6 ms·

As sewbots threaten Asia's sweatshops, we need to decide who will benefit

51 points by miraj 10y ago

boznz 10y ago
"Who will benefit from automation?" Easy answer the companies profits and the automation machine manufacturer and support companies. Additionally the "Made in good old USA" sticker or wherever you happen to be brings up images of a local using timeless traditional methods making the garment, apart from a very few very expensive items that image is obviously a joke but it certainly works for sales and marketing to manipulate peoples perception and many will pay more for the sticker.
- chrischen 10y ago
  Let's get rid of the factories for cars, silicon, and electronics while we are at it. Efficiency is not conducive to jobs and prosperity. Workers must unite to protect livelihoods! (end sarcasm).
  - dmix 10y ago
    And ironically the capitalists always get blamed by the left for this unholy union between the state and upper class. There's a reason many pro-market people want smaller gov and it's not just personal selfish gain to save a few dollars in taxes but to prevent the predictable selfish incentives of the power players from exploiting the absolute power of the state for the benefit of a limited few. No wonder there is a backlash against globalism and 'free trade' agreements when this same group of insular regulators and powerful market leaders are designing the agreements and calling all of the shots. Sweatshops are hardly the result of free trade but government controlled/financed trade that only prioritizes the interests of the mega corps, sometimes pushed to the point of exploitation in countries with poor legal systems and weak concepts of human rights. The process of creating the TPP made this even more apparent to the public, they hardly even tried to hide the obvious favoritism and complete lack of openness. Clearly it has become so status quo that they didn't even bother with pretense.
    - jbicha 10y ago
      How does smaller government help with sweatshops or unemployment or income inequality?
      - gozur88 10y ago
        Regulatory capture allows large companies (espeically multinationals) to exclude competition.
      - pjkundert 10y ago
        Less regulatory capture. When companies reach the scale of increasing inefficiency of communication and regression to the mean, the natural barrier to their growth, they replace innovation and competitiveness with erecting barriers to entry into their markets. Try staring a business in a market with large established players. You'll find that you cannot do many of the things they themselves did to get started -- they have erected legislative barriers preventing replication. Easy -- just write "think of the children" legislation demanding egregious safety, accounting and legal overhead, trivial to bear at scale, but lethal to new entrants...
      - dmix 10y ago
        Basic income and small government can coexist IMO. As can a healthy legal system and charter of rights. The level of government involvment in everyone's day to day life has risen astronomically since the 1950s. That doesn't mean we have to sacrifice all social safety nets and human rights in order to have a healthy functional government. Running a non-megacorp business and surviving without a job has not been made easier at all since the 50-60s. It's actually harder than ever as a result of government intervention and wasteful resource consumption for very little benefit to society. It makes you wonder who the government has been busy serving all of those years. (Hint: the kind of business who wouldn't think twice about running a sweatshop via trade deals that never seem to involve clauses to require following the laws of the parent country) .
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > And ironically the capitalists always get blamed by the left for this unholy union between the state and upper class. The reason is that capitalists (the economic class, not "advocates of capitalism"; the two have substantial overlap, but aren't identical) tend to be the power behind both business and government in capitalist systems.
  - cnfjdnx 10y ago
    See you at the soup lines!
  - good_gnu 10y ago
    Or we could keep the factories, accept unemployment as a result of technical progress, realize that the total amount of goods created has not diminished at all and stop tieing the right to consume to participation in the production process. The "human in the production process" paradigm is doomed to fail as technology progresses anyway.
    - dmix 10y ago
      All the more reason basic income makes economic sense. When the alternative is inefficient and costly human labor.
      - afarrell 10y ago
        We should figure out a way create some sort of dividend that skims some money off of the benefits of automation and adds it to social security income. I'd say we should distribute it across age groups, but this lets you use the existing Social Security Infrastructure. Plus, young people don't vote in legislative and local elections, so that wouldn't be as useful for preserving the freedom to automate.
