to load a mannequin and then with sandpaper on their hands to begin the destruction process to remove the indigo.

Do the lasers still damage the fibres or do they just remove the indigo or even just its colour?

Indigo is a plant chemical that takes a specific chemical reaction to form, and needs special treatment to adhere it to the fibres. The fact that it does not adhere perfectly is what causes the specific worn look on jeans. If the fibres can be kept intact but the indigo selectively removed, you could have a pair of jeans that looks used but also can still be used for a long time.

And 300-400 workers less

[gweihir]

Not that I am complaining. This process is better for (almost) everybody. But it shows how it goes with automation: A few hundred jobs lost, a few highly qualified gained. That is basically how this will work in most places. And the jobs are gone and are not coming back in some other form.

Re:And 300-400 workers less

[gweihir]

Well, I did an engineering PhD and I have kept current on AI for something like 30 years now. In actual reality, AI being able to do that is getting farther away. Realistically, "most certainly not in the next 50 years" (the answer a senior engineer in the Watson team gave me recently) is a lower bound. It may well be centuries away or not happening at all. It is also not true/strong AI that is threatening these jobs. It is dumb automation that could not empty a bucket of water unless specifically programmed to do so. However, as it turns out, large parts of many human jobs do not actually need intelligence and that is quite enough. That is, for example, Amazon doing away with 90 human workers, and retaining 10 (low paid ones) that do what the robots cannot do and fix the occasional screw-up by a robot. Add two human engineers to keep the robots running, and that is still 88 jobs lost permanently and only 2 upgraded from low to high pay.