        nikanj 10y ago
        We have this, it's called "taxes". Not many large corporations pay any, though
      - chris_va 10y ago
        Just to be picky, this is one of the weakest arguments of UBI. This gets into a "what is money" kind of discussion, but paying people because they are incapable of employment is not a good outcome. That money reprents scarcity, which traditionally has entirely been labor. In a post labor economy, what is money?
        afarrell 10y ago
        Money represents obligation. Either to give somebody a puns of silver or to provide a negotiated amount of value. That value need not be scarce, as in the case of say, a downloadable audiobook or music file.
  - andrepd 10y ago
    That's a frankly pointless comment. Did you miss the point of the parent? I don't think so, I think you deliberately attacked an issue that wasn't even the parent's point. This concern is a valid one: keeping the current paradigm, automation will lead to unemployment on a massive scale which will wreak havoc everywhere especially in underdeveloped countries with little to no social safety net or worker and citizen protection. Keeping the current paradigm, the capitalists will reap even more obscene profits by absorbing the difference between the current salaries and the much lower automation costs, while potentially tens to hundreds of millions of people (in the short term only) will be out of jobs and left with no means of survival. This is very concerning to me, and attacking a straw man with a ridiculous "oh let's close the factories then shall we" is childish.
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  Actually, that's interesting to think- the more automated the factory, the less sense it makes to overseas for low labor costs. (tarriffs and other legal structures are a different matter) So, other pressures (like being near raw materials, or near the end market, become stronger factors.
- WillPostForFood 10y ago
  High prices on necessities (food/housing/clothing) are like a regressive tax on the poor. Cheaper clothing will primarily benefit poor people who buy clothes.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    Only if those poor can actually afford those cheaper clothes.
Zikes 10y ago
This is a moral dichotomy that's been around for ages and I have yet to see a satisfactory answer on: are sweatshops evil because the workers are grossly underpaid and work in terrible conditions, or are they good because they're better than nothing and people will apparently starve to death otherwise? Who should bear the responsibility of that decision? The workers? The governments of the workers? The governments of the consumers? Or the consumers?
- chrischen 10y ago
  Factories and jobs in China (and other countries with factories) are good (in general, at least). It doesn't get much simpler than that. The only people that have issues with it are the consumers thousands of miles away who are completely detached from the issue and realities facing those workers, and who at the same time fuel demand by purchasing and funding those workers.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    That says that jobs are good. It says nothing about the sweatshops.
    - chrischen 10y ago
      Of course if you just make a statement such as the "bad factories" are bad, then yes. The problem is people use the term sweatshop for any factory, because most people using the term are not doing so with much weight.
      - st3v3r 10y ago
        Because there's absolutely no reason for them to be "bad". There is no reason whatsoever that we have to allow sweatshops to exist.
  - lmmlzxx 10y ago
    > The only people that have issues with it are the consumers thousands of miles away who are completely detached from the issue and realities facing those workers, and who at the same time fuel demand by purchasing and funding those workers. Ok, that is just not true. Tell that to the garment workers here that were shot last year by government police while protesting low wages and poor working conditions.
oh_sigh 10y ago
Sewbots =~ mechanical loom?
- theoh 10y ago
  No, robots that automate sewing. Looms are weaving machines, as you probably know.
- Sylos 10y ago
  "Sewing machines" was already taken, so they had to come up with a different name...
sedachv 10y ago
Can someone point to any actual sewing robots that would make this question not a hypothetical? I just searched Youtube and these videos came up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iudSnw--Y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iudSnw--Y8 Automated rows of buttonholes and overlocking simple edges? Done in the late 1980s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3kNnHZdl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3kNnHZdl0 How much slower can you go? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBLEx-WaF9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBLEx-WaF9A Pocket sewing. Again, done in the late 1980s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSPb44jxA6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSPb44jxA6M Notice the video quality? Most of those machines use regular manufacturing automation techniques and seem to be designed in the early 1990s. They are not adaptable to different patterns/hems/collars/pockets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GUhlfjqQmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GUhlfjqQmQ This one is actually not bad. There was a lot of development in automated sewing in the 1980s that was abandoned as a result of American and European apparel manufacturing collapsing and all the work being outsourced to Asian countries and Mexico. I have not seen any robots that can do overlock or coverstitch of shirts, dresses or tights at full speed. Until you have that, Asian apparel factories are not going anywhere. It is still not clear how sophisticated and cheap cut and sew automation has to get in order to make it cost effective as a capital expenditure. For example textiles was already a very automated field in the 1980s but US companies found out the hard way that capital expenditures for increasing automation was not worth it: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html The one area of apparel manufacturing that does look like it will be fully automated (by definition) is complete garment knitting. The kinds of apparel it is useful for is sportswear, tights (thank you Lululemon for convincing women that tights are pants, sometimes it makes walking down the street that much more enjoyable), and certain kinds of dresses and sweaters.
- ksenzee 10y ago
  Those Lululemon garments you enjoy are leggings, not tights. Tights cover the foot as well. (They're not pants, either, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm more likely to buy a women's top from ThinkGeek than Lululemon so I'm a bit outside their target market.)
- dragonwriter 10y ago
milesskorpen 10y ago
I appreciate most of your comment, but really don't appreciate the aside in your last paragraph.
- sedachv 10y ago
  To appreciate the aside you have to understand Lululemon's seminal role in the athleisure trend and the market impact it (making leggings acceptable pants) has had on the apparel industry. Also important to note is the sewing process required for leggings - coverstitch of very stretchy knit fabric - is something that requires a lot of sewing machine operator skill and is difficult to automate.
  - danielhooper 10y ago
    To appreciate the aside you have to be a creepy guy.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      Well, you have to be okay with the objectification of women -- which may make you creepy on some level, but doesn't require you to be a guy (though, statistically, its more likely that way.)
    - sedachv 10y ago
      What is creepy is when you are so uncomfortable with your sexuality that you think people watching on the street is objectification.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        Watching on the street may or may not be (or involve) objectification. Publicly expressing gratitude to a clothing manufacturer for the pleasure you receive watching on the street, OTOH, is clearly objectification.
        10y ago
Animats 10y ago
The article comes from a study by the International Labor Organization.[1] All this seems to come from one startup, Softwear Automation, which has just some lab demos and can't put a whole garment together.[2] First of all, the textile industry has been mechanized for a long time. It was the first industry to mechanize, over 200 years ago. Everything from picking to weaving was mechanized in the developed world by 1940 or so. Cutting and sewing are now semi-automatic, and slowly going automatic. If you've never seen a modern loom, here's one in action at a trade show.[3] Here's a working textile factory.[4] The looms pretty much run themselves. Note how few people are in the textile factory. Even third world countries have this technology. Low labor costs cannot beat a 1000RPM Toyota jet loom. Sewing has advanced to the semi-automated stage. There are lots of machines where a human lines up the fabric and the machine does the rest.[5] The main remaining problem is handling and placing fabric automatically. The T-shirt and jeans manufacturers still haven't solved that problem, though they're getting close. Production of simple shapes such as towels and sheets is almost totally automated. Here's a factory in Bangladesh. Massive machines, few people.[6] Summary: most of textile automation has already happened. The last step, sewing of complex garments, is the only part that hasn't been automated yet. Expect T-shirt and jeans production to go full auto in the next decade. [1] http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/actemp/whatwedo/aseanpubs/report2016_r1_techn.htm http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/actemp/whatwedo/a... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA96-WX-oXc#t=163.352979 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA96-WX-oXc#t=163.352979 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl2rmup2dVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl2rmup2dVY [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCcZW91Ub38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCcZW91Ub38 [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJw6oMwuJ94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJw6oMwuJ94 [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXiEU1Dhc9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXiEU1Dhc9M
- colanderman 10y ago
  What makes T-shirts and jeans more complex than other shirts and pants?
  - hactually 10y ago
    It's the fact that they're composed of multiple differently shaped pieces and need to be combined carefully. I've tried putting a robot together myself as I find it silly that we haven't already automated it and... yeah, harder than i thought.
atarian 10y ago
>savings of over $180,000 over 5 years I don't know how thin the margins in this industry are, but this doesn't strike me as a substantial cost-saving move, especially if this is how much the US would collectively save.
aaron695 10y ago
> This isn't an entirely bad news story: the South Asian garment industry is dangerous and underpaid Yet they are choosing it over the alternatives. unemployment, sex industry.... How about we let them chose their lives rather than somehow twisting that firing them is a good thing. These robots will kill people, just in boring ways like increasing child hood mortality. But it's going to happen, lets snap this band-aide off.
xbmcuser 10y ago
Google deepmind and other such ai type software is going to make doctors, architects, lawyers, CFA, engineers, software engineers irrelevant as well. And I feel is a lot closer than robots that have human dexterity and can do all physical things humans can do.
- cooper12 10y ago
  You got anything to back that first part up or is this more singularity hyperbole? So far the only use of robots in medicine that I'm aware of has been to assist doctors, such as in delicate surgeries. (Or more mundane stuff like a robot going around handing medicine) AI has huge hurdles to overcome before it can solve real-world problems. Deepmind excelled at Go because it's a board game that works within constraints. (really, you can learn the rules of go in a few minutes) Even self-driving cars depend on optimal conditions and assume an already-built infrastructure. Not only is it FUD to say that AI will usurp us that fast, but it is also insulting to human ingenuity and insight to say that human intelligence can be replaced with a clever algorithm. Don't get me wrong, I'd love for everything to be automated, eliminating human error and inefficiency, launching us into a basic income utopia (ha), but we have to look at the situation realistically and refrain from statements that will hold back the industry. (See things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter and references to skynet) The solution is to look at the actual state of the art and to evaluate advances in their proper contexts. Consider this: we still can't make robots that walk like humans (bipedal locomotion) and stay balanced. (There are promising results coming from Boston Dynamics, but AFAIK actual usage has been limited to military stuff like pack dogs)
  - xbmcuser 10y ago
    Not hyperbole I believe that is going to happen and I am not talking about ai or sigunlaraty more about machine learning. Doctors learn about disesases and then with experience start diagnosing them. It's a simple a+b=c now feed the data of millions of patients their symptoms their diagnoses the most effective remedy or cure. Computers will start finding and predicting the problems and diseases faster and more accurately than doctors so we might need more nurses but fewer doctors in the future. An architect designs buildings taking into account building codes and best use of space etc. Feed thousands of blueprints to a deeplearing machine tell all the buliding codes it has to follow. The current climate and what is expected to be in the next few decades it will give you the most efficient building plan that uses the most space and least amount of energy. Feed the machine all the tax law it will find you the best loopholes to avoid taxes A human can't take into account the number of variables a machine will be able to in the next few years and the keep getting more powerful everyear.Google recent announcement of using machine learning to improver server heat efficiency is just the start. Their are thousands of such problems that will be solved with machine and deeplearning and make many human jobs mostly obsolete.

51 points by miraj 10y ago

boznz 10y ago

"Who will benefit from automation?" Easy answer the companies profits and the automation machine manufacturer and support companies. Additionally the "Made in good old USA" sticker or wherever you happen to be brings up images of a local using timeless traditional methods making the garment, apart from a very few very expensive items that image is obviously a joke but it certainly works for sales and marketing to manipulate peoples perception and many will pay more for the sticker.

chrischen 10y ago
Let's get rid of the factories for cars, silicon, and electronics while we are at it. Efficiency is not conducive to jobs and prosperity. Workers must unite to protect livelihoods! (end sarcasm).
- dmix 10y ago
  And ironically the capitalists always get blamed by the left for this unholy union between the state and upper class. There's a reason many pro-market people want smaller gov and it's not just personal selfish gain to save a few dollars in taxes but to prevent the predictable selfish incentives of the power players from exploiting the absolute power of the state for the benefit of a limited few. No wonder there is a backlash against globalism and 'free trade' agreements when this same group of insular regulators and powerful market leaders are designing the agreements and calling all of the shots. Sweatshops are hardly the result of free trade but government controlled/financed trade that only prioritizes the interests of the mega corps, sometimes pushed to the point of exploitation in countries with poor legal systems and weak concepts of human rights. The process of creating the TPP made this even more apparent to the public, they hardly even tried to hide the obvious favoritism and complete lack of openness. Clearly it has become so status quo that they didn't even bother with pretense.
  - jbicha 10y ago
    How does smaller government help with sweatshops or unemployment or income inequality?
    - gozur88 10y ago
      Regulatory capture allows large companies (espeically multinationals) to exclude competition.
    - pjkundert 10y ago
      Less regulatory capture. When companies reach the scale of increasing inefficiency of communication and regression to the mean, the natural barrier to their growth, they replace innovation and competitiveness with erecting barriers to entry into their markets. Try staring a business in a market with large established players. You'll find that you cannot do many of the things they themselves did to get started -- they have erected legislative barriers preventing replication. Easy -- just write "think of the children" legislation demanding egregious safety, accounting and legal overhead, trivial to bear at scale, but lethal to new entrants...
    - dmix 10y ago
      Basic income and small government can coexist IMO. As can a healthy legal system and charter of rights. The level of government involvment in everyone's day to day life has risen astronomically since the 1950s. That doesn't mean we have to sacrifice all social safety nets and human rights in order to have a healthy functional government. Running a non-megacorp business and surviving without a job has not been made easier at all since the 50-60s. It's actually harder than ever as a result of government intervention and wasteful resource consumption for very little benefit to society. It makes you wonder who the government has been busy serving all of those years. (Hint: the kind of business who wouldn't think twice about running a sweatshop via trade deals that never seem to involve clauses to require following the laws of the parent country) .
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > And ironically the capitalists always get blamed by the left for this unholy union between the state and upper class. The reason is that capitalists (the economic class, not "advocates of capitalism"; the two have substantial overlap, but aren't identical) tend to be the power behind both business and government in capitalist systems.
- cnfjdnx 10y ago
  See you at the soup lines!
- good_gnu 10y ago
  Or we could keep the factories, accept unemployment as a result of technical progress, realize that the total amount of goods created has not diminished at all and stop tieing the right to consume to participation in the production process. The "human in the production process" paradigm is doomed to fail as technology progresses anyway.
  - dmix 10y ago
    All the more reason basic income makes economic sense. When the alternative is inefficient and costly human labor.
    - afarrell 10y ago
      We should figure out a way create some sort of dividend that skims some money off of the benefits of automation and adds it to social security income. I'd say we should distribute it across age groups, but this lets you use the existing Social Security Infrastructure. Plus, young people don't vote in legislative and local elections, so that wouldn't be as useful for preserving the freedom to automate.
      - nikanj 10y ago
        We have this, it's called "taxes". Not many large corporations pay any, though
    - chris_va 10y ago
      Just to be picky, this is one of the weakest arguments of UBI. This gets into a "what is money" kind of discussion, but paying people because they are incapable of employment is not a good outcome. That money reprents scarcity, which traditionally has entirely been labor. In a post labor economy, what is money?
      - afarrell 10y ago
        Money represents obligation. Either to give somebody a puns of silver or to provide a negotiated amount of value. That value need not be scarce, as in the case of say, a downloadable audiobook or music file.
- andrepd 10y ago
  That's a frankly pointless comment. Did you miss the point of the parent? I don't think so, I think you deliberately attacked an issue that wasn't even the parent's point. This concern is a valid one: keeping the current paradigm, automation will lead to unemployment on a massive scale which will wreak havoc everywhere especially in underdeveloped countries with little to no social safety net or worker and citizen protection. Keeping the current paradigm, the capitalists will reap even more obscene profits by absorbing the difference between the current salaries and the much lower automation costs, while potentially tens to hundreds of millions of people (in the short term only) will be out of jobs and left with no means of survival. This is very concerning to me, and attacking a straw man with a ridiculous "oh let's close the factories then shall we" is childish.
sliverstorm 10y ago
Actually, that's interesting to think- the more automated the factory, the less sense it makes to overseas for low labor costs. (tarriffs and other legal structures are a different matter) So, other pressures (like being near raw materials, or near the end market, become stronger factors.
WillPostForFood 10y ago
High prices on necessities (food/housing/clothing) are like a regressive tax on the poor. Cheaper clothing will primarily benefit poor people who buy clothes.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Only if those poor can actually afford those cheaper clothes.

Zikes 10y ago

This is a moral dichotomy that's been around for ages and I have yet to see a satisfactory answer on: are sweatshops evil because the workers are grossly underpaid and work in terrible conditions, or are they good because they're better than nothing and people will apparently starve to death otherwise? Who should bear the responsibility of that decision? The workers? The governments of the workers? The governments of the consumers? Or the consumers?

chrischen 10y ago
Factories and jobs in China (and other countries with factories) are good (in general, at least). It doesn't get much simpler than that. The only people that have issues with it are the consumers thousands of miles away who are completely detached from the issue and realities facing those workers, and who at the same time fuel demand by purchasing and funding those workers.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  That says that jobs are good. It says nothing about the sweatshops.
  - chrischen 10y ago
    Of course if you just make a statement such as the "bad factories" are bad, then yes. The problem is people use the term sweatshop for any factory, because most people using the term are not doing so with much weight.
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      Because there's absolutely no reason for them to be "bad". There is no reason whatsoever that we have to allow sweatshops to exist.
- lmmlzxx 10y ago
  > The only people that have issues with it are the consumers thousands of miles away who are completely detached from the issue and realities facing those workers, and who at the same time fuel demand by purchasing and funding those workers. Ok, that is just not true. Tell that to the garment workers here that were shot last year by government police while protesting low wages and poor working conditions.

oh_sigh 10y ago

Sewbots =~ mechanical loom?

theoh 10y ago
No, robots that automate sewing. Looms are weaving machines, as you probably know.
Sylos 10y ago
"Sewing machines" was already taken, so they had to come up with a different name...

sedachv 10y ago

Can someone point to any actual sewing robots that would make this question not a hypothetical? I just searched Youtube and these videos came up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iudSnw--Y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iudSnw--Y8 Automated rows of buttonholes and overlocking simple edges? Done in the late 1980s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3kNnHZdl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3kNnHZdl0 How much slower can you go? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBLEx-WaF9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBLEx-WaF9A Pocket sewing. Again, done in the late 1980s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSPb44jxA6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSPb44jxA6M Notice the video quality? Most of those machines use regular manufacturing automation techniques and seem to be designed in the early 1990s. They are not adaptable to different patterns/hems/collars/pockets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GUhlfjqQmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GUhlfjqQmQ This one is actually not bad. There was a lot of development in automated sewing in the 1980s that was abandoned as a result of American and European apparel manufacturing collapsing and all the work being outsourced to Asian countries and Mexico. I have not seen any robots that can do overlock or coverstitch of shirts, dresses or tights at full speed. Until you have that, Asian apparel factories are not going anywhere. It is still not clear how sophisticated and cheap cut and sew automation has to get in order to make it cost effective as a capital expenditure. For example textiles was already a very automated field in the 1980s but US companies found out the hard way that capital expenditures for increasing automation was not worth it: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html The one area of apparel manufacturing that does look like it will be fully automated (by definition) is complete garment knitting. The kinds of apparel it is useful for is sportswear, tights (thank you Lululemon for convincing women that tights are pants, sometimes it makes walking down the street that much more enjoyable), and certain kinds of dresses and sweaters.

ksenzee 10y ago
Those Lululemon garments you enjoy are leggings, not tights. Tights cover the foot as well. (They're not pants, either, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm more likely to buy a women's top from ThinkGeek than Lululemon so I'm a bit outside their target market.)
dragonwriter 10y ago

milesskorpen 10y ago

I appreciate most of your comment, but really don't appreciate the aside in your last paragraph.

sedachv 10y ago
To appreciate the aside you have to understand Lululemon's seminal role in the athleisure trend and the market impact it (making leggings acceptable pants) has had on the apparel industry. Also important to note is the sewing process required for leggings - coverstitch of very stretchy knit fabric - is something that requires a lot of sewing machine operator skill and is difficult to automate.
- danielhooper 10y ago
  To appreciate the aside you have to be a creepy guy.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Well, you have to be okay with the objectification of women -- which may make you creepy on some level, but doesn't require you to be a guy (though, statistically, its more likely that way.)
  - sedachv 10y ago
    What is creepy is when you are so uncomfortable with your sexuality that you think people watching on the street is objectification.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      Watching on the street may or may not be (or involve) objectification. Publicly expressing gratitude to a clothing manufacturer for the pleasure you receive watching on the street, OTOH, is clearly objectification.
      - 10y ago

Animats 10y ago

The article comes from a study by the International Labor Organization.[1] All this seems to come from one startup, Softwear Automation, which has just some lab demos and can't put a whole garment together.[2] First of all, the textile industry has been mechanized for a long time. It was the first industry to mechanize, over 200 years ago. Everything from picking to weaving was mechanized in the developed world by 1940 or so. Cutting and sewing are now semi-automatic, and slowly going automatic. If you've never seen a modern loom, here's one in action at a trade show.[3] Here's a working textile factory.[4] The looms pretty much run themselves. Note how few people are in the textile factory. Even third world countries have this technology. Low labor costs cannot beat a 1000RPM Toyota jet loom. Sewing has advanced to the semi-automated stage. There are lots of machines where a human lines up the fabric and the machine does the rest.[5] The main remaining problem is handling and placing fabric automatically. The T-shirt and jeans manufacturers still haven't solved that problem, though they're getting close. Production of simple shapes such as towels and sheets is almost totally automated. Here's a factory in Bangladesh. Massive machines, few people.[6] Summary: most of textile automation has already happened. The last step, sewing of complex garments, is the only part that hasn't been automated yet. Expect T-shirt and jeans production to go full auto in the next decade. [1] http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/actemp/whatwedo/aseanpubs/report2016_r1_techn.htm http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/actemp/whatwedo/a... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA96-WX-oXc#t=163.352979 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA96-WX-oXc#t=163.352979 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl2rmup2dVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl2rmup2dVY [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCcZW91Ub38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCcZW91Ub38 [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJw6oMwuJ94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJw6oMwuJ94 [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXiEU1Dhc9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXiEU1Dhc9M

colanderman 10y ago
What makes T-shirts and jeans more complex than other shirts and pants?
- hactually 10y ago
  It's the fact that they're composed of multiple differently shaped pieces and need to be combined carefully. I've tried putting a robot together myself as I find it silly that we haven't already automated it and... yeah, harder than i thought.

atarian 10y ago

>savings of over $180,000 over 5 years I don't know how thin the margins in this industry are, but this doesn't strike me as a substantial cost-saving move, especially if this is how much the US would collectively save.

aaron695 10y ago

> This isn't an entirely bad news story: the South Asian garment industry is dangerous and underpaid Yet they are choosing it over the alternatives. unemployment, sex industry.... How about we let them chose their lives rather than somehow twisting that firing them is a good thing. These robots will kill people, just in boring ways like increasing child hood mortality. But it's going to happen, lets snap this band-aide off.

xbmcuser 10y ago

Google deepmind and other such ai type software is going to make doctors, architects, lawyers, CFA, engineers, software engineers irrelevant as well. And I feel is a lot closer than robots that have human dexterity and can do all physical things humans can do.

cooper12 10y ago
You got anything to back that first part up or is this more singularity hyperbole? So far the only use of robots in medicine that I'm aware of has been to assist doctors, such as in delicate surgeries. (Or more mundane stuff like a robot going around handing medicine) AI has huge hurdles to overcome before it can solve real-world problems. Deepmind excelled at Go because it's a board game that works within constraints. (really, you can learn the rules of go in a few minutes) Even self-driving cars depend on optimal conditions and assume an already-built infrastructure. Not only is it FUD to say that AI will usurp us that fast, but it is also insulting to human ingenuity and insight to say that human intelligence can be replaced with a clever algorithm. Don't get me wrong, I'd love for everything to be automated, eliminating human error and inefficiency, launching us into a basic income utopia (ha), but we have to look at the situation realistically and refrain from statements that will hold back the industry. (See things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter and references to skynet) The solution is to look at the actual state of the art and to evaluate advances in their proper contexts. Consider this: we still can't make robots that walk like humans (bipedal locomotion) and stay balanced. (There are promising results coming from Boston Dynamics, but AFAIK actual usage has been limited to military stuff like pack dogs)
- xbmcuser 10y ago
  Not hyperbole I believe that is going to happen and I am not talking about ai or sigunlaraty more about machine learning. Doctors learn about disesases and then with experience start diagnosing them. It's a simple a+b=c now feed the data of millions of patients their symptoms their diagnoses the most effective remedy or cure. Computers will start finding and predicting the problems and diseases faster and more accurately than doctors so we might need more nurses but fewer doctors in the future. An architect designs buildings taking into account building codes and best use of space etc. Feed thousands of blueprints to a deeplearing machine tell all the buliding codes it has to follow. The current climate and what is expected to be in the next few decades it will give you the most efficient building plan that uses the most space and least amount of energy. Feed the machine all the tax law it will find you the best loopholes to avoid taxes A human can't take into account the number of variables a machine will be able to in the next few years and the keep getting more powerful everyear.Google recent announcement of using machine learning to improver server heat efficiency is just the start. Their are thousands of such problems that will be solved with machine and deeplearning and make many human jobs mostly obsolete